The Solo project named ‘Āter‘ started back in 1996, I bought my first guitar at 13 (my birthyear and month are January 1983) and that’s when I learned (more or less) how to play, first by earn, then by theory. Before that I had been playing piano and keyboard since I was 11.

Nothing much came of it, I learned to play most by tabs of bands I liked like Cradle of Filth, Emperor and Rage Against the Machine (very good practice for rhythm and timing) and I started writing songs. Then I searched for bands and bandmembers but usually nobody stayed long enough, they were young and impatient and wanted fame almost immediately. So I kept on writing solo until I met my good friend Mantorok (is the name he chose to go by), he later actually went to join Mortuum. He helped me write the EP titled ‘Valkennacht’ but insisted his role was only a session member. Then all the tapes were gone and my computer destroyed by a flooding in my house and all files were lost. By a huge clean-up later I found them back on a broken hard disk and recovered them, that was 2004, and I replayed the bass parts since they were hardly heard in the mix.

You have to keep in mind we were very young at the time and things like interfaces were very new and unknown to us so even the vocals were recorded with a cheap handheld mic in a public bathroom to create natural reverb while my friend held the door..haha. We just didn’t know any better.

Since then I have been playing In countless bands, gigging, touring, some as session vocalist, sometimes as lyricist, sometimes involved in writing, but the last band was Lemuria, I toured and played with them for 4 or 5 years I believe, it was a very pleasant but enormously energy consuming time since they did the genius musical work and I did all the promo and marketing in my spare time, actually 140% of my spare time which involved taking the car to actually meet bandmembers (of other bands) and promotors to discuss packages and get us on the road for fair prices. Next to that I answered every fanmail myself and spent a ton of time in just finding the right combination of partners and bands to work with to gain interest in the scene and to promotors in general. In that regard I believe I succeeded., Lemuria grew rather quickly. This was also the reason Āter kind of went into slumber for all these years.

But since a heavy accident in August 2017 I was in and out of hospitals for 6 months, getting random attacks, seizures, literally falling dead on the floor…. The doctors didn’t find out why and weren’t even sure if I would ever recover, until someone noticed traces of a hematoma in my brain, caused by the accident and he came forward with the theory that this swelling must have been huge at some point and did some nerve damage in my brain, that would have been the ‘dropping dead’ and ‘collapse and seizure reasons’.

Meanwhile the band moved on with another vocalist since they already booked the studio in December and I was unable to perform at their level due to my poor state of health, and since stated earlier, nobody knew how long my recovery would take, if there would be a recovery to speak of at all.