This album is dedicated to Asmus Tietchens.
Like a couple of other albums, the music on Oddwind wasn’t intended to result in one at first - rather, it started as a combination of an exercise (in playing stuff by hand; something I am admittedly not very good in…) and as an exploration - of my little Waldorf Blofeld synthesizer, which I had acquired in 2009 (mainly to have some better equipment for a live performance I was to play later that same year).
In fact, Oddwind ended up being almost exclusively being performed on that instrument.
Actually, being able to record a whole album of (decent) music all played by hand was something I always had hoped to accomplish, but never really felt up to. I’m just not a very well trained keyboarder…
So, when I started recording tracks in that way (mostly improvising the needed elements - bass lines, chords, sequences, melodies, also some percussion - in traditional multi-track recording fashion, and - as I like to point out very clearly - without editing those recordings later, except for some basic level adjustments) I had little hope that anything worth listening to might come out of it, but much to my surprise, it did (in most cases). After the first few nice results, confidence grew, and at some point I realized that this whole thing might well result in what - at first - I had not even thought of: an album…
Another thing I soon realized was, that my hand played music turned out to be somewhat different from the more programmed - and therefore composed - music I usually did; of course - due to my lack of proper skills - it was considerably less rhythmically accurate, but on the more positive side, it also seemed a lot more lively and, I think, „soulful“ (not in the sense of the musical style „soul“, of course).
Also, I seemed to have other kinds of musical ideas that way - and I found these new aspects quite rewarding…
