ProgPulse Progressive Music Features

Can you please tell us something about your background, like for instance your time with the German band Horizon.
Well, to make a long story short, Horizon was formed in 1998 around drummer Krissy Friedrich and me. We recorded a self-produced debut in 1999 that caught the attention of Kosta Zafiriou, who, at the time, was managing a lot of big German or Swiss bands like Helloween, Gotthard, Silent Force, Sinner, etc., and it is he who made us sign with Massacre Records. We worked with Massacre until I left the band in early 2006 for various reasons including the fact that I couldn’t get our albums produced the way I expected.
At that time, I felt the need to make a break with band life and so I turned to studio work and teaching. But, after a while, even though I loved what I was doing, I really needed to put together a new band to play my music, which eventually turned into a solo project to avoid having to live again some of the problems I had experienced with Horizon. Since then, I have been trying to intelligently combine this solo project with my teaching, studio activities, and various musical collaborations.

Have you always been singing as well as playing guitar or do you see yourself more as a guitar player?
I am a guitar player and a songwriter who can sing if the situation requires it. :D But I sure don’t consider myself a singer.
I sang in Horizon because I was the one who had sung on the demos, then had sung on our first recordings because we had no singer, and, since this seemed to suit everybody else, I ended up being the only one who still wanted to look for a singer so I could concentrate better on my guitar playing. Despite all this, at one point, we had finally found a singer who had even started recording the "Worlds Apart" album, but things did not go very well in the studio and the easy way was to ask me to re-record all the vocals with very little time to meet the deadlines... and keep the singer position.
As far as my solo project goes, I originally had planned to work with a singer and only be the guitar player, but finding the right person turned out to be much more complicated than what I expected, so, after a few tries and demos with a couple of guys, I finally preferred doing the lead vocals on “More Than Meets The Eye” rather than having to accept someone would change my melodies and write lyrics I couldn’t relate to.
Then, this became the way it was and, today, I enjoy the independence and autonomy that come from being able to sing, but I would be ready to give up all the vocal duties to someone else if I met someone talented and who shares my vision.

Who are your main influences both now and when you were first getting into music?
When I was a kid, I started taking piano lessons around 7 or 8 and I was living in a pretty musical environment, but I was not exposed to Rock music, and therefore, I was more into Pop songs and stuff I could hear on the radio or on TV.
I discovered Rock music trough classmates when I entered college, and when I heard Judas Priest, Van Halen and the likes, I knew this was what I wanted to do. I
was also a lot into Iron Maiden and AC/DC too, and those bands were my first big influences.
As a guitar player I was also influenced by Uli Jon Roth, Cacophony, Gary Moore, Michael Schenker and Yngwie to some extent, but also many many others. The list could be very long. Today, I still love listening to Marty Friedman, Jason Becker or Uli Roth, and therefore, the old influences remain. Then, of course, I also listen to things like Sons Of Apollo, the awesome Jeff Loomis, or Symphony X among others, but they’re not influences, just great musicians who set very high standards to keep up with.

The Writing's On The Wall (2019)