Two months ago, on August 5, 2020, I had an accident which left me with painfully injured hands and arms. As a consequence I haven't been able to play any musical instrument for long fifty seven days – and counting. Because I always want to do what I must not, my desire to make new music turned unbearable just three days after the crash. Strangely – or significantly? – enough that very day, because my hands were still very clumsy, I accidentally wounded a tendon on my arm so playing an instrument got even more impossible.

I once saw the term "laptopwave" somewhere, used in a mocking way, which made it an even bigger challenge. I told to myself: I'm a musician. My instruments aren't keyboards, guitars or drums but the trained ability to listen to the world, life experience, education, imagination, invention, empathy, memories and humanity. I still have all these, I just can't play any musical instrument except for perhaps kazoo – so I'd better switch tools for a while.

I lay down with my laptop in what I partly imagined, partly pretended to be the "Lincoln Rhyme way" and tried to make music using almost exclusively one finger. I'd been obsessed with summer turning to autumn for a long time, both literally and as an allegory. I recorded all the individual tape tracks of my previous album from an intended trilogy, Boyhood, to the laptop. And I started transforming them into drones.

My goal was to imitate the feeling I had as a boy when someone was standing closely behind me, I felt her or his presence as a delicate chill and enjoyed it very much. I also wanted to work with the melancholy I felt (and still do) every September when beloved summer was leaving and bleak autumn coming. And I needed to process the bittersweet sadness I feel more and more every year when realizing that the four seasons resemble life periods where my current one has been slowly turning from "summer" to "fall" already.

Each individual track utilizes samples from a single "Boyhood" track and adds some binaural recordings I have been making for the past few years. As a conceptual starting point I was, during the creation of this album, having in mind Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty", especially the part so fitting, beautiful and important that I had to put it on the cassette's cover:

"When noon is past; there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!"

I felt that a beautiful, old photograph / autumn brown cassette in an optimistic summer yellow case, with its warmth, limits and gradual deterioration, would be a nice symbolic representation of this album. So this is the very first time one of my albums has been released both in its digital and analog form at the same time. I hope you'll like both the versions as I feel they well represent what I wanted to re-experience, to re-touch, to re-tell.

One more thing... I don't feel bitter, sad nor angry in any way because I hurt myself so unpleseantly. Rather the other way round: I have felt since the very accident, and then even more after the examination by a surgeon, extremely lucky I survived the crash. And it changed me in a positive way because whatever bad has happened to me since then, I've felt like it superseded something much worse that could have happened instead or did happen in a parallel universe. Simply put that everything has a sense and a higher meaning.

Last but not least: One of the joys of my current life period has been you, my fans. Thank you very much for experiencing this huge adventure with me, for enjoying my music and for supporting me so I can make more of it. I'm humbled by your generosity and grateful for your moral, motivational and financial support. You have yet much more to look forward to, trust me.

Binaural Space, October 2, 2020