When I wrote the description for my new “remnants of a beautiful life ep”, it somehow turned into a long essay. In short, I made an EP with ambient variants of tracks from “tales of a beautiful life”. The EP is 24:05 minutes long and contains five beatless, calming, melancholic tracks that fit well as background music for breathing.


If you want to dive into the making of “remnants of a beautiful life ep”, here’s the full story:

When I finished releasing “tales of a beautiful life”, I was broke from the self-financed vinyl pressing that turned out not to sell, and dashed that I had once again released an album I had been working on for years just for it to get lost in the vastness of the internet again.
It put me in a weird mental state. I was unable to make music. Felt like some kind of a musical burnout. Just the thought of making music gave me dark thoughts. It was a little different from a writer’s block because I had ideas. But whenever an idea came up, my mind started to run me down and told me things like I was obscenely bad at playing piano and I should be ashamed for even trying to write a song with such lousy skills. Or that my Englisch is so crappy that I’ll never be able to write any decent lyrics. Whenever I had the spark of an idea, a massive wave of self-doubts would wash over me and nip every idea in the bud. My mind was poisoned.

I knew that if I ever wanted to make music again, I would need a radically new approach. I confronted my perfectionism with minimalism and asked myself what does a song actually need?

Years ago, when I wrote “Wind Farm Choir” for “tales of a beautiful life”, I made two different versions. Originally, I sought a very simple ambient piece inspired by Aphex Twins “Selected Ambient Works Volume II”. But even back then, my stupid self told me that the song wasn’t enough. That a simple ambient song was too boring and would slow down the record so much that every listener would die of boredom. So, I made a different version with drums, more layers, and replaced the song structure with something my demanding mind thought would be less ordinary. But it quickly turned out that I liked the simple version more.

I started there and went back to “tales of a beautiful life” looking for simple, ambient variants. As I was pretty exhausted, I lowered my expectations and only looked for one more song that I could release alongside the ambient version of “Wind Farm Choir”.
At first, I found “Pier to Cosmos” and wondered what it would be like when the guitar was replaced by piano. And I also found this epilogue at the back of the song and thought to myself “fuck me. What a gem.” What was I thinking, hiding this fantastic musical spacewalk at the end of the song?

Then there was that piano melody in the climax of “Gewitterwolken”. I was wondering if I could isolate the piano and just have that without all the drums, all that noise. I was listening to the minimalist “Melancholia” by William Basinski a lot recently and thought maybe something like that. Taking an incredibly loud piece and making something quiet out of it. Let’s see where this takes me.

And suddenly it was there again, the well-known but long-forgotten feeling when you make music and suddenly everything is running by itself. I rediscovered the flow.

“Endless Love” started with a joke years ago. I took my favorite part out of that rave-banger “Stephanibruecke”, tuned it down two half steps and discovered that the result coincidentally had the same song length as “Magic Window”, a piece of 1:46 minutes of nothing but silence by Boards Of Canada. I thought it was funny and uploaded it to YouTube as “Magic Window (Remixed by Nordsun)”.
But there was more to it. I noticed that this ambient “joke” had the power to calm my subconscious, even when it was highly aggressive. For “tales of a beautiful life” I doubled the length and put it on the album but even that always felt too short. I was realizing that this thing here was becoming an ambient record and that a slow, calming piece of long music would fit just right into it. “Endless Love's” soul was already located northbound, and for this record, I placed it even further north on the edge of the Arctic Circle, from where this song could absorb the energy of the Northern Lights and turn it into sound.

And when I was done with all that, there was “Vincent”. It was just there. I already made this track back in 2016 as one of the first tracks for a new album which became “tales of a beautiful life” and guess what? The song was too slow, too boring for my poisoned, highly demanding mind.
I just had to record the vocals and knew that this would fulfil my new ambient record. Recording vocals with my newly discovered mindset was a relief! I guess without it, this song wouldn’t even exist because my critical mind would have killed every take I recorded. But this time I allowed myself to think, fuck it. I’m not a professional singer but I love to sing every single word. Who cares if the vocals are not clean or perfectly pitched.

I don’t care for perfection. Not anymore. I want to breathe and I want to release an ambient record that may be boring to a lot of people. But for me, it’s not boring. It’s music that resonates with my soul and that I enjoy listening to, and that’s all I want.