It should take only a few words to describe me. I’m lefthanded – and »Can someone lend me a guitar?« is a running joke with me, because I need one strung for southpaws – bloodthirsty, and rather weird. And yet my self-portrayals tend to fill pages after pages, and I end up asking myself if anyone will read this wall of text at all. So if you’re not up to the task, you can quit after this first paragraph and should still be able to identify me at any convention.
My recognition factor is heightened by the fact that I have a thing for caps – not stupid bobble hats, but smart flat caps that, according to my mother, don’t suit me at all – and that my awkward posture always makes me look either twisted or tense, or both. But most of all I wish to characterize myself through by music: my guitar picking, which is based on six years of classical training; my voice, which I considered to be alto until my second vocal teacher claimed I was actually a soubrette (she wasn’t my teacher for long, so I continued being an alto), and of course by my songs.
My roots are in folk music, and I am my father’s kid through and through – my father, who would have made a great filker, had a large collection of Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention, Pentangle and the like, so I just had to take off from there. Though I never thought of writing my own folk music, I did a number of translations to fill my (Germana) fantasy novels with some nice traditional songs – and then, in 1999, an acquaintance took my first filk convention, and from then on, I was hooked.
For ten years I formed, first as a duo with Silva, then with the addition of our partners Kjenjo and Peredar, the band Lord Landless, and it was a great time we look back to fondly. Two factors put an end to LLL: After moving places, there were suddenly 500 kms between us, and then Silva and Kjenjo turned pro musicians with their band Schattenweber, which turned organizing proper rehearsal weekends near impossible. I don’t think I’d make a good pro musician – but I became a professional writer, which calls for the same kind of audacity.
Today, I form the duo Pavlov’s Duck together with Peredar or go solo. I live close to the charming imperial city Aachen, further my writing career and look forward to the next convention. Though I wrote fewer songs over the past couple of years, I still try to improve my craft, and I am quite happy with the few songs I did manage to write. Next to filk and writing I am a pc gaming and roleplaying enthusiast, consider myself a geek, and enjoy working on my various websites. In a time gone, I was also a librarian, but that is another story, and because there’s little music in it, it doesn’t belong here.