Uphills is my first solo record. That sounds larger than it felt while I was making it. There was no single grand plan. It was more a collection of small moments that eventually fitted together.
I have made music for a long time: in bands, with guitars and with ideas that sometimes became songs and sometimes remained unfinished. What I often found difficult was imagining a piece from beginning to end as a complete form. Intro, verse, chorus, bridge. That architecture can be beautiful, but for me it was often too large before anything had even begun.
Loops changed that.
Letting the moment remain
A loop is small at first. A few notes, a movement, something that returns. That is exactly what helped me. I did not have to know immediately where a piece was going. I could take one moment and look at it for long enough to let it find its own direction.
With guitar, filters, delays, reverbs and small electronic effects, this became a way of working. I play something, hear it repeat, turn a filter, remove a layer or let the sound tilt. Often the most interesting part is not a new melody but a change in how the same sound behaves.
That opened a lot for me creatively. The limitation was not restrictive; it was useful. A loop says: stay here for a moment. Listen again. Do not change everything at once.
The legs turn in circles until movement becomes loops.
Cycling as a form
Something similar happens when cycling, especially uphill. One hard push does not take you to the top. You repeat the same movement: circle after circle, crank revolution after crank revolution. At some point, your sense of time changes.
A climb is not only distance. It is rhythm. You find a gear, breathing pattern and speed that just work. Some moments are heavy. Then there are the small stretches where you notice that everything is moving again.
That feeling fitted the pieces. Not as a soundtrack for sport, but as a musical form: repetition, small changes and slow progress.
The lines
The artwork comes from GPX tracks of real climbs: Rosskopf, Coll de Rates, Stadlberg, Gindelalm, Rotwand and Kesselberg. On the cover, they are not intended as maps. You should not navigate with them.
I am interested in the lines because they look like notation. Each curve is a decision made by the landscape. Each hairpin is a small loop. If you look for long enough, the traces become almost musical.
The drawings come from the climbs' GPX tracks; they are less map than rhythm.
Why it became a record
Eventually there were enough pieces from the same world: guitar loops, small electronic sketches, repetition, climbs and lines. The feeling of slowly finding a way into something.
With Uphills, I think I finally found a subject that held my attention long enough to become a record. Not a concept I wrote down beforehand. More something that was already there in cycling, in the studio, in notes and in evenings with a guitar and effects.
The tracks are short. They do not have to explain everything. They stay close to the ideas they came from. That is what I like about them.
What remains
For me, Uphills is also a small document of how I can make music at the moment. Do not plan perfectly. Do not judge too early. Find a loop, touch it, react to it with effects and see whether it creates a space where I want to stay.
Perhaps that is why the title fits so well. Many things feel uphill. But uphill does not automatically mean difficult. Sometimes it simply means there is a direction.