Salted Caramel – MC-707, TR-8s, TD-3, MS-1

I used some time this weekend, to dive into the soundscapes of my machines. As the Hardware-Jams group challenge was to create a track inspired by „food“ in any of it’s flavours; be it great moments with family and friends around a large table or munching crackers on the sofa.

As life’s a bit hard, lately, I chose one of my favourite sweets „Salted Caramel“ and jammed to it.

Thanks for listening to my music!

Test Drive Series 2020 Compilation

Cover Test Drive Series „2020 The Golden Age“

Two of my tracks are featured on Test Drive Series 2020 „A Golden Age“ Compilation! DJ- and producer-duo HMND.SnB.Ens. (Instagram) chose my songs „Crawling Backwards“ and „Entropy One“ for their retrospective view on this very special year.

The album features tracks of Phil Decker, Curtis Newton (Instagram), The Poti Orchestra (Instagram), To66l and the HMND.SnB.Ensemble. To be featured together with these long-time-favorites makes me very proud! 😉

Give it a spin, this is awesome music made for awesome people! 😉

Entropy EP – Dark Synthwave

Entropy is a concept describing a state of randomness or disorder, e.g. in information theory it shows the amount of information hidden in the noise.

Follow the entropy rising from lush cosyness to a barely bearable overflow.

Dark. Deep. Emotional. Afraid.

There is hope.

New EP „Entropy“ has been released to stores on Dec. 23rd, hope, you enjoy it!

Bandcamp:

Soundcloud:

Spotify:

Vote for „Ans Licht“

Today is a very special day: My new track „Ans Licht“, a collab with Kay Emmess, has been released and is available in stores, now!

If you like it, it would mean the world to us, if you pushed it on Distrokid’s Spotify Playlist – just follow this link and choose our track „Ans Licht“.

Thank you 😉

Create a linktr.ee-like Instagram Bio landing page with WordPress

I started a while ago, to use my WordPress blog to give further information on my musical projects to followers of my social media profiles by linking from my Instagram bio to the category „Music“ of my blog.

Well, this was ok, but in the end, I was not overwhelmed by the user experience, this provided. Interested followers had to scroll over several posts, which made it clumsy to allow them to quickly access multiple external content offers. State-of-the-art services like linktr.ee are successful due to providing a highly accessible page that enables users to quickly catch up with artist news and offers and to easily navigate through. Well, I wanted this, too.

Having that said, I decided to not go with additional external services. My trusty WordPress site with Twenty Twenty theme should be sufficient to provide a similar feature out of my hands and not the hands of a third party. So I dug into the web and finally compiled a lot of hints and resources together to enable my feature. Here’s what you will want to do, if you intend to provide a similar service on your WordPress installation with theme Twenty Twenty:

How to do it

First step is to create a page that will be used as the landing page. Give it a title, in my case „helixrider news“. Although this title will not be visible to the user, it gives more convenience to identify the page in the WP backend and, if you are using titles in links, it will help with SEO.

Add the entries as block-types „Button“ with style option „fill“. This will not look too good in the WP editor, as the Twenty Twenty theme does not allow setting fixed width (like 100%) – we will handle this later.

Example page in WordPress Editor

Once you saved this page, take a note of the page ID, we will use this in the next step. In my case, it is 1236, you will find it in the URL while editing:

Note the page ID while editing

Second and last step is to reformat output of this one page. My idea was to divert from the Twenty Twenty standard by applying the following:
– Set the buttons to full content width.
– Hide the page Header.
– Hide the page Title (I am using only my logo instead).
– Hide the page Footer.

This will be achieved by giving some customized CSS code. By doing it via the WordPress backend’s Configurator, you won’t mess with the theme and will (hopefully…) stay upgrade-compatible.

Go into Design – Themes – Configurator and select „Additional CSS“. Copy the following lines into the text field, and remember to change the page-ID-tag (.page-id-xyz) to the ID you took note of above:

.wp-block-button {
    display: block;
    width: 100%;
}
.wp-block-button__link {
    display: block;
    width: 100%;
}
.page-id-1236 .entry-title {
display:none;
}
.page-id-1236 .entry-header {
display:none;
}
.page-id-1236 .header-inner {
display:none;
}
.page-id-1236 .footer-inner {
display:none;
}

Save this and give your newly created page a reload and you see the changes.

If you store the link to this page in your Instagram bio, you will be getting something like this – for me this looks like mission accomplished! 😉

Hopefully this can help you in creating your own landing pages for your social accounts and reducing dependency to other 3rd party services.

Ans Licht

Today is a very special day, as not only my album Meanders has been released, I am also very proud to announce my collaboration with Kay Emmess!

I did an Edit of his brilliant song „Ans Licht“ („To the light“) that drove the catchy melodic lines to an eternal trance hype phase.

Check out Kay Emmess awesome work on his Bandcamp account.

Hopefully, you enjoy this track! It will be released on all major digital platforms on November, 20th. If you like to, you can give it a pre-listen on my Bandcamp site.