Panta Flux
The Tinkerer · The Artist · The Human
Driven by a love of electronic music, self-built tools, and the deep conviction that change is not a problem – but the very nature of things.
Since the C64 – and after everything, more than ever.
Why "Panta Flux"?
Panta rhei – everything flows. Heraclitus knew that. So did the Tibetans. The flux capacitor from Back to the Future, obviously. And then there was also: Fluxus!
Panta – everything. Flux – the flowing, change. Greek meets Latin, the roots of European civilisation.
A name as both compass and commitment: life is change. All things are impermanent. Everything flows. Some things sound.
Panta Rhei as an artist name would have been too clichéd.
And a catastrophe for search engines.
Music? Music!
The core concept of my music is what I like to call LEGOing – building music like LEGO bricks, playfully and experimentally. No particular genre, no stage, no career plan. Just making – because I simply can't help it.
The influences feel like they come from another time – Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Jean‑Michel Jarre, Vangelis: that was the music of an era when humanity flew to the moon and synthesizers spread sounds as if from the final frontier: space. My fascination with that has never faded.
Growing up with synthpop and music that back then simply sounded like the future, what emerged from me is somewhere between space opera and my self-coined term Toytronic: electronic music with playful sonic elements, serious at its core, playful on the surface. Though it can also go orchestral or experimental.
Have a Listen
A small, varied selection of my music – no algorithm, no playlist logic.
My Journey
Looking back, it all started with Popcorn by the Butterfingers. Sometime in childhood, somewhere on the radio – that’s where the thought was planted: I want to be able to do that too. The SID chip in the C64 showed me it was possible at home. The Amiga 500 confirmed it.
In the late 1980s, my first synthesizer moved in: a Yamaha SY77 that I loved but never really learned to master. Then came university, moving around, life – and a longer musical pause. In the early 2000s I absolutely had to have a Korg Triton Pro, which I still own today. But it wasn't until 2013, with Ableton Live 9 and the first Push, that it truly grabbed me – and that fire has been burning ever since.
Gaming has been just as much a lifelong companion – from the first pixels on the C64 to VR with the Valve Index today. Also a way of building worlds, understanding systems, of playfulness as a basic attitude. And that characteristic 8-bit sound is always somewhere in the mix.
My actual livelihood over the past few decades was technical translation. Then, in 2024, a cancer diagnosis was made by chance. The surgery that followed changed a great deal and shifted my focus. I started programming again, returning to my roots (computer science studies). Panta Flux gained a new dimension: music-related software. Any parallels to Tim Exile are purely coincidental and were certainly not planned that way. But without that turning point, this website would not exist.
MPE & Me
I’ve never been able to get on with conventional keyboards. The same intervals require completely different finger gymnastics depending on where you are on the keyboard – the result of historical coincidence with no musical logic whatsoever. In my head, that just creates knots. Much like QWERTY (with its ergonomically questionable key layout to boot), which I’ve banished from my life for similar reasons in favour of NEO2.
The moment I realised it wasn’t me that was the problem came from a chance look at an accordion keyboard: isometric, the same hand shape for a chord, wherever you are. The chord moves around – the gesture stays the same. That clicked immediately.
When I finally unpacked the first Ableton Push I’d ordered on a hunch and felt the grid under my fingers: “Yes!” – no run-up, no major adjustment. Honestly: without the Push, I’d probably still not be making music today.
Another problem was more subtle: synthetic sounds live by being shaped over time – not simply struck. A mod wheel that requires lifting my hand from the keyboard breaks the flow. MPE supports it: pressure, slide, vibrato directly under the fingers, per note, no detour. The sound follows the body, the feeling.
That’s why there are things around here that look strange at first glance: a hexagonal grid (Exquis), a soft surface full of sensors (Erae 2), a keyboard whose keys wobble when you want them to (Osmose), a Push 3 that doesn’t just step sequences, but makes notes feel tangible. Not out of collector’s instinct for curious gadgets, but from lived usefulness and conviction.
Patch Bay
All cables lead somewhere.
