Growing up behind the Iron Curtain in a household with a suspiciously deep admiration for rock ’n’ roll, one of my earliest memories is of my father turning up a Gene Vincent tape after my mother complained that “the boy is listening to too much music.” Clearly, her intervention failed spectacularly.

A few years later, I found myself as a teenager in a meadow with friends, booze, and a wooden cassette player when someone put on the MC5. Life-changing, although we probably wouldn’t have called it that at the time.

Things escalated from there.

I started booking underground shows and publishing fanzines in the early 1990s, eventually becoming a music journalist for VISIONS Magazine and PR manager at EFA Distribution. I then founded the label Exile On Mainstream and Southern Records Germany, sister company of the legendary Southern Records UK, handling distribution, label management, PR and tour booking. Apparently, having just one job in music was never an option.

Alongside touring as a musician, this added up to three decades in pretty much every corner of the music industry, while somehow maintaining my admiration for underground music and independent business.

In 2013, I joined Optimal Media, mainly working in vinyl as Senior Manager in sales, customer service and quality assurance. In 2022, I moved to Key Production Ltd. as European Operations Manager, continuing my lifelong attempt to find professional reasons to be surrounded by records.

Since 2024, I’ve been Director of the Making Vinyl Europe Conference, bringing together the many people involved in turning PVC, cardboard, ink and unreasonable amounts of enthusiasm into records. I’m also Editor-in-Chief of Making Vinyl Magazine and write for MINT—because apparently I still haven’t talked about vinyl enough.

In my free time, I build speaker cabinets, climb mountains in summer and ski down them in winter. I still love hanging out with musicians more than almost anything else.

The exception? Listening to and talking about vinyl records.