Privacy Policy and Legal Notice

You'll find my contact details at the very bottom of this page!

Privacy & Cookies

No user data is stored on my website, and no tracking technologies are used. Only technically necessary (essential) cookies are set for the displayed visitor counter. These prevent the same user from being counted multiple times. If the page is visited again at least 24 hours later, the content is overwritten.

There is generally no exchange of data with other service providers on my website.

Copyright and AI notices

Unless otherwise stated, I hold the copyright to all music, images, photos, and texts. The published music is my own composition, arrangement, and recording. It is not subject to GEMA regulations. Any use of the content beyond personal information, especially the music, texts, images, drawings, photos, and videos, requires my written permission!

Many images on these web pages were created using generative AI in combination with traditional image editing. This is not intended to deceive, but rather is a modern artistic expression and part of the Sanaphantastron project. Where photos of real people served as the basis for the images, their explicit consent was obtained. In all other cases, any resemblance to living or deceased persons is purely coincidental and unintentional.

Contact

I'm happy to answer any questions you may have about the content on my website. However, please understand that due to time constraints, I may not always be able to respond immediately. You can find my email address below. If you don't receive a reply from me, please also check your spam folder!

Disclaimer

The content of these pages is a creative experiment and makes no claim to be up-to-date, accurate, or complete. On the contrary: Here, time periods are sometimes playfully mixed, facts are distorted, and gaps are left where the imagination takes over. Any use of the information is at your own risk. Anyone who believes everything here does so at their own risk!

But this is true:

The producer of Sanaphantastron is Claus Schmidt. He has been involved with music since childhood. A formative experience with music came when, at the age of two, he secretly switched on his parents' Telefunken tube radio. Not hearing anything at first, so he turned the volume all the way up. Once the tubes had warmed up, the music blared at an almost unbearable volume. The protective cloth in front of the speaker from the sound pressure moved back and forth. Terrified, he ran away and hid. His mother, however, wasn't at all angry that he had switched on the radio on his own and simply turned the volume down a little. Claus learned from this that loud music isn't dangerous and that music itself is a good thing.

At the age of five, he bought himself a ukulele with his pocket money. It wasn't a children's guitar, but a proper instrument from a music store. Soon after, he also got a glockenspiel. This, too, was a serious musical instrument with quite precise tuning. It even had tone bars for semitones. Claus initially didn't take to music lessons at school. He could only produce strange squeaks from the recorder, and his singing was considered hopelessly humming. Even at the time of his enrollment in school, his interest lay not in folk music and children's songs, but in the Rolling Stones, The Beatles and The Monkeys.

Claus received his first real guitar for Christmas when he was twelve. He insisted it be an electric guitar, so a cheap Telecaster copy with a "Gedson" label ended up in his home. Even before that, his stepfather, the Copenhagen jazz musician Björn Jensen, had taught him the basics of guitar playing. He believed that one had to teach oneself to play the guitar. To this end, until he could buy the Gedson, he lent Claus his semi-acoustic Höfner guitar. It was an export model, labeled "Hofner."

In Claus's relatively modern music class with a young teacher, radio hits like "La Paloma Blanca" were later played. There was a large collection of musical instruments, including electric guitars, amplifiers, and a drum set. However, Claus opted for a different course called "Tape Experiments." The teacher who led this course introduced a wide variety of musical styles and talked extensively about classical music and its reinterpretations. Harmony was also covered. Claus first time learned about twelve-tone music here. In class, sound art pieces were created by piecing together snippets of tape.

His experiences in his first school band were frustrating: everyone played a jumbled mess of notes – Claus still on bass guitar. So he soon founded the band Andromeda, where he played rhythm guitar. As a guitarist, Claus uses the name Che Guitare. This has nothing to do with the revolutionary of the same name. It's simply the initials of all his given names. To avoid being pigeonholed as just a guitarist, Claus later created the character Fahco Labuel. This is a presumably somewhat younger nerd who claims to have come from another planet. Even the teddy bear named Tomate (a nickname from Thomas), which he received as a child, appears as a fictional character in his musical work.

After initial training and qualification in social pedagogy and jobs in open youth work (e.g., youth centers), Claus transitioned to the field of communications engineering. There, he designed various custom devices for musicians and recording studios and carried out development work in radio technology. He also authored five books on radio technology and numerous magazine articles.

Today, he works full-time as part of the teaching staff at a school. With a particular focus on inclusion, he also volunteers his time supporting music projects that provide therapeutic musical activities for people with mental health conditions. It was in this context that the rock band AmpCrash from Schwarzenbek (near Hamburg) was formed.