RA PATERA
Starting
I joined Ra Patera in 2002, when ALIVE decided finally to shut down. The band had its rehearsal room in the basement under a bar and so it was no problem making some noise. Ra Patera started something like mark II or mark III and so there was some basic material to work with.
After some trials with new singers, Kevork Muhtaroglu took the mike and was the driving bullet for the success we had in the following years. Kai Jentsch was the musical mastermind, great guitar player and soloist - he came over with most of the ideas. Sven Jentsch and I built the basement of the hard guitar rock that we took to a lot of stages in Baden-Württemberg. Our first CD "Debut" we recorded at Karlsruhe with Robin Schmidt (2496mastering).
Getting successful
In the months after our debut record we decided to try something new. We switched from the original English lyrics to German. In the beginning this was quite cumbersome, but finally we managed to write some great songs that played very well with the sound of the new words. We recorded our second disc "Eine Frage der Zeit" at the Soundfactory studio at Walldorf with Siggi Zundl. The recording was the access to several German rock samplers and a feature in the Soundcheck magazine. In 2005 we presented the sampler "frisch! Auf gut deutsch" as a prelude band to Udo Lindenberg in front of more than 5000 people at Calw.
Recording phase
At Calw I got in contact with Arno Köster, the manager from Udo Lindenberg. He invited us to write some songs for a planned motion picture film with Udo and other known German actors. We organized some recording equipment and delivered "Skizzen", which was accepted from Arno as a good piece of demo work. Unfortunately the film did not manage to get the required funding and so the whole thing died - but at least we had three exciting songs.
In the following months we invested in recording equipment and used this for our songwriting process.
Going down
After 2007 it became more and more difficult to get good gigs, it was more or less pay-to-play without revenue. Though we had really good songs, this was the time when the audience requested cover bands. So we had more fun recording our songs and philosphing about better times. In the end I decided to leave Ra Patera, the other three then also gave up after a few months.
Ra Patera Revisited
More than ten years after the split of Ra Patera I discovered the sources of our last recordings and remixed them from scratch, adding some stuff and created 'radio edits', that were more compact than the long versions we played on stage. You can find them in "Revisited". All in all it was really a great band where I learned a lot.
