About

Spirit Of Lao Dan …

The idea of the…

… project was born in 2019.
After having done several instrumental albums (“Get it”, “Into my Arena”, “Christmas Classics”, “Get it 2.0”) in the Hard-Rock genre and my latest album “The Raimund Burke Orchestra Performs A Rockin’ Tribute To Glenn Miller”, I had the wish to record a new kind of prog-metal album.
But this time with vocals! But how could I do that? Since my voice is only good enough for some additional choir parts? So I decided to ask some great vocalists to lend me their extraordinary voices.
Said and done, there now is an great collection of mega singers who sang my songs just awesome. Please go to the “Guests” page for more details.

The artists on the album called “Secret Life”, are all carefully selected to find the perfect musical fit for each song.

Deciding to take rock singers to match the historical Laozi verses with the modern metal influenced power was the best idea I ever had! And I am very glad to have those guys on my album now.

This unusual concept, made of prog-metal influences, merged with the incredibly meaningful texts of Laotzi’s Tao Te King, which probably does not exist anywhere in the world in this form as far as I know, promises to be an entertaining journey.

Musically, the Spirit Of Lao Dan album tend to be characterized by some opposites: brutal guitars enriched with some asian historic instruments, classic Hammonds merge here and there with screaming digital synthesizers, for solos and harmony parts with guitars and keyboards, which guides into the next vocal appearance.

All the songs are kind of connected with traditional chinese instruments. So you have a whole CD of one musical piece in a row.

I recorded the album from december 2019 to march 2021 in my own studio and played all the instruments myself and did the mix too.

But where does my connection to Daoism or Laozi come from?

Well, I’ve been practicing the basic forms of Taijiquan in the Chen style since 1990. And traditional Chen Taijiquan (the Taijiquan in general of course) contains many of the principles of Daoism. And Daoism is based on the Tao Te King of Laozi. In the Daoist tradition, the Taiji primarily denotes the unity of complementary polarities, i.e. from a holistic point of view, the opposites of Yīn and Yáng, which complement each other.

And so I thought, why not taking the verses of Laozi and connect them with my music.