IGOR

Music has been part of my life for as long as I can remember.

When I was just four years old, my parents gave me a small record player, and I would spend hours listening to the hits of the time over and over again. By the early 1980s, I had become fascinated with the international charts, constantly discovering new songs and sounds.

But it was in 1985 that music truly captured me. Songs like Samurai by Michael Cretu and Maria Magdalena by Sandra opened up an entirely new world of sound.

What fascinated me was never simply a particular musical style. It was the way music could be produced and shaped: wide synthesizer landscapes, atmospheric soundscapes, layered arrangements and tiny details that revealed themselves only after repeated listening. Artists and projects such as Sandra, Michael Cretu, Enigma, Cretu & Thiers, Nena and Madonna became important influences on the way I experienced music.

The 1980s remain an essential part of my musical DNA to this day – not because I want to recreate the past, but because I have always loved music that feels emotional, expansive and full of detail.

From an early age, I dreamed of becoming part of the music industry myself. Growing up in Switzerland, however, the path towards an international music career was anything but easy, especially for an English-language artist without significant financial resources or industry connections.

Still, I never completely gave up on that dream.

I entered a singing competition with a ballad I had written myself, “Don't Ask Why” – and won.

That experience encouraged me to keep going, although my parents understandably wanted me to learn a solid profession first. So that is what I did.

A few years later, an advertisement appeared in Switzerland's largest daily newspaper. Five young men were being sought to form Switzerland's first boy band. Around 500 people applied for those five places.

I was one of the five selected.

That was the beginning of Code 5.

I initially became the band's second lead vocalist. Our first single, Love Is Your Game, reached No. 9 on the Swiss singles chart, followed by our second single, Hold Me Now, which reached No. 42.

During that time, our lead singer left the group and I took over as the band's lead vocalist. Our third Swiss single, “I'll Be There for You,” was released with me as lead singer and reached No. 27 on the Swiss singles chart.

What followed was an intense period of television and radio appearances, live performances and a successful club tour. One of the absolute highlights was performing as a support act for the Backstreet Boys in front of around 30,000 people.

In 1998, we travelled to Canada to record our debut album, Premium. While we were there, we also recorded “And the Song Goes (Doo Dit),” a cover of a song originally recorded by Canadian artist Carol Medina.

The song was released in Canada and became an unexpected international success for us, reaching No. 24 on Canada's RPM National Top 100 Singles chart.

For me personally, however, Canada became important for another reason.

The time I spent working in the Canadian studios was one of the most formative experiences of my musical life. I worked closely with experienced producers and engineers and was deeply involved in the recording process.

Watching a song develop piece by piece – from the first musical ideas and individual recordings to the moment when everything suddenly came together as a finished production – fascinated me.

It was there that I learned an enormous amount about working in a professional recording studio: how different parts of a song require different vocal approaches, how interpretation changes when you are singing for a recording rather than performing live, and how voice, arrangement, production and engineering ultimately come together to create the emotion and character of a song.

That experience has stayed with me ever since.

At the same time, being part of a band and a larger commercial project naturally meant that my creative influence had its limits.

I was able to contribute one song entirely written and composed by myself to the album: “Emotions.” On other songs, including “QUIT!”, I was involved as a co-writer and co-composer. But the final decisions about arrangements, production and musical direction were shared between the producers, the band and, ultimately, the record company.

Despite everything we achieved, the financial reality behind the scenes was very different from what people might have imagined.

After almost two intense years, I decided to leave the band. I was 25 at the time and the oldest member of the group. Continuing would have required financial support that simply wasn't realistic for me or my family. Mismanagement and a number of wrong decisions had created a situation in which the project was no longer financially sustainable for us as individual band members.

Shortly after I left, the band came to an end.

I returned to a normal professional life.

For a while, I was still regularly invited to events within the Swiss music scene, but after two or three years without releasing new material, that gradually faded away as well.

Later, I recorded a new song of my own, “Secrets,” and considered trying once more to establish myself as a solo artist. But I quickly discovered that I had already been given a label: former boy-band singer. At the time, the message from the industry was fairly clear – that label would be difficult to escape.

For the time being, that was the end of my professional music career.

But it was never the end of music.

Over the years, I continued writing lyrics, developing melodies and creating music at home, mostly just for myself. There was no release strategy, no commercial plan and no pressure. I simply continued creating because music had always been part of who I was.

Some of the songs and ideas from those earlier chapters of my life never disappeared. They stayed with me, sometimes for decades.

And now they are finding their way back.

“Emotions,” the song I originally wrote and composed during my Code 5 years, will become the very first release from my new project. “QUIT!”, which I co-wrote and co-composed during that same chapter of my life, returns in a new form as well. “Don't Ask Why,” the ballad that once helped me win my first singing competition, has finally found its place on the album. And “Secrets,” the song with which I once hoped to begin a new chapter as a solo artist, is part of PURE too.

For me, there is something special about bringing these songs together with music I have written more recently. They were created at completely different moments in my life, yet somehow they belong to the same story.

Today, I don't really define myself simply as a singer, songwriter, composer or producer.

I see myself as a Music Creator.

For me, music is a creative way of expressing memories, emotions, experiences and the images I carry inside my head.

And perhaps the biggest difference between then and now is freedom.

Today, I decide what I want to say.

I decide what my songs should sound like.

I decide which emotions they should carry and how I want to produce them.

Every song and every lyric on PURE comes from me. I create music first and foremost because I love creating it. If other people listen to it, connect with it and perhaps find a piece of themselves somewhere inside one of my songs, that means a great deal to me.

But I am not making music because I need to become a world-famous artist.

I am making it because, after all these years, I still love music just as much as that four-year-old boy sitting in front of his little record player.

And that is why the album is called PURE.

It represents creative freedom, genuine emotion and, above all, my pure joy of making music.

PURE is not simply the comeback of a former boy-band singer.

It is the continuation of a dream that never really ended.