Growing up in a small(ish) town near Cologne, Germany, Boris Rogowski was often lonesome by choice as a kid and spent long hours in the woods next to his family’s house—and over the ITT Tape recorder his father gifted him when he was 5 or 6. It had a built-in microphone that he used to record audio dramas starring his stuffed animals. Strangely enough, he only discovered the possibility of recording music to tape much later, age 15, after he had already given up on recorder, piano and oboe lessons and briefly joined and left an orchestra. Dismissing his entire classical training, he taught himself chords and scales on the guitar and recorded songs and instrumental pieces by overdubbing.

He went on to release three song albums under the moniker The Society Islands, recorded and toured with bands like Gentleman and the Evolution and Die Sonne, and learned a thing or two about music production, arrangement and structure in the process.

In the 2010s he began composing music for audiovisual media, including television shows like Skylines (Netflix) and Sam – A Saxon (Disney+), podcasts like the Spotify Original 190220 about the right-wing terror attack in Hanau, and Winners, a German-Kurdish movie told from the perspective of a refugee girl from Syria. Also, he is a repeat collaborator of the Stuttgart Opera, having contributed orchestral arrangements for two works, the latter of which (I Did It My Way) will premiere in September 2025. At the same time he began to take a great interest in Ambient and Minimal works, which brought him back to the classical world he grew up in. Aspects like texture and openness of structure became more and more important, and he started to collect his ideas during long-form improvisation sessions.

In 2023, the first album under his own name was released on the label piano and coffee records: The Waste Land, an instrumental meditation on the eponymous poem by T.S. Eliot in 11 pieces.