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paniq is Leonard Ritter, an artist of all trades from Hamburg, Germany. His musical style is hard to define; ranging from pure acapella over acid hip hop to full-blown psychedelic micromusic, he melts supposedly incompatible styles to tell his life's story.

Since 10 years, paniq has released more than 10 albums on the net, with many more to come. paniq.org hosts most of his productions, most of of them freely available, all of them Creative Commons licenced.

Getting interested in computer programming at the age of 9, it was impossible to separate him from computers ever since. At the age of 12, secretly toying with the studio equipment of his mother, a known german children music and radio play producer, he got entranced in the world of sequencers and synthesizers. Since sampling hardware was exorbitant at the time, paniq resorted to programming beats using a so-called Tracker program, an early ancestor of todays software-based studio environments.

1997, when the world wide web found its way into his family's living room, he began publishing his music online. He joined the demoscene, a creative international collective devoted to creating art with and for computers, which is now his primary platform for art releases.

Since 2006, paniq produces music using his own programs (such as Aldrin) and a lot of other open source audio software.