Latest / Electronic Music / Martin Kohlstedt - Piano And Electronica
Transcript
- Caro C: Hello and welcome to the Sound On Sound podcast about Electronic Music and all things synth. I'm Caro C and in this episode I'm talking with Martin Kohlstedt from Germany. Martin describes his music as instrumental music and electronica. Trained as a jazz pianist, Martin is passionate about improvisation, but also needs that contrast with electronic instruments to create his sound world. Improvisation is indeed central to his live shows as he strives for deep connection with his audience and the performance space. Apart from his own compositions, Martin writes music and scores for movies, plays, podcasts and audio books. Let's start with the taste of Martin's music. Here's an extract from his most recent album called Live, made up of recordings from his 2023 European tour. Caro C: Hello Martin Kohlstedt and welcome to the Sound On Sound podcast. Martin Kohlstedt: Thank-you. Caro C: Brilliant, okay, well thank-you so much for fitting this in 'cause I know you are busy preparing for a tour at the moment. Yeah, I think to start with, what I'm most curious about is it sounds like you've got some training in there on the piano, so how did you get drawn into the world of electronic music? Martin Kohlstedt: Yeah. First of all, I started with playing the piano as a 12 years old boy at my childhood's home in the very middle of Germany. So it was, in the woods and I improvised on my own on this detuned upright in the living room. But I would say 10 years later, or let's say 8 years later, I needed something which is kind of the opposite side of the argument. So I started to discuss with myself, you get in this adolescence thing, you know and you have to, yeah, there have to be a friction also in music. And I started with synthesisers very far away from, very artificial, very far away from the piano. So I had this organic past arguments and this, yeah, present artificial arguments which, and this is what I still do on stage in a very, yeah, organic familiar form, let them form new phrases out of these instruments. Caro C: Yeah that's nice, the friction.Yeah, so for you, it's not all about it being harmonious or in agreement, you want that kind of clashing contrast or something like that? Martin Kohlstedt: Mmm, yeah. Sometimes, but I'm also into the cliches. I also love the pure harmonics, I love the very loud dissonant epic, electronic, big pressure base. But to be honest, yeah, I think the energy or the petrol for the whole thing is in the contrast of both sides. Caro C: Yeah, 'cause you say contrast, but I think they also really work nicely together. I've gone down a bit of a synth wave, piano, rabbithole at the moment and for me, it's almost like the synths hold the piano at times and sometimes the piano holds the synths soundscape. So do you see those as kind of equal parts, if you like, between the piano and the, or is it conversation, or how does that feel for you? Martin Kohlstedt: For me, the piano and all these, I would say themes from the, are like thoughts from the past, so to say, I have the feeling this is, it's not now or, I cannot really handle it out of my intuition. What I do with this electronic sound is this. Bring these past piano pieces into the present and yeah, convert them into the future together. So I have this different points of time which I create with the piano and I can improvise in a modular way with different times, different rooms, different situations and thoughts of yeah, of myself. And this is what I need for myself in a very meditative way and I never expected that people get into it in the same way. So I'm very happy about that and kind of a ceremonial way, processing this stuff. Caro C: Yeah, I think you very much communicate that for you it is a magic moment. You bring the whole of yourself and in your live performances and you want it to be that magical moment with people, don't you? Even though it sounds like, obviously there's a lot of planning and preparation that goes into it. Martin Kohlstedt: Yeah, true. I try to activate the people, yeah, next to me. We are sitting in this same direction. It's not like I'm being on stage and entertain the people. It's more like an familiar, same directional feeling, kind of a Churchill moment somehow, but not in this big epic way, you know, it's more like in this connected way. I love that so, and it's very important for me to get out of myself with this music. So the people can make me feel brave enough to, yeah, to step out these, of this safe place and it go with and deal with his uncertainties, you know? Caro C: Yeah, I'm a visual person so I'm seeing this ship that's sort of going into this voyage of discovery. We're all on the same ship and then you're heading, we're heading off together. Let's see what happens. Is that how it feels? Martin Kohlstedt: Yeah. This is an interesting question. Sometimes it's very close to, it could be set, it could be, it could be everything. You never know before to be honest. Mostly it's a very exciting, expressive feeling where you get out of yourself and grow somehow personally. But sometimes you get small, like this 12 years old boy at the piano back in the, yeah, back in the 90s and yeah, it's always a surprise, what's happened also personally in every concert. Caro C: Wow. Yeah, that must be quite tiring. Martin Kohlstedt: Yeah, it is. After a concert, you feel like very tired, but mostly in a positive way because people understand you, you are kind of in a therapy, circle of therapy. But most important for me is like to, yeah, to. processs thoughts and feelings all the time. I mean, it's typical for music, it's emotional, the, yeah, electronic music tries to structure it somehow, make it basic and then you have this organic piano, which has no rhythm or whatever, and tries to connect to the world and this is what always happens. So left hold of the brain and right hold off of the brain tries to get together. Caro C: Yeah, I was just thinking that you are, I mean we all are when we are performing or sharing, but it's also that form of communication. I think a lyric I used in my last album was there's something about electronic sound where you can pinpoint that emotion or that feeling or that communication in a way that's not necessarily restricted to traditions. So for example, if it's a piano, already a note has been decided for you, you know, you might want to go between a C and a C sharp and hmm, it's very difficult to do that. Whereas there's something about electronic sound where almost for me, the piano is quite a structured sound and obviously comes a lot of the time, does come with it, a lot of tradition. So there's something I hope, almost kind of, but a bit freeing or a bit more open about adding electronic music to that, adding electronic sound. Does that work for you at all? Martin Kohlstedt: Yeah, it works for me. This is a very good, yeah, it's a good zoom out for me also. I'm deep inside of the center, but you're right, the piano is always bringing back and make the chapters of the whole storytelling, yeah. And for me, everything is connected through that instrument and then you can do experiments with all, or like open different windows with these electronic sounds. And after now 10 years of releasing stuff, the electronic comes closer and closer and more organic to the piano and the piano got more and more artificial, so they meet in the centers as one whole group of instruments. Caro C: Mmm, nice. One quick question before we get nerdy about instruments. Are you ever tempted to use your voice? Martin Kohlstedt: Yeah, to be honest my voice is kind of on every album, but hidden in the track. Sometimes there's a choir in the background, sometimes there's one voice in the center, but pitched or some, yeah to be, I have thoughts about bringing the voice and because it's a very strong instrument, not as, I don't like words or like the value of words, to be honest. They are too small for what I try to create in music, but yeah, but the voice itself, if it's for example, is it female or is it male? Is it a big difference in what it does with your subconscious and you know, it so, I'm interested in using it for the future. But let's see how. Caro C: So in those early days, playing with piano first and then adding synthesizers or electronic sounds, what instruments could you access at that time? Were they software, was it hardware? Martin Kohlstedt: I'm a hardware guy to be honest. So I need knobs and I need this working stuff. I don't like this long cut through the left half of the brain bringing like layers on the DAW or something and then you click and the idea is gone. You know for me an idea is like a Pokemon, you have to catch it with a ball directly because it's intuition. So sometimes I have an idea for just 30 seconds and if I have to set up something before it's gone, so I'm a hardware guy. I am very into, my very first synthesizer was an a Korg MS2000, so like the bigger brother of this microKorg stuff with the same chip and it was kind of an own arm of myself. So to be honest, I was very fast in doing the sounds and the initial sounds and everything I heard, I just needed 20 seconds to bring the sound and I liked so I started with a very dry sound of the MS2000 in combination with a piano, mostly basses with a piano because I wanted to support the piano in the beginning. But then after like a few months, you start to concurrence, you do the concurrence with the piano sounds. Caro C: It's almost in competition with each other you mean? Martin Kohlstedt: Yeah, the friction we talked about in the very beginning. So yeah I try to, what are the arguments, what is better, is louder the better or is this a frequency? So I started with sound synthesis, so I studied at the Bauhaus University here in Weimar. So I wrote plug-ins, I was a programmer here and I started to build own synthesisers here and so I got into this material very fast. And so sound was a completely new thing for me, electronic sound. Rich sounds you never heard before. That was what I aim for also in my bachelor thesis. Caro C: So starting from what you had then, how has your electronic instrument tools let's say, how have they grown and what are you taking on tour with you? Martin Kohlstedt: Yeah, so after the MS2000, I was very into the Prophet sound, so have a Sequential 10 on stage, which I, yeah, control with an Osmosis for an expressive E. So my music is intuitive and I was very happy that people invented that intuitional keys, you know. You have to, you can go left and right and you serve the sounds somehow and these MPE controlling, I can use for all the others synths too with all these aftertouch things. So I have four synthesisers on stage which I control with one key and I mix the synthesiser sounds on stage to make one big sounds out of it and with it I have a, you know, 06, the boutique version, the very small one for the analogue basis mostly and then I add sounds of this millennial instrument, Roland Fantom EX, I'm in love with these choir sounds when they try to, yeah, generate choir sounds in the realistic try, they try to be realistic and I love that feeling of this old school choir stuff with this opera and combined with this analogue basis of the, you know, with these lead sounds of the Prophet and then you have this, I would say organic melod, clink things of the Osmosis, so you can make the every world you want so, and this is what I'm working with. And I have a looper on stage, a normal, yeah, the 600 looper of the Roland Boss. Then I have these drum kits and so it's, I have a Ensoniq where with own sounds where I can create very fast own beats and without a sync. So I don't work with syncs or timings so in a very old school way I put in drums and then yeah, the speed rotating out of this loop, which I can create or which I can combine sorry with the MPC, I have the old Akai 500, the very small one I'm working with on such and a lot of reverb and effect stuff. So everything is reachable on stage. I have a Fender Rhodes on my left side and the realistic grand piano on the right side so I can fly through, yeah, as in a cockpit with the people. Caro C: Wonderful, wonderful. And do you have a mix engineer with you? Martin Kohlstedt: I have and you need that and he, yeah, he needs to know you because it has to be kind of an emotional connected friend because it's all improvisation and he has to order all these different synthesisers and all my thoughts on its way. And it's the same with a light engineer. It's a very close familiar group and in an Eastern German collective way are traveling around Europe. Caro C: Yes and do the old synths all travel OK, are they okay with travelling? Because I remember Suzanne Ciani saying that was the scariest part is traveling, but she had to take a plane so I suppose it's different. Martin Kohlstedt: Yeah, yeah, I had a lot of instrument in the past where I was kind of crying when I saw these, yeah, these problems and all these functions and all the vibrations and yeah. So the most important old school stuff, so I have a lot of old Soviet synths here, I cannot travel with them onto, so I have a, I have a fast setup on tour where can I create ideas in a very fast way and then I have this experimenting synthy area at home where I take an hour to create one sound. Caro C: So how does all this translate into the studio experience for you personally? When you know you are recording an album, do you approach it like you do a live show or is it completely different? Martin Kohlstedt: Yeah, it needs to be improvisation still for me, so I start the recording, sometimes when I'm going to start with the piano, I start with a 30, 40 minute session where I try to get an essence of the main theme, so to say, when I'm going to start with a synthesiser, it's always kind of testing out and then a wave is coming and then you have to serve it and sometimes it's working and sometimes not, so I have a lot of skits here and they are hop or top, so they are 0% or 100%, so I can bring them into different orders, but it's not about producing in a very fast way. It's, for me, the third step, I would say after bringing first ideas together to 70%, I'm going to start in a very fast, detailed way to produce it, but not to kill the idea. That is very important for me. Caro: Yeah. I imagine you need a bit of reflection time after you, you know, you've turned, you've showed up and you are putting down those ideas and then you need some reflection time to actually be able to digest them in a sense. Martin Kohlstedt: Yeah. This is a very hard, to be honest, this is the hardest part of the whole job to listen to your own first ideas, so to say, for the Live album I did last year, I need to hear like 400 different improvisations of your own and this is hard. 70 recorded concerts in a row and you sit at home on your carpet, laying on your carpet and I hated it and you go through yourself, you know, you have to deal with yourself in a massive way, so that was a very, this is a very hard part, but this is the science behind it, you have to mirror it all the time, what you are doing and this is how you develop the whole thing. Caro C: Yeah and you kind of, it's almost, it's always a sort of stepping in, stepping out as well is like you have to completely step in to yourself to create the music, but you also have to step out of yourself to be able to work with it, don't you? Martin Kohlstedt: Absolutely. This is the ambivalence of an artist in 2025, I would say. You have to be inside and outside of yourself, you have to be authentic, but in the same way you have to calculate all next steps, it's crazy. Caro C: Yeah. I had a friend recently saying, you know, we kind of expected to, you know, open ourselves out and give everything and express everything about humanity, but then there's kind of no support about what that does to us when we then expose that to the world, yeah, kind of thing. Yeah, we have to be incredibly resilient as well. Still a wonderful life of course. Yeah. So how did that all kind of develop for you in terms of, you know, popularity, finding labels, like you say, realising that the world actually wanted to listen to your internal expressions. Martin Kohlstedt: Yeah, when I started with this instrumental music stuff it was, we have kind of close to Jean Michel Jarre or whatever, so this is what my first thoughts, the album Leave was a big part and I listened to Sigur Ross also and so this new sounds is I was totally in love with, but I'm from a small village in the very middle of Germany, in the woods and I had never have had ever the dream to be an artist or whatever. So I wanted to do, I was a programmer at the university. I was, music was kind of an hobby and yeah, but after a very big familiar crash, so my mother died in cancer. I was on my way back to this 12 years old boy which just played piano while my mother was like working around me in a very loud way, you know and remembering all this stuff, I thought this is the only authentic thing I've ever done in my whole life. Not the band projects, not the calculated things, not the products I've ever made, you know, it was the, how I made it and not what I made it and so I started with instrumental music again and founded my own label with it. For me it was important to not explain what I'm doing and not explain people why I don't need that black and white pic as a piano player or like as a big composers, I wanted to have a very safe place and I needed this very safe place to make a new home inside of me and also for my music. So it was a very personal thing to found this Edition Kohlstedt label with me and then I added people I was in love with and not what have the best competence for music business. So I started with a good friend who called people where I can maybe play a concert and then there was a guy who was helping me with a online shop and selling the first self-made CDs, you know, in a very, it's, it was a very rough but very true and serious beginning of something new. So, and it is still like that ,we were only in one small liaison with Warner for this big choir album. So there was too much risk to, yeah, to make it on your own, it was yeah, $100,000 things and very big choir things, you know, I wanted to be safe in it and without the risk to be free in what I'm doing. So we made three albums with them on our way and then we got back to, yeah, our independent self-made, DIY label Edition Kohlstedt and what it is now and I feel very safe there because I'm the only signed artist on it and it was very important to me to be over saved from all the people. Caro C: Wonderful, wonderful. And do you ever do music for film or to commission or for other art forms? Martin Kohlstedt: It is a very important part to be honest of the whole story because you, in when you do score music or something like you zoom out everything and your whole responsibility for feelings is a character in a movie. So you get out of your own problems for the very first time and reimagine it with this other character, but with your, yeah, with your own experiences. And to be honest it's very, simple is the wrong word, it's very easy for me to do that, to getting feelings out of myself to bring them into music is much harder than the responsibility for a movie or whatever. I like to get into it. I'm very good in following feelings of other people and also of the conductors or the directors of the movies and being a slave, slaved to his feelings or her feelings and it's so good to, yeah, to follow sometimes. And sometimes I miss that feeling because I have to decide every day 100 little and big things and score music is kind of an own road with, but also with your music. So sometimes I got this score music back to my own music and the other way around. Caro C: Wonderful, wonderful. And how about collaborations? Have you had any interesting collaborations that you'd like to tell us about? Martin Kohlstedt: Yeah. When you do music, which is always in a process and it is kind of, my albums are like a collection of arguments, which I let this catharsis, which is either on stage and all on the following albums too. So my first album, there were pieces which I created and developed in this second album and developed in the third album, so sometimes they are kind of in an evolution to follow. So in between like in a good talk like us too, you know, you need somebody yeah in front of you or next to you to talk with. If you have just a discussion with yourself, it's not a real discussion, you stay in a loop somehow, but the right questions, although the right subjects from outside are very important. So I created rework albums with every album cause I had, so with the first album, with the second album, with the third and the fourth I have about 40 different collaborations with, for example, Peter Broderick, Douglas Dare, Christian Löffler, so sometimes it's kind of this electronic music culture, sometimes they are singers doing their lyrics on it, sometimes, so many different very important people I was working with and they gave me a sense of the pieces and develop the pieces on their own and this gave me also the next task for this, for the pieces, which is, yeah, which are being in conscious like little monsters, like little creatures following their own lifelines. Caro C: Wow, awesome, awesome. So in terms of like you say, growing up in the woods, I have a kind of natural, for me contradiction of nature and technology. So I'm just wondering for you how that works in terms of how does that live with you and in your music and in your art? Martin Kohlstedt: Yeah, it's a good question. I couldn't say in that very romantic way that nature inspire, as when I yeah, when I go through a forest it inspires me to new compositions. I think this is in too old fashioned romantic picture of it. It's more that nature for me is an important catalyser of, for the thoughts. So you have these creatures like trees, they lived far beyond and very long before you were born and they will live after you died so you are kind of in a small part of a bigger world. I think this pressure is a good inspiration to be honest. You're walking through it and your thoughts order in the same way, like this architecture of nature and all my album covers are following this nature architecture so it's always that nature has no order but when you look closer, it has a very straight order to be honest and this ecosystem is kind of also the petrol or the volcano for inspiration. When I was a child and I had conflict or I was in my first love and she never answered, I went out with my dog to the nature and all the thoughts, yeah, I brought all the thoughts into line through nature, through walking through the nature, so, because you are just, you are not a human in a human world, then you're then a human in the nature world and I like to be part of something bigger. Also in all what I'm doing, I'm really a child of the words I'm very connected to, or to projects which helps, yeah, middle central European forests to get better again after this climate change stuff. So there is a very conscious connection to it, but a very, a much bigger subconscious connection to nature also in doing the music, yeah. Caro C: You've been also funding or supporting ecological projects. Is it tree planting you've been doing in terms of your carbon footprint from touring? Martin Kohlstedt: Yeah, that was the first idea, yeah, we had to, rewatching what we did in our past and cover capturing, I would say yeah. I tried to get deeper in the responsibility for this carbon capturing thing before, because we had also like long drives from our city to the other and also the people who are coming to the concerts are also like mostly traveling and I was thinking about a lot and we started to, yeah renaturate forests here in the very middle of Thuringia, so all these monoculture forests are dead now and with a lot of help of volunteers and we have the first financial power we got from the concerts, we yeah, recreated trees and over the next 60 years they capture all the carbon, yeah we used for all the concerts, so to say and all, yeah, we have a big calculation and we are very into this, maybe not the English language, but we have a big newsletter which explains everything in a very close way. We try to route our tours, very intelligent without flights and we try to yeah, be responsible also for the productions of vinyl and cities and so on and so on. This is very important for me too also as I could, being connected to nature. Caro C: And I imagine your touring schedule, the plan must be quite structured because you obviously need to recover from performance, you need to prepare for performance, you need to somehow connect to the world in between performances, reconnect with yourself. Yeah, how does that all work out for you? Martin Kohlstedt: The most interesting thing with this is that you get into a routine, getting introverted and extroverted out of yourself in front of the people, so you need that row of concerts to being authentic in your improvisation, you need that other world for one month to really stand that tasks, being true to the music and sometimes the first and the second and the third gig is mostly a little more constructed, so it's maybe 50/50 in improvisation and kind of an uncertainty settles you do in your brain, you know. But after this, you get into this outer space mode. So you are tired over the days you're driving and seeing something, but your eyes are just half opened and about 5:00pm your heart starts to beat and all your energies flow, flowing into this two hours, sometimes one and a half hour improvisation of that evening with a lot of power. So your day is just three hours long to be honest. It's more like, and in between is you're right, a kind of a recovering, but it's more like a standby mode. And after a tour you can just lay down for two weeks, but you're happy and you're fully empty in a positive way, also kind of a spiritual way, but it's really, you're empty, absolutely empty because you talked about everything, about every little conflict and problem in your head about music with other people. Caro C: Yeah, wonderful. And I imagine you have a trusted team that supports you and travels with you too? Martin Kohlstedt: Yeah, it is very important that these are very familiar people, we have no hierarchies. We have a driver, a sound guy, a light guy, a content creator from Brazil, Carina. She's doing her best and capturing all that feelings we have mercher, Laura. So we are six people traveling and these people are like the best mirrors you can get. They're very, also very true in their answers and they also feel the vibe of the evening and they have to feel my personal feeling of the day and have to recreate it somehow, they have to be inside of my feelings all day and this is kind of also a very hard job for them, but they're also very empty afterwards because it's a very easy, let's say very easy touring, you cannot really prepare it and you cannot really, yeah, reflect about that years later. So you have to be in the moment and when you reach that state of mind also on touring after like gig six or something, then you are really into it. Caro C: And do you feel a kind of kinship, if you like, with other artists? I'm thinking Hania Rani, Nils Frahm, who also do this kind of what I call piano and synth wave music. I think there is a comparison. I just don't like these neoclassical, I think it's kind of a wrong approach because we are not, I'm not the next Mozart, you know, we are not this in kind of this composition process, we are more in this intuition and Hania Rani and Nils Frahm are super top artists I'm very in love with yeah, but maybe this genre of new classic, I'm more, it's more like, it's more electronical, experimental and whatever piano stuff, but also maybe neoclassical, maybe it's just every artist is crying about his genre. I don't want to be like that. I think it's fine, you can say what you want because you know it much better than me, you know. I'm also in love with like this old Tangerine Dream, the album Leaves, so this is what I was starting with this new sounds, Sigur Ross, all this Iceland, Ólafur Arnalds was also one of these, he brought electronic music to the piano. So they're very nice, a very nice group of people which are doing this music. Caro C: Yeah, thank-you so much for your time and thank-you for unpacking some of your wonderful approach and music and yeah, all the best with your continued adventures. Martin Kohlstedt: Wonderful, take care. All the best for you, bye-bye. Caro C: Thank-you for listening, and be sure to check out the show notes for further information as well as links and details of other episodes in the Electronic Music series. And just before you go, let me point you to soundonsound.com/podcast so you can check out what's on our other channels. This has been a Caro C production for Sound On Sound.