Martin Kohlstedt

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Martin Kohlstedt is a German composer, pianist and producer whose dazzling creations offer a contemporary approach to the blending of classical music with avant-garde styles. He has collaborated with Christian Löffler, Peter Broderick, Douglas Dare and Sudan Archives, and has released six albums, the latest, Feld (2023), a dozen more titles including singles and EPs and thirteen soundtracks. Before starting his solo career, he studied multimedia art at the Bauhaus University Weimar and also studied jazz piano and was an electronic music producer.

His first two studio albums, Tag (2012) and Nacht (2014), were solo piano albums, and it was not until his third, Strom, that he included electronic instrumentation. From then on, experimentation was the rule, courageous creativity, with a special emphasis on modular composition. His resume also includes interactive sound creations that have been developed at events with visuals and projections (such as Currents, which he created in 2017 in collaboration with the German Reeperbahn festival); music for fireworks shows, such as the one he was commissioned in 2019 for the National Fireworks Fair in Tultepec (Mexico), the largest in Latin America; and interactive sound installations based on complex algorithmic treatments, such as the one he designed in 2019 for the American Burning Man festival.

Live, Martin primarily uses grand and upright pianos in combination with a Fender Rhodes and various synthesizers. For guidance, The Daily Telegraph's review of his London stage debut noted that “his repetitive patterns and modal harmonies are sometimes reminiscent of music often described as hypnotic, from Ryuichi Sakamoto to Einaudi.”

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