Martin Klein 'Nachtlieder'

Simplicity is the most underestimated of all musical qualities. And songwriter, singer and pianist Martin Klein (he also plays cello and drums when he gets the idea) is a master of the underrated.

A piano is a perfect machine, perfect for overloading music with ornament, bombast and ten-finger acrobatics, but Martin Klein approaches it carefully and resists it at the same time. His instinct always leads him to reduction, like a sedated John Cale strumming his chords rhythmically instead of hammering them. In this way he opens wide spaces for his clear, blonde boy's voice, which uses a geographically almost neutral, but all the more emotional style of High German, which you can't hear about growing up in Innsbruck, the time spent abroad in Utrecht and life in Vienna.

“It seems to him / As if he were the loneliest person in the world,” he even sings in Die Blume, but immediately corrects this note of self-pity: “But he sees the flower, the day is brightened.” Not many can do lines like that write, let alone sing, without being afraid of the sentimentality that is essential to human survival in tougher times. Martin Klein can, and that's precisely why his are among the most engaging that he has sent out into the world to date.

But even more than that, it probably says everything about the art of his songs that he had already written them before our world was to change so radically. And that they still sound as if they were specially made for all the endless nights that we have since woken up and are still waking up through. And for the mornings after, and for the days in between too. (press release)

Singer-songwriter and pianist Martin Klein doesn't really seem to care about musical categories and expectations.

He has now released two German-language, one English-language and one experimental electronic albums. The EP Lost Songs was released in 2018, on which seemingly lost songs from the last few years can be heard. The press only writes good things about the idiosyncratic artist, for example the Falter described him as “Thom Yorke without an art backpack”, the Standard described his art as “sensitive and obsessive”, the German specialist magazine Jazzthetik described him as “dream-lost masterpieces”, Bayern 2 a kind of “ modern Franz Schubert” and Radio Fm4 a “musically impressive work”. The daily newspaper Die Presse wrote: “His Utopia attempts nothing less than to undo the disenchantment of the world.” (Press release)

"When he puts his hands on the keys and begins to play, he creates a magical world, with minimalism at its maximum, he underlines his poetic stories with sound from the piano. Reduction is his premise, his recipe for success. The native of Innsbruck allows himself to be pigeonholed not stuck, as his work extends from German and English songs to electronic experiments." (Ö1 - Lexicon of Austrian pop music)

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