Martin Kohlstedt Sits Down at the Piano and Disappears
There are composers who write music and there are composers who think through music. Martin Kohlstedt is the second kind. The German pianist and composer — raised in Weimar, the city that gave the world the Bauhaus — has built a practice around stripping everything back until only the essential remains: no ornament, no embellishment, just the direct, unmediated thing. He performs with his back to the audience. He lets pieces evolve differently every night. He sat with us to talk about a leather jacket, 70 choir voices, and the controlled schizophrenia of running your own label.
The story Martin Kohlstedt tells about his first real encounter with music says more about him than any biography could.
He was sixteen. A Friday night. New leather jacket, friend due to ring the doorbell, a weekend stretching ahead. He sat at the piano in the living room to kill a few minutes. He looked up and it was 4:30 in the morning. The friend never came. The leather jacket came off. He went to sleep.
"The urge came from the inside," he says. "I found no other way than to misuse the detuned piano in the living room to pick apart my inner workings as a teenager."
That phrase — pick apart my inner workings — is as good a description of Kohlstedt's entire practice as you'll find anywhere. The piano, for him, has never been a performance instrument in the conventional sense. It is a thinking tool. A place to have a discussion with yourself and put your thoughts into order. The stage, he'll tell you, is essentially the same thing — with the minor difference that people can watch him do it.
What followed that Friday night was the kind of musical adolescence that sounds chaotic from the outside: eight bands simultaneously, hip hop, funk, electronic music, an accumulation of sounds and collaborators and desires that he describes, with characteristic precision, as amassed dreams. Somehow, through all of it, the thread held. The need to strip things back. The suspicion of the decorative.
Growing up in Weimar will do that to you. This is the city of the Bauhaus — the movement that declared, a century ago, that form should follow function, that ornament was not a virtue but a distraction, that the most honest thing a maker could do was communicate concretely and outright. Kohlstedt absorbed this not as ideology but as instinct, a mindset that now runs through everything he makes.
His compositional approach is modular — pieces built from recurring themes, HAR and NAO among them, that recombine and develop differently depending on the space, the audience, the time of day. There is no fixed version. Each performance is a snapshot, and the development between snapshots is where the real work lives.
"A piece is always a work in progress. Recording the piece is like taking a snapshot of it at a certain point in time. Playing live is therefore more vivid and sometimes even unpredictable. That is what keeps me going."
This is Bauhaus thinking applied to time. Not a finished object but a living process. Not a product but a practice.
On stage, Kohlstedt gives the audience as little visual input as possible. Classic lighting, darkness, haze — and he sits with his back to the room. It is a decision that sounds like provocation until you understand the logic behind it.
"That way everyone gets into a conversation with themselves, without the need for obvious or conscious communication."
He is not withdrawing from the audience. He is creating the conditions for something more interesting than eye contact. He is making space for the listener to disappear into the music the same way he does — the same way he did at sixteen, alone at a detuned piano while the night went somewhere without him.
The logical endpoint of this thinking was the collaboration with the Gewandhaus Choir — seventy voices joining the intuitive, modular compositions he had spent years building alone. He reaches for a particular image to describe it: years of poking a stick at your subconscious, alone, and then suddenly marching into it with the power of a whole armada. An experience, he says without any irony, that left him addicted.
The challenge now is establishing the intimacy needed between himself and the choir to fully improvise — to let the scores function modularly at that scale. The first concerts have already produced moments he calls completely unique. He is, in the best sense of the word, unfinished.
Running his own label sits alongside all of this — a controlled schizophrenia, in his words, that threatens more than once to crush the freedom in music-making. The ambivalence of being both artist and boss, shielding the work from the erratic bombardment of the international economy with nothing but a team of friends and a ton of gut feeling.
It is, like everything Kohlstedt describes, a tension he has chosen to live inside rather than resolve. The friction between HAR and NAO. The gap between the snapshot and the development. The back turned to the audience so everyone in the room can finally hear themselves think.
"Basically the same thing happens on stage — with the minor difference that people can look at me doing that."
Martin Kohlstedt is a pianist, composer and founder of his own independent label, based in Weimar, Germany. Discover more artists chosen for their ideas, not their visibility, here at Antakly Projects.
UK AND IRELAND TOUR DATES:
25 OCTOBER 2019 MANCHESTER (UK) – St. Michael’s Church
26 OCTOBER 2019 GLASGOW (UK) – The Blue Arrow
27 OCTOBER 2019 DUBLIN (IRL) – Dublin Unitarian Church
29 OCTOBER 2019 LONDON (UK) - Courtyard Theatre