About us

A short historical:

In 2006 Christian Clement, a former guitarist, wrote about 12 songs on the piano and called the project TRAUMKAPITÄN, the name was taken from a collection of poems (Das Logbuch des Träumkapitan's) Jean Arp published in the 1920's.
Ambitions on mixing foxtrott, tango, jazz, straight rock and reggae rythms lead the music in a quite unusual postmodern-patchwork field. The melodies from jazzy to minor-barock-pop gave the songs an edgy but catchy character.

Robert Wyatt, the Beatles, Carla Bley, Sonic Youth, Gainsbourg, Talking Heads, Henry Cowell and many more were inspirations to the music.

A bunch of musicians from the Rock, Jazz and Classic scene gathered around the project : David Fettmann, Romain Hoffmann, the Belardi brothers, Christian Neyens, Olivier Lefèvre, David Ascani, etc.
Traumkapitän recorded it's first album with local celebrity Rocco Russo and seven musicians.
"Virtue Comical" was a sixteen piece concept album around fictional characters like Hillary Hilarity, Mr Selfdynamical, the Abstraction Runner...
The themes of the lyrics had a politico-metaphysical background and contained several musical versions of poems like "A poison tree" from William Blake.
For the release Clement arranged 2 hours of music for a 27 piece orchestra. The album got excellent critics in local and Berlin fanzines.

In 2007 Traumkapitän released "House of Glass", a condensed atonal Jazz-Pop tune on a Berlin label called Digital Kranky. Other compilations followed...
Traumkapitän signed on Noiseworks and Radar Music.

The concerts they played were always slightly different as the project fonctionned in a "variably geometry" manner. Traumkapitän also likes to work with visual artist that inspire the music: Roland Quetsch, Trixi Weis, Beryl Koltz, etc.

In 2008 Clement was looking to work with other musicians and went in the studio to record 3 songs in 3 days with 12 musicians containing saxophones, trumpet, trombone, suzaphone, violins, violas, cello, harp, piano, etc.
It was the first collaboration with film director Beryl Koltz. She sang on 2 of 3 songs. In 2009 Traumkapitän shot with Beryl Koltz it's first video in New York.
The clip tells the story of the impossible view of a blind man. The single called Easy and went straight into the national charts for 9 weeks (3 weeks nr 1).

In 2009 Traumkapitän decided to perform as a smaller band. The new band includes Laurent Hoffmann (standup bass), Carlo Krausch (percussions), Jorsch Kass (drums), Tim Ecker (trumpet and piano) and Christian Clement (piano and voice). Projects to work with other visual artists, release another single and record another album are in work.