Name: Martin Rott
Nationality: German
Occupation: Composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist
Current Release: Martin Rott's Utopian Traveller is out via FerryHouse. Order the vinyl here.

If you enjoyed this Martin Rott interview and would like to stay up to date with his music, visit his official homepage. He is also on Instagram.  



The ideas of entering new worlds, escapism through music, and building sonic utopias have always exerted a very strong pull on me. What do you think you are drawn to most when it comes to listening to and creating music?

Same here. Though it seems to me music or art in general always has to be built on some familiar ground or language in order to be grasped, or even be understood as “music“ in the first place.

Yet I mostly enjoy music that doesn’t hold back, suprises and has the ability to create an unheard and therefore “unreal“ experience.

The only “reality“ I want to expirience is the intention of the artist and them being faithful to it during the process of creation. Which, for myself personally, is the hardest part.

What role do utopias play in an age when being “real” seems to be everything?

I believe it is more honest to intentionally present a fantasy, rather than to market one self as “real“, when in fact no one ever really is - it’s proven to simply not be in our nature as hyper social creatures. It’s honestly pretty off-putting to me when someone can’t stop showing off about how “real“ they are.

A couple years ago I read Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman - to me this book proofs that being “real“ and creating utopias are everything but opposites.

Every step of progress was a utopian dream, before turning into reality. By nature, negative voices are louder than facts and are therefore claimed to be more “realistic“ when in fact they don’t have to be.

Mixing up a negative world view with “realism“ in my opinion can result in a dangerous mindset, a philosophical dead end, bad political consequences and the reversal of progress.

It is often said that there is never anything genuinely “new” in music and that we are only ever creating variations. With regards to the underlying themes of Utopian Traveller, what's your take on this?

I guess that could be theoretically correct if music was reduced to the written notes - wich bear nearly endless possibilities in themselves. Yet expanded to include the sound created by billions of individuals in endless technical combinations?

Of course everything is a variation, as are we and our cells are, in turn, variations of similar molecular settings … So at first I’d say every variation is highly individual, like trees in the forest, each of them important and unique.

The “newness“ would be defined by the listener's previous experiences.

The press release mentions your interest in the “space between the old and the new.” Just out of curiosity and keeping in mind streaming which puts recorded music history at our fingertips - isn't that space our current reality?

Since I was referring to the creative process, I don’t think I have a smart answer to that.

But from the creator's perpective - as with streaming, we also have all the knowledge about how to reproduce that music history at our fingertips.

This has many advantages but also can make it more difficult to find that personal realm of unschooled playfulness, where one is not afraid of creating just another “variation“ of past greatness.

Do you see this album as part of tradition or a lineage – if so, which one?

Inspired by modern neo-classical as well as electronic artists, I wanted to take their sonic inspiration and expand it with my own ideas of harmony.

Still, it would be presumptuous to compare any of this with the works of the past masters. I’d be more than honoured if others would regard anything in my oeuvre as a form of continuation here.

My parents are well trained classical violinists, so if anything, I like the idea of me, who decided for drums at an early age, continuing the love for these instruments, by writing for string section.

It is easy to see how the past and the future need to be reconsiled when it comes to society as a whole. When it comes to music, however, why is it important to try and resolve these opposites as well?

For some reason I feel personally touched, when I see Floating Points composing for the San Francisco Ballet, John Hopkins and Nils Frahm playing symphony concert halls, or the teenage girl in the first row screaming when she hears the first notes of John Williams “Hedwigs Theme“ conducted by 90 year old John Williams himself.

[Read our Nils Frahm interview]

There's a special magic in the room, you could say a sprituality, bringing the most different kinds of people together through the abstract emotion of the music itself, and not so much through the fandom of a certain person or likeness in age, social status, etc.

I believe this moments should be cherished and supported in times of the so called “culture wars“.

To some, the advent of AI and 'intelligent' composing tools offers potential for machines to contribute to the creative process. What are your hopes, fears, expectations and possible concrete plans in this regard?

To be frank, I never would want AI to get in to any of my core creative processes meaning to be part of the idea itself. To me the idea is the most playful, fun and human part of art. Having the idea as a human who is channeling his very own human experience including love, happiness, failure and depression to other humans.

When we start letting AI into that fun part we have really lost all ethics as composers, even if it was music for a TV-commercial. Without wanting to be pretentious, I always have enough ideas for what I want to express. If I didn’t I shouldn’t work as a composer. For now it’s easier to say, AI spit out some notes, then we arranged it and now it’s a collab. But what did AI want to tell us, how did it love or suffer or dream?

If I have an idea to be orchestrated and finalized, I’d be open to AI doing that job, taking off some of the workload. But even then, I’d probably want it to take over from the part, were I have to layout and proofread the sheet music.

We actually used AI in the album artwork though: My grafic designer Vitaly Peters fed our ideas into Midjourney and put in a lot of work to combine the resulting images to create the album cover, to include a sense of nowness into the utopian dream. It really was a worthwile experiment, but looking back, I would have loved it even more, if he, being a highly skilled illustrator, had drawn the images himself.

If we construct our world view through language and language is thought made sound, then we literally construct our reality through listening. I'd be curious as to how we can raise awareness of these thoughts and how society as a whole can deal with them “for the greater good”?

Inspired by Rick Rubin’s book, I have to remind myself to be aware of with what to feed the mind. I have to remind myself that now, more than ever it is important who I listen to, to know which voices to trust and which ones to simply mute.

But I really wouldn’t know a way to raise a global awareness to this other than to try and be an honest and therefore trustworthy voice myself (literally and musically), creating a place to feel home, where one could listen and respond on native soil.

I once asked Matthew Herbert, what aspiring musicians could do about the dilemma of trying to cut through the cacophony while feeling part of the very same. He said:

"If one single crazy orange man can gain so much power, simply by using his voicechords, then you do, too. Whatever you do, it is a sound, it is a voice and you can use it for the greater good.“

[Read our Matthew Herbert interview]

Seth S. Horowitz called hearing the “universal sense” and emphasised that it was more precise and faster than any of our other senses, including vision. How would our world be different if we paid less attention to looks and listened more instead?

Listening feeds the abstract, creating one's very own vision of a story in the brain. That’s why musical foreshadowing is so effective in movies. It lures the viewers mind from being a bystander to actively participating in the story.

I believe this goes both ways: If there’s a visually compelling image connected with a song, the listener will be satisfied with less compelling music.

So not only would we be smarter - popular music would arguably sound way more interesting and interesting music would be more popular. ;-)