Who is the man with the cyan eyes?

Blue, greenish and purpleish flashes cut through the mist and smoke floating over the stage. Rage lightning brakes off the melancholy turning it into anger and unhappiness. In between this storm and a powerful band, a blonde guy plays around with clarity and gasping, the solemnity of an orchestra, the ordinary sound of an acoustic guitar and the coldness of an electric one, and puts them at the service of his indie, electro and rock proposal, all together and in English. That’s Kirt. A German citizen of the world that is now a “porteño” by demand of his own desire that showed him, in one of his last visits, the similarities between his inner bunker from where all his songs come from, and this city. Similarities that can be resumed in chaos, unhappiness, adrenaline and hunger of inspiration. Buenos Aires and Kirt are living a long life romance and everything seems to indicate that it will continue that way.

Who is this foreign lover of the metropolis and its scene?
Kirt is a composer, singer and multi-instrument player who was born in the lively and questioning city of Frankfurt. Listening to his first album, “Cyan”, is enough to understand the way he assimilates the critic sense of the city that surrounds him and saw him grow up. Eventhough he was musically educated in London and lived as a nomad teenager, by own choice, his music features characteristics deeply related to his city of city, defined by darkness, observation and yet, optimism. Perhaps by fate, he found those same qualities in Buenos Aires, and that fact made him choose this city as the place where his career would take off from, and give shape to very unusual and modern ideas. To become an indie borderless artist, always ready to settle down only in metropolis that would understand him, whenever he wanted, with no prejudgments and no strings attached.

The same way, at the age of 16, he left his hometown Frankfurt to move by himself to liberal London, where he decided to stop being a lawsy student and concentrate on acquiring an academic musical education in the centre of the most genuine rock and roll.

In London Kirt studied at Frensham Heights School, a politically progressive and liberal school located in the English country side, which had several members of Pink Floyd within its former students as well as some prominent sons of rock & roll such as Brian May’s daughter. Frensham Heights School has the reputation of being the perfect environment for creative spirits by nurturing individual characteristics and encouraging the development of personal talents with the ultimate intention of stimulating originality. In that context Kirt choosed to focus on music and fine arts and learned how to materialize his always moving inner world into songs.

Nor in his childhood, nor in his more experimental teenagehood he stopped visiting a family’s friends’ residence in Buenos Aires, although at the beginning he spent those days simply running around the flat surroundings of Alsina lake, a completely unusual landscape in Europe, or composing a melody that could fill in so much silence. Before deciding this country would be base camp for his new plan he had to go through a very strict year studying at the Guitar Institute in London, where he polished his talent as a guitar player and won a composing competition.

It was by that time he learned how hard work it was to spend nine hours a day with and instrument in his hand not to be just an artist but to be a session musician, and then decided to abandon the academic world, get his luggage ready and get back to the Argentinean country side with all that technical background under his arm to finally surrender to experimentation and seek his own sound. That search ended up being “Cyan”.

Cyan is Kirt’s first album, is a strong alloy of clear electro pop melodies within the context of an obscure production allowing certain existentialist anguish shine through, with a melancholic voice, floating over purity and dirt with interesting mid tones. If certain war-related atmosphere is visible in this delicate work is not casual; eventhough it was composed in Argentina, “Cyan” was recorded in a bunker abandoned after the second world war, in his hometown, where the musician built a studio. It’s the perfect place to make music, isolated from the world, no windows, no noise, no signs of the outside world, only inner life, he describes, and is not afraid to analyse the physical isolation necessary to record and the mental isolation he found to compose and perform his songs. In that same bunker Kirt took his first steps as a hip hop producer, electronic and rock, but never got distracted from his main project. “My album is divided in two parts; the first one looks out the surroundings and questions political reality (Wolf in a Bush on a field, Harvest) and the second one shows the end of a very complicated relationship in my life (Going 19, Patterns y Fallen Angel)”, he explains. When Kirt talks about politics he doesn’t just talk about Bush and the pointless wars in the name of justice, he also makes reference to a tabú subject after the second world war; the notion of German identity, that acquired such a bad reputation after Nazism. “There’s a part of history that is dead. Everything seems to indicate that Germany was born with Nazism, nobody remembers anything from before that time, and they look at you weird if you’re proud of being German; but my country has past of glory, emperors and shields that I try to recover from a naïve side and avoiding bring back any kind of violence”, he makes clear, and without noticing it he justifies the art work of “Cyan” that shows dragons, exuberant fonts and himself dressed up as an emperor hitting a carriage with a lash… pulled by women! A careless expression? Kirt similes and soon warns that it has nothing to do with his conflictive romance. “I think is a very provocative and powerful image, which reflects how things were in the past. A lot of men think it should continue being that way but I don’t include myself in that category. Sometimes strong images are the ones that capture our biggest flaws, and this photo invites to take a position on the subject, it bothers you. But I have to say that a lot of women loved it”, he says between laughs.

Another subject that surrounds his first album is lack of love. “There’s people who love darkness and feel comfortable being locked in their own world and conflicts. It’s hard to overcome personal ghosts but it’s also true that it’s easier to be a victim than fighting over something”, he says with certain sadness. “Lock-up and darkness are part of a process, they can’t be taken as a life style because they may turn into something destructive. Love involves going out of yourself, taking risks, and not everyone can do that”, he says. Risk and self destruction play an important part in Cyan, and is not afraid of looking conservative by critizising drugs as fake hedonism. “I had my experimentation phase, I know that road and I know not everybody is looking for the intensity they claim to want. Far from that, they just want to feel numb, and avoid taking control of their life. I fell respect for life, maybe because I was close to death so many times”, he confess, and opens the door that leads straight to the importance of the colour that gives his album a name. A few years ago Kirt had an climbing accident near the sea and found himself going back down through a very dangerous way on his bare feet, with no ropes or protection. That side of the mountain faced the sea. “It wasn’t planned at all, with some friends we’ve decided to climb up that mountain near the beach where we were hanging out, in our swim suits. When we reached the top we realized that the only way down was filled with cactus and the only one who didn’t have any foot gear to make it through was me. My friends decided to keep going and I stayed there by myself until it was dark, waiting for help. But no one came and I had to go down as bad as it was”, he remembers. “While I was going down I had to carefully think each one of my moves, mi life was pending on my self control and my ability to focus. I remember the sound of the sea, and even more that the sound I remember its colour, it was cyan”. After many hours of descending, when he got to safe terrain, Kirt felt more alive than ever, and ever since he gave that colour peaceful properties. Even today he says he owns his survival experience to the calm of the ocean, its sound, and specially its colour. Intuitive by nature, Kirt no longer runs after meaningless adventures, today his life has turned into a path full of intersections and projects that depend only on his own will.

In a few days the musician will be on his way to New York city, leaving behind the powerful band he has in Buenos Aires, to reproduce the model in the big apple and come back in a couple of months. In between that, he wants to do the same in Los Angeles and England. Something he’s sure about is that to go through such a journey is necessary to carry a light luggage. His indie model at a world scale demands a change in the form of conceiving the industry. “The record as we know will be ponitless soon. In the future it will be just a collectable item that people will only buy if they already know the artist and only if that album comes with an extra value, such as a good design”, says the artist. Multicorriente Music is a net label that has a wide selection of artists of great quality, that will allow downloading their music for free from the internet, and will make presentations around the world knowing that the distribution of their music will no longer be a problem. “I like to think that we’re part of something new, and I don’t want to deny the path of things, I like flowing with my goals cutting off all trings with old models and imaginary limitations”, he says.

Kirt considers this city as a serious candidate to be his permanent home, whenever he decides to settle down in one place. “I feel a great energy here. London, Paris, Frankfurt and New York are important cities, but too alike between them in this globalization times. Buenos Aires maintains its identity, its personality without loosing connection with the rest of the world. That makes me love it”.