Obituary for musician: Bruno Kramm is dead and I owe him something

Bruno Kramm died on Saturday night after a concert by his band Das Ich in Granada, Spain. After the performance he collapsed in the dressing room; the exact cause of death has not yet been published. He was 58 years old.

I'm staring at this message and can't stop thinking about it. Seriously, Bruno? I think. 58 is not an age to die. Especially not as a goth. Anyone who goes on stage as the undead for decades could at least be a little less consistent when it comes to real death. And as I ponder, I realize that this news is hitting me much harder than I expected. It pretty much leads back to where something started for me.

Because 31 years ago, in April 1995, my very first text for this newspaper about Bruno Kramm's volume Das Ich appeared here. It was called “Grafty Perfection: The I suffered making music in Potsdam”. I was 23 and new to the business. I wanted to write about music that at the time was laughed at rather than taken seriously by many male music journalists. The black scene has long been more successful than some of the things they wrote about with a jovial gesture.

Bruno Kramm and Stefan Ackermann had created something that hardly fit into the feuilleton drawers: it was called New German Death Art. Electronics, Dark Wave, pathos, German texts about God, death, guilt, the body and other abysses. And live it looked the way I described it at the time, clumsily and fearlessly: singer Stefan Ackermann stood there “with the wobbling skull of a gnome from the 'Neverending Story'; together with Bruno Kramm he toiled on 'our surface world', on 'war and destruction', on 'bitterness and wintertime'.

A few years before their concert I met Bruno and Stefan in Bayreuth. Their first album “Satanic Verses” had not yet been released. They welcomed me in sweatpants, very rude, and served perfectly normal sandwiches with at least black tea in the middle of work for their cassette label. Hundreds of tapes had to be recorded, bagged and sent. “Gottes Tod”, one of their most famous songs to date, had become so successful that a scene idea had become logistics. It was then that I realized that it wasn't some marginal phenomenon that was being managed here. Right before my eyes, a counterculture emerged with its own audience and aesthetic - and with a reach that many music enthusiasts still underestimate today.

Even back then, Bruno was completely different than his music suggested - he was much more than just the keyboardist, composer and producer of Das Ich, a multi-instrumentalist and crazy inventor. He was also warm-hearted and engaging – and he took responsibility. With his record label Danse Macabre he built an infrastructure for an entire scene. The fact that it is now seen as one of the first in all of Germany to have stuck to it: that also has to do with people like him.

And one more thing: Bruno also thought of music as work - and therefore as a question of copyright, distribution and power. He was initially involved with the Greens and later with the Pirates, of which he was the Berlin state chairman for a time. He was concerned with what digitalization does to artists and who actually earns money from their stuff. That's another reason why he didn't give up his label and his band until the end.

Then the years passed. I lost sight of Bruno, the way you lose sight of people who were once important to you, because it is so unimaginable that these people could simply be gone. But when I look at the yellowed and cellar-smelling text that I cut out and pasted on, I don't just see Bruno.

Like a message from another world, I see myself at the beginning of something. The fact that the article was printed at the time was a tiny but important triumph for me. Apparently my future colleagues had respect for a 23-year-old who suddenly declared that stuff that they themselves hardly wanted to write about was important.

So: Thank you, Bruno. For being so strange. And for letting me try out on you what it feels like to trust your own perceptions in journalism. I'll stay here, in this newspaper, while you go on your journey. My thoughts are with your family, friends and fans. I would have liked an encore.