Rosbeh

Das sagt der/die Künstler:in:

The Hamburg-based Rosbeh comes from this border area of ​​completely free-spirited musical work, because it is based on a profound understanding of harmony as well as technical know-how: “I just don’t come from electronic music, but from the classical piano area. I had piano lessons at the music school from the age of six, where I was taught Mozart, Bach and Beethoven. When rehearsing these pieces, I realized early on that I always had my own voice in my head, which kept telling me: 'Play this melody like this!' or 'Make the phrasing completely different from the one given'. From this, the point arose quite naturally where I began to compose my own pieces.” His detachment from given classical literature began early, around the age of ten. Piano pieces were created in a row,  which can also be counted among the neo-classical with a clear conscience, in which chord progressions that are often not even complex create very special atmospheres and vibrations. "The origin of my piano lessons," he remembers, "was my mother's wish to enable me to do something in our new home in Germany for which you had to be a millionaire in Iran, my parents' country of origin. The beauty of it was that she never had to force me to - I really loved playing the piano from the first moment. And quite early on, I always boasted that I would be a successful musician one day," he laughs. "Although I thought for a long time that I would end up in a similar corner with my music as Nils Frahm, which means: As a classical concert pianist who also composes his own spherical piano music."

When Rosbeh came of age, he began to discover the possibilities of electronic sound production. "At first I thought that electronic music is always produced with the computer," he grins in retrospect. "The multitude and, above all, unlimited possibilities of samplers and sequencers, which in themselves are also independent instruments, I then gradually opened up to myself." In the course of the last few years, an extensive catalog of tracks, songs and compositions has emerged, which became more and more special, unique and unmistakable. They tell of his great compositional quality as well as of his talents for combining richly decorated music with oppressive floor filler beats and thus creating a rare duality of compositional demands and transcendently repetitive letting go.

Pieces that breathe and live, that flash and engage the listener at the same time, that stimulate and soothe - and of which he has only published a fraction so far. This, however, with a remarkably massive response: Many of his tracks have streaming numbers of between one and 4.5 million plays on Spotify, international stars of club culture such as Diplo or Oliver Heldens supported him and his tracks as well as radio stations between London, Sydney and New York. While on his Soundcloud page you can find many no less prominent, extremely independent Rosbeh reworks of numerous big hits by artists as diverse as Lana del Rey and Gipsy Kings, Manu Chao and Deadmau5, RIN & Bausa or - unsurprisingly, but all the more successful - the great Sébastian Tellier classic "La Ritournelle". All successes that Rosbeh is rightly proud of, "because I've achieved everything up to this point on my own, without a record label, PR agency or any social media teams behind me." The quality of his music is somehow to be expected (and absolutely deserved).

But how exactly does this quality come about? "I always make music in the moment, and it's only in the process that it is decided in which direction it goes," he describes his process. "Most of the time I sit at the piano and compose something, and then the music tells me in a certain way whether I should put a four-to-the-floor bass drum underneath and let a house track emerge from it, whether it's more of shimmering drum' n'bass or chilled downbeats, or if it's going to be a completely atmospheric piece with no rhythmic focus. In fact, it's almost always the case that the music tells me what it needs and not that I decide where to go. The music is basically already there, and I'm just the executive tool that makes it form and sound. The music is the language that stands for itself and I am its translator.”

How much this applies not only to composing and producing, but even more so to live situations, you can see immediately when you look Rosbeh in the eye at one of his concerts: There is a man surrounded by keyboard instruments as well as devices with a lot of buttons, who is completely in the tunnel and in the moment, who instinctively knows which device he feeds with which idea - and this often and intentionally purely improvisational - in order to condense many individual elements into an orchestral overall picture that touches and takes away the head, the heart and the legs in equal parts. As a listener, you experience the ideal state of a fusion of man, instrument and machine. And at the end of the day something comes out that is complex and impressive, atmospheric and powerful and soulful as well as clever in its grace, elegance and multifaceted density.

Not least because of his extremely high output - on a good day Rosbeh likes to write three new compositions and design their productions - his first long player was more than overdue. Welcome to the enchantingly rich sound world of "Fortunate Day", to twelve incredibly complex and varied tracks between classic and techno, ambient and breakbeats, quotes from Persian music culture that he got from his parents, and songs decorated with incredibly beautiful guest vocals.