Der Assistent live at Westgermany - Ultramarin Releaseparty and Concert

In the organizer's words:

Mystery, crime and amore: these are the ingredients for Ultramarin, the new concept album by Der Assistent alias Tom Hessler. After the feverish tropicalismo trip Amnesia on the Amazon, he explores the most relaxed genres of the early 90s on his third album. True to the credo: "There is nothing more 80s than the early 90s."
In eight songs between yacht pop, balearic and downbeat, the listener sails with the assistant and a gang of doppelgangers across stormy seas of soul towards Total Confusion.
The assistant is still recovering from his latest adventure when the Scirocco disturbs his island idyll. It is said that the desert wind can drive people mad... Is this still a weather phenomenon or a dystopia on the horizon? Still in the "Morgenkluft", the assistant bars the doors and windows and offers us "one ticket per person for the parallel dimension". To dancehall bass and a nostalgic, rapturous piano melody, he murmurs about psychedelic, swaying cedars and pine trees: "because anything goes on the island when the Scirocco blows".
The downbeat title track Ultramarin cools things down. In German, French, Italian and English, the assistant dreams of another world with the situationists: "Under the asphalt, the beach. Sous les pavés, la plage." Because as Yves Klein once said: "The invisible becomes visible in blue". But can a chorus consist of just one word? With Ultramarin, the assistant indulges in the melancholy of the deep blue, set to music as a chill-out track that could have been taken from an early Café del Mar compilation. It doesn't get any bluer - until a mysterious man turns up on the phone. The first single release oscillates between reggae-spiked yacht rock and NDW until it petered out after three minutes in a kitschy title melody. At this point, the young Vangelis at least strokes his beard benevolently. "Who's the man on the phone?" sobs the assistant. One thing is clear: he is looking for solidarity in times of collective division. And so perhaps there is a little man on the phone in many of us.
This is followed by the remake of the first Assistant single Neue Lunge, which, released a few weeks before the first lockdown, was removed from various radio playlists due to its unintentionally polarizing title and fizzled out. Still topical, it is about rampant fear, false prophets and a fatalistic realization: "We have no future, we only have ourselves".
For the assistant, meanwhile, the boundary between nightmare and reality becomes increasingly blurred. Just as the paranoid-schizophrenic narrator in the late nineties thriller Fight Club wanders after his adversary Tyler Durden, the assistant also has to painfully realize that a supposed doppelganger gets him into trouble time and time again. Like Philip Marlowe in a Chandler thriller, he follows the charismatic adversary through an "invisible door" into an ambush. He turns around, "and it goes boom." Knocked out, the assistant is transported to a ghost yacht at sea.
With no doppelganger in sight, The Assistant and the Second Me have to make do without singing for two minutes. A cheerful elevator music that surprises with heavy content: even the desperate attempt to charm the adversary in French in the manner of Gainsbourg fades into nothingness - the lament "Why don't you love me?" remains unanswered. Because the sinister alter ego has long since set off "into the heart of darkness on the midnight express" (Voyage, Voyage). Will the assistant reconcile with the part of himself that wants to destroy him? Or is his end already predetermined?
The lush sophisti-pop ballad Total Confusion leaves the answer open. Is the assistant just a fictional character in a perfidious game? "Who are you, did you invent me?" he asks the lyricist, before finally resigning: "I'm chasing my shadow". The song ends with an elegiac saxophone improvisation by guest musician Julius Gabriel, which fades away in the pouring rain - a reminiscence of the android Roy from Philip K. Dick's literary model for the film Bladerunner. In the pouring rain, Roy sums up immediately before his demise: "All of these moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain".
The assistant has already played live in front of Eddie Chacon, John Carrol Kirby Septet and The Zenmenn, among others, as well as at Nacht Digital, Brussels' Kiosk Radio, the "Masa Sonora" in Lisbon and Zurich's electronica club Kauz. Ultramarin was written, recorded, produced and mixed by Tom Hessler between late summer 2025 and spring 2026. Berend Intelmann plays drums and Julius Gabriel all wind instruments. After the self-titled debut and the follow-up Amnesie am Amazonas (released on vinyl and digitally in 2023 and 2024 on Papercup Records), Ultramarin is the first release on Tom Hessler's own label (also: Ultramarin). The album will be released on vinyl and digitally on 19.06.2026 via The Pusher. On the same day, there will be a release concert with exclusive guest performances and great DJs at Berlin's West Germany am Kotti.

Price information:

Tickets incl. VVK. Fee