Chris Imler

Chris Imler is a true veteran of Berlin’s music scene, having moved to the then still divided city in the early 1980s. Imler was an escapee from a Catholic family upbringing in Augsburg, where – aside from Robert Johnson records in the city library – there was little to hold his hyperactive teenage self.

In four and a half decades in Berlin, he has lost none of that agility. Quite the opposite: whether alongside Jens Friebe and Peaches, in bands such as Oum Shatt and Golden Showers, or as a solo artist – a path he only began in his fifties – Imler never sits still for long, constantly challenging both himself and the world around him.

It is no coincidence that his current album is titled »The Internet Will Break My Heart« (named the best experimental album of the month by The Guardian). As a keen observer of our times, he knows exactly where the wounds of contemporary existence lie – whether in the ongoing gentrification of Berlin and beyond, an increasingly conformist cultural sector, or AI and algorithms as the new meta-layer of our lives – and he works through them with razor-sharp humour.

As a musician with a fondness for broken things that resist every logic of optimisation, the self-taught drummer and tambourine player is perfectly suited to highly rhythmic sonic designs and performances that can quite rightly be described as spectacular.