Ep 38: Matle Hagemeister & Kristian Nord
Malte Hagemeister | Co-Founder, Ca Music
Malte is a creative force in LA: artist, music producer, composer, guitarist, mashup DJ, director, activist - and father of (so far) five kids.
His childhood he spent in a small town near Hannover, Germany, next to green fields, forests and lakes.
Three musical decades so far:
10 years hometown Hannover: Falling in love with the guitar. First band “be” got heavy rotation on MTV Europe, making records, touring festivals for years. “Never-ending field trip with your best friends”. The good old 90s in the music biz.
10 years Hamburg: Becoming an accomplished songwriter and producer, working with leading German and UK artists, top 20 in the UK with Timo Maas, Golden and Platinum records. Starting to support non profit Viva Con Agua in their first years, a trip to Ethiopia shows first hand impact of their work for clean drinking water and sanitation. Getting a taste for scoring commercials - becoming a big player in the German advertisement world. And breaking the (copyright) law as a mashup artist - iPunx gets knighted by BBC One playlists.
10 years LA: Daring the leap across the Atlantic. Joining forces with Kristian Nord. Building up a company that becomes California Music. The mix: Artistry meets commercials meets purpose. Their band The Great Escapes secures big syncs in TV & film. Their list of international clients includes most big brands. Their work with neo-classical orchestra The String Theory gets a Grammy nomination for a collaboration with Afro-American spoken word artist Sekou Andrews. Global campaigns for BMW and Nivea. Social campaigns for immigrants, democracy and to end gun violence. Founding of the California chapter of Viva Con Agua. Producing award winning podcasts for BMW. Evolving into a sound company with a bigger team.
Kristian Nord | Co-Founder, Ca Music
Music is salvation. Music can close gaps and build bridges. Music, essentially, can be a sanctuary. According to Kristian Nord, music can even be a superpower of epic Marvel proportions. “Music makes you feel immediately, like no other form of communication,” he states. “You hear one single note and get goosebumps all over your body, and one chorus of a song can have 1000 times more emotional impact than a two hour speech.” It’s no wonder that the composer and musician is now retreating to this sanctuary to cope with loss. His first solo album “The Rest is a Gift” – an electro-orchestral hybrid of pure beauty, is dedicated to his late father who died when he was Nord’s age. And the lead single “The Adventurer '', a crystalline, sun-drenched, soul-searching paragon of beauty, is reminiscing his father with bittersweet yet hopeful and soothing sounds.
Kristian Nord is one of those artists who fell in love with music before everything else. For a long time, he worked as a musician, composer, producer and everything in-between in Hamburg. Then, 15 years ago, something called him. Nobody knows whether it was the sound of music or the call of the waves that lured the passionate surfer away from Northern Germany to California’s sun-drenched Pacific coast. Here, in Venice Beach, he has long found a second home. “To me, Venice Beach is still the hippie town it was 15 years ago when I arrived here. There is still this underlying free spirit. To me and my friends, Venice is the place where you can live out your personal dreams. Plus,” he adds, “it is pretty much the only place in the world where I can have a beach lifestyle and work in music on a certain level.”
His first session in his new home was with The Doors drummer John Densmore – not the worst way to start a new chapter. And yet, it was only the beginning for Nord, the first pebble that started rolling. Alongside with his partner in crime, a second Hamburg expat named Malte Hagemeister, Nord is living his very own American dream under the California sun: They are a part of internationally renowned indie band The Great Escape, they are working on humanitarian causes, they produce aspiring artists and create momentous image films for some of the world’s strongest brands. Records he has been working on sold millions of copies and he is a member of the Grammy jury.
Enough for one life, right? Not for Kristian Nord. Next to all these projects and bands, to all these endless hours surfing the Pacific, he also wrote a solo record. This, however, is a far cry from the wild roar of his furious indie rock troupe: “The Rest is a Gift” is an inward look, is all intimacy, catharsis and an attempt to cope with tragedy. He wrote it for his father who died at the age of 42. It’s precisely the age Kristian Nord has reached now, turning this record into a monument to the father Nord lost when he was ten. “To do a solo album was not a career decision,” he states. “It was an urge from deep down. Turning as old as he was when he died was an important point in my life and I wanted to honor it, I wanted to put a stake in the ground and create something lasting.”
The first single “The Adventurer” is a first glimpse into this deeply personal album, a sparkling, bittersweet, nostalgic piece of music. Every second seems precious, wants to be savored by composer and listener alike. This is purely emotional neo-classical music, with melodies scurrying over the crests of the ocean’s waves, ever striving for the distant horizon. “A couple of years back I was working on establishing a new relationship with my father. This soul search also included a journey to Germany where I visited a few close friends of my dad to get closer to him again,” he explains the motivation behind this song. “I wanted to get to know him as a grown-up since I was so young when you died. What I found was this incredibly lively, non-conformist adventurer. Always ready to explore new worlds and new people. Who was full of ideas. He helped so many people selflessly and brought joy to their lives. This song is about him, about a man who was heart driven and full of surprises.”
This first teaser, full of melancholy but not devoid of hope, is not the only song on the album recounting the tales of his father. Of a man who always followed his heart. “Yet, this song especially helped me to see him as a friend, eye to eye. Since I wrote this song, in my mind I take him on every journey and show him my world.” One of these journeys also made it onto the cover of his solo effort, picturing Nord in awe before a mountain ridge. “I wish he could’ve been there to enjoy the view with me,” he softly says. But in a way, he is. Thanks to “The Adventurer”, a song for someone who set forth to sample the fruits of life.
There it is again, this superpower called music. It can move mountains, even those in California, it can get us close to the people we lost on our journey. For the first time in years, Nord is facing this musical task alone. He had to: After a pretty severe surfing injury, Nord began to re-evaluate his life, quickly realizing he had not yet overcome the trauma of his dad’s death. He started getting into spirituality, and self-growth, using his music to get through it all. “With my music, I would like to encourage people to take the extra step, get out of the comfort zone, go deep inside themselves to find their true purpose. This way you can really start living, even if it means to feel uncomfortable, sad or awkward at times. It’s not the easy way,” he says, “but it’s worth it!”
His music is a journey. What may sound like a cliché at first is indeed inherent to his work: A journey he’s taking alongside his father, reminding us how precious life really is. This is why he named this album “The Rest is a Gift”: “Now the time begins that he never had. It’s about living it to the fullest. Living the beauty, living the highs and the happiness, but also fully living the sadness, the lows and the pain.” Only an artist living life like this is able to create pure and truthful music. Only a surfer living life to the fullest is able to fearlessly commit himself to the Pacific Ocean and the surf, becoming one with the elements, come what may...
