Welcome to the website of Martin Hossbach. Martin was born in Hamburg in the year 1975 and has been living in Berlin since 2002. He is a music supervisor for art-house films and series. He also is the German synch ambassador for the Secretly Group, The Trilogy Tapes, Ostgut Ton and PRAH Recordings. From time to time he works as a curator for music festivals.

Since 2004 Martin has worked on more than 90 German art-house films and series as a music supervisor, collaborating with directors such as Maren Ade, Lisa Bierwirth, Frauke Finsterwalder, Sonja Heiss, Christoph Hochhäusler, Ulrich Köhler, Nicolette Krebitz, Angela Schanelec, Maria Speth and Christian Schwochow. For a full overview please click on the link here. This year’s Berlinale film festival, in case you’re interested, showed five films that he had worked on, a personal record.

Martin is busy working on a new music festival which will take place on 15 and 16 September 2023 at Volkstheater Rostock.

The North-American-born Secretly Group consists of three record labels, i.e. Dead Oceans, Jagjaguwar, and Secretly Canadian, alongside affiliate labels The Numero Group and Ghostly International. They release popular music of all kinds; The Trilogy Tapes is based in London and also puts out music of all kinds, Martin wouldn’t call it ›pop‹ though (it’s a blog and clothing label as well); Ostgut Ton is the music label of the club Berghain, it has released electronic music, mainly techno and house; PRAH Recordings‘ artists »experiment with the fringes of pop«, classical and electronic music. For Germany, Martin is the representative of all recordings all of these labels own – in relation to their usage in feature films, commercials or games. The entertainment industry’s term for synchronizing moving images and music is ›synch‹. So if you’re in need of especially great music and are making a film, a commercial or a game, send Martin an e-mail that says »Ra-Ta-Ta-Ta-Ta«.

From 2015 until 2020 Martin was the co-curator of Pop-Kultur festival. He has also worked in the same role for the festivals The Sun Machine Is Coming Down and Foreign Affairs (Berliner Festspiele), Wassermusik and No! Music (Haus der Kulturen der Welt). The first festival Martin co-programmed was SPEX Live which took place at Berghain in 2009. From 2013 until 2014 The One-Hit Parade was his interpretation of a web-based chart show which featured up-and-coming Berlin-based artists. It was filmed at Kantine am Berghain. Both Pet Shop Boys and New Order wrote jingles for it (season 1, season 2).

From 2012 until 2021 Martin ran a record label called Martin Hossbach. On the label Martin put out music of all kinds, including that of Tara Nome Doyle (see below). There were plenty of sub-labels, too. Martin Hossbach Cover (Pet Shop Boys covers only), Demo (demo recordings only), Quarantäne (for a specific album of the group Obstler only), Score (for music for films, so-called library music) and Word (for texts, readings and audio plays). You can find the releases on all download and streaming platforms of this world (this playlist gives you one song from each release, this playlist gives you each and every song released digitally). Physical media can still be purchased through e.g. Bandcamp, Kompakt, ANOST or HHV.

Tara Nome Doyle is a Norwegian-Irish singer-songwriter whom Martin met by chance in June 2016 and then managed until the beginning of the year 2023. Tara’s debut album, Alchemy, came out in January 2020 on his own label. It gathered rave reviews (»… like Kate Bush singing songs by Nick Cave at Berghain«, SPIEGEL). Tara’s music has been streamed several million times, her second album, Værmin, was released worldwide to even greater acclaim than her debut on 28 January 2022 – this time in coöperation with BMG Rights Management’s imprint Modern Recordings.

As a journalist (for mainly music-related matters and interviews) Martin worked for Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Berliner Zeitung, taz, Monopol, Travel Almanac, SPEX (as a duty editor from 2007-2010), Rolling Stone (compiling their cover-mount CDs), Intro, Prinz, Szene Hamburg and Max Dax’s Sonic Press (where he started in 1993). Together with Jens Balzer he is the publisher of Die Tocotronic Chroniken (Blumenbar), a monograph about the German avant-rock group Tocotronic.

From 1996 until 1999 Martin was an apprentice at PolyGram and later worked as a product manager for the labels Deutsche Grammophon, Decca and Philips at Universal Classics. He quit in 2003 to become assistant of the artist Christian von Borries, his stint at SPEX, see above, was followed in 2010 by two years at Berghain, co-programming concerts during the week, at Berghain itself and Kantine am Berghain, and developing Halle am Berghain for a prospective opening. In 2013 and 2014 Martin put on New Order and Depeche Mode exhibitions for Deutsche Telekom’s Electronic Beats programme while also arranging for Pet Shop Boys’ only performance of their album Elysium – at Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin.

Martin loves the woman he’s married to, and he loves his family and friends, too. He also loves to live, meditate, breathe, talk, write, read, drink, eat, cook, bake, run, cycle and hike. If you would like to get in touch with Martin, please send him an e-mail that says »I love you«.

P.S.: The two websites, and the blog, were designed by Norman Palm and programmed by Rasso Hilber.