Interview with Bruno Kramm (Das Ich): ‘Breaking with rules is something what only real artists can do’

When Stefan Ackermann (vocals, lyrics) and Bruno Kramm (music, backing vocals, production) formed Das Ich in 1989, they were starting an artistic experiment that later became closely associated with the German movement described as “Neue Deutsche Todeskunst” (New German Art of Death). Das Ich developed a confrontational sound built on Obscure Electro, layered with symphonic structures and, at times, industrial abrasion. Heavy drum sequences pushed German lyrics that were delivered as much as performed – Ackermann’s vocals drawing on theatre and dramatic phrasing. The Das Ich songs were – to put it very mildly – not really considered light entertainment. On stage, Das Ich translated the material into a physical and visual performance language where gesture, posture, and sound worked as one. What began as a self-imposed trial expanded into an international presence.

The Das Ich albums that followed became reference points in the genre, with songs that built long-term status among listeners. After years of silence, Das Ich (finally!) re-emerged at the end of 2025 with their first studio album in nineteen years. “Fanal”, released via Bruno Kramm’s Danse Macabre Records, presents a direct, tightly focused release. Das Ich does not appear frequently in interview settings, and the work often invites interpretation rather than quick summaries. This Das Ich interview therefore aims to narrow the scope to a small set of core questions, answered here by Bruno Kramm. What remains is respect for the artists and for a catalogue that continues to provoke, challenge, and stay with its audience.(Courtesy by Inferno Sound Diaries)

Das Ich interview with Bruno Kramm

Q: The Das Ich album “Fanal” was released 19 years after your last studio album. You have both gone through profound personal experiences during that time—illness, political engagement, and, inevitably, getting older. To what extent did these experiences shape “Fanal”? And when did work on this Das Ich album actually begin?

Bruno Kramm: Well, I think all experiences you’re making as a human being will automatically be an experience that inspires the musical work you do. So actually, of course, everything that happened in this time to us was getting into this album. But when thinking about the album, we were always writing songs, but then we threw them away again and weren’t finalizing them. And if you want to see what we were doing constantly, you can check out my Instagram account where I always record some little parts of songs which have never been released.

So basically for “Fanal”, we started really from scratch about one year ago and then worked consequently just this one year. There was one song, “Lazarus,” which had already been done earlier, but was also heavily reworked then. But yes, 19 years when you read it seems to be really long. But when looking at these 19 years, it sometimes feels like it has been just yesterday. So actually the number of time doesn’t mean anything.

Q: Das Ich‘s “Fanal” presents an extremely critical view of the contemporary world—a system marked by decay, corruption, the erosion of moral values, self-destruction etc. Could you expand on these themes, and to what extent do you see yourselves as both part of—and victims within—this system?

Bruno Kramm: Yeah, of course, the album is a critical view on this post-factual world, which is getting more and more crazy. We all were hoping that with the idea of globalism, everything becomes one democratic world. I think we all had this idea that one day we have this federation like in Star Trek where the whole world is a peaceful place with a basic universal income and stuff like this. But since a long time we know this will not happen.

So the bigger question is: how long will society, how long will humanity survive on this planet? And if you see how a few people get richer and richer, while others get more and more poor, then you sometimes have the feeling it’s just going backwards into the darkest times.

On the other hand, it’s always so that a society goes many steps forward and then goes a few steps backwards. And as you live in a quite small time frame as a human being, as an individual, it always feels like there is just a backdraft. But at the end, I always hope that it goes forward for society.

And yes, we as a part of this system—I would say we’re not so much victims, we are more part of the world which is the opposite. But at the end, when you see how everything politically changes, then I think we are all victims, especially thinking about us being members of an underground scene.

Q: As I understand it, the title “Fanal” functions both as a warning signal and as a testament to a world in decline. Do you believe there is still room for hope, or does the album ultimately embrace nihilism in its most philosophical sense?

Bruno Kramm: The “Fanal” album is a warning signal and at the same time some kind of testament for a world which is going down. Albert Einstein once said he doesn’t know with what weapons people will fight the Third World War, but he knows that in the fourth, they will again have simple Stone Age weapons.

Of course, as an individual, especially having children, you always hope that something gets better. But when you start to think as an artist about the world, then the nihilist look, which had been perhaps in the past more like a romantic nihilism, became a real—I would say—realistic nihilism. And that’s a painful thing.

Therefore music starts to have this function that it takes away fears from you when you express all these fears in the music. Whereas in the past, when it was sometimes some kind of romantic nihilism, it was more like playing with the idea of darkness—so to say. But now it became the bitter reality.

Q: “Fanal” strikes me as one of your most imagery-driven works, with (again) strong references to biblical figures and symbolic scenes that mirror the present day. Why do these images continue to fascinate you, and what do you think they can still teach us?

Bruno Kramm: Yeah, why do biblical figures really interest us? It’s not only biblical figures on this album. It’s a lot of historic figures like from the Roman Empire, from all decades. And we really like the idea also to work with the antagonistic view—for example, on “Brutus” about betrayal and these things—and to see how they stand with their negative effects as symbols for the whole society.

So we always liked a lot on this album to work with these kind of figures, for example religious figures, and use them to put them in a context of the modern world and giving it with this still kind of Gothic expression, because it refers more to these old figures while talking about something really modern. And yes, we can always learn from history, especially from history. And therefore it’s really important that we sometimes think about these figures.

But of course, this has also changed. While when we started, religion and biblical figures always had been some threat to us because society was much more religious at that time. Today, the Christian religion is not really being so important anymore and not a threat at all. So it is much nicer actually today to play with these kind of figures from the Bible because they become more like an example than a threat.

Q: To what extent is the release date of the Das Ich album”Fanal” important or symbolic to you? On your Bandcamp page, October 28th is listed—coinciding with the feast day of Saint Jude in the Christian calendar, which could be read as a reference to betrayal—while November 2nd, All Souls’ Day, might also have been an obvious choice. How much attention do you pay to such symbolic details?

Bruno Kramm: Well, yeah, to be honest, we didn’t think so much about this. We then sometimes see coincidences and then we’re really happy about it. So therefore, yes, I saw that also in the Christian calendar and was then a bit smiling. Then I was thinking, should I write something like this in the release info? But then we thought we don’t do it because it was not our original intention.

But yes, it’s really beautiful. And sometimes it just happens as a coincidence that things just work. And sometimes you don’t know if it’s perhaps some kind of subconscious thing. But symbolism is of course for us a really important thing.

Q: Art—and music in particular—has long served as a source of comfort or hope in times of crisis. Do you believe Art still has the power to effect real change, or has it become more of a form of temporary emotional regulation? And how do you see Art evolving in a world you perceive as being in decline?

Bruno Kramm: I’m unfortunately a little bit pessimistic that art is still as important as in the past, because art and artists have really lost their function in society on a huge level. I mean, today everybody is expressing himself or herself through social media.

If you think of our youth time, art and music was the way how you could shape your growing up by listening to certain kinds of music and using it as the—I would say—the cocoon from which you were making the next steps in your development. Today nobody needs that anymore because everybody expresses himself in totally individualistic, overpainted, egoistic ways on social media. And at the same time, art is becoming more and more replaced even with artificial intelligence.

Of course, artists who had been a long time around like us and many of our colleagues, we can be lucky that we had been important for many people who became older to conserve their memories with our music. That makes it possible for us to still go on as artists.

But I can see it as an owner of a record label: for young artists, it is really hard to make somehow a way where you can make a living from your art or can call yourself an active artist, at least for some kind of short time period until the existentialism of surviving in this world affects you hard. And from the moment you have a family, you cannot afford anymore being an artist.

So basically, this was always a problem for artists, but I think we were growing up in a time like in the 80s and 90s where it was a perfect situation for you as an artist, especially because the channels of distribution were opening to everybody with this whole new independent and alternative revolution. So it felt really like steps forward in society that everybody finds a way to express with art. But as I was telling in the beginning of this interview, we are in a constantly going forward, going backward situation.

Q: Time has always been a central concern of philosophers. Yet listening to “Fanal”, it feels as though time has had little impact on your musical language—the album sounds as if Das Ich had never been away. How do you view this continuity, and what was your artistic approach when creating this new work?

Bruno Kramm: Yeah, it might sound like the whole album sounds like there was no break in between, and you could see that positively or negatively. Some could say, ‘Hey, these guys in 19 years were not developing forward’. Or you could say that we really found quite early our language—our personal language—and we just go with it.

It’s never the intention to copy ourselves. It is just the way how we work, and it might be—as we are just two people—it is much easier to keep a consistency than if it would be a whole band in a process of composing with changing members. So I think that makes it really easier to stay consistent. And let’s say other duos from our time also sound still quite consistent. Take for example bands like Clan Of Xymox or so. They are still consistently doing what they always did.

And this might be a reason: in your young years—that’s how I believe—in your young years when you try to find your expression, you will find your own language. And of course you do lots of experiments, but you always have this idea of an artistic approach, of vision. And therefore we were just going on with it. And honestly, time doesn’t mean anything.

Q: One of the notable new elements on Das Ich’s “Fanal” is that you, Bruno, recorded cello parts. How did this come about, and what kind of atmosphere or emotional depth were you hoping to capture through this instrument?

Bruno Kramm: Yeah, the cello became really important for me, and it is the instrument which I started heavily to train in the times of Corona because there was no chance to do anything—no tours, nothing else. Of course I was starting then a company, an AI company, and finding some funding from investors. But artistically at that time I really every day started to train at least one to two hours cello.

Why? Basically because when I was really young I was starting piano and violin, and I stopped violin because I had a quite aggressive violin teacher who was hitting you when you played somehow wrong. But I always had a love for string instruments, and I think you can tell it from the music what we do that I just have a love for symphonic instruments and specially for strings. And therefore it was a quite consequent step to then start with the cello.

And basically it became the instrument with which I was also writing a lot of music parts instead of clicking on my keyboard. My keyboards—it was much more fun playing parts with the cello and then using some converters which helped me to put this automatically into a sequenced part.

So I’m basically doing today a lot with the cello because for me it’s an instrument where you also can put so much expression into the shaping of sound. When you play a piano of course you can hit it stronger or softer, you can be faster or slower, but you cannot shape the sound itself so strongly like you can do it with stringed instruments. Therefore I love cello so much because you can do so much with it. And therefore I was also recording all the cellos on the album and also some violins on the album were played by myself.

I think it also helps to make the sound more natural and more human by little mistakes what happened. And also it’s always not the perfect tune, and therefore when you record many of these tracks you always get automatically this beautiful chorus effect.

Q: In recent years, technological and societal modernization has accelerated dramatically—not always in a positive direction. Were there any significant innovations or changes in your compositional or production process for Das Ich’s “Fanal”, and how did they influence the final result?

Bruno Kramm: Yeah, about technological acceleration. Of course on one hand it became really easy to record music today, to mix a complete album on one laptop actually. That’s a beautiful thing. On the other hand, it also became so easy that everybody is nowadays doing Electronic music, and Electronic music itself lost its magic where you always had to be also an engineer to be able to set everything up.

I mean, I just remember times when we recorded the “Propheten” album—at that time you needed to be a real nerd to make this Commodore 64 sequencer not crash, to synchronize all these synthesizers with tape machines, and it was a really complicated time. Also during the mixdown you had a list of events when you have to put which reverb on which part, and sometimes with three people at the same time during the mixdown and everybody had to take care of some faders. Today you can automate everything, and even you can go further—you can use AI to help you with mixing.

Yes, I use also AI sometimes for equalizing things or for mastering things, but it goes even further. And I was also doing experiments with that, but not using it for my own music because I was also programming with a friend some AI tools and realized how much you can even replace the whole creative process with AI.

This is for me sometimes a bit frightening, also frustrating. I also see it quite critically because expressing ourselves as human beings with music is something so fundamentally important, and replacing this with AI is really weird. Why not replace things which are not fun—like stuff which is bothering and making no fun and is hard to do—instead of replacing those things which are so important for your soul, for your development as a human being?

And also the problem is: the more AI slop is released, the more the next generation gets used to it. The problem with AI music is that it is always some kind of average of everything what already exists, so you will never reach a level where you can create something completely new, because AI is always—let’s say—a statistic. Yeah, a statistical element that combines things that exist. But breaking with rules is something what only real artists can do.

My fear is that the more we are getting used to it and the next generation is getting used to art from AI, the more nobody likes anymore breaking with the rules. So music becomes more and more standardized, and that’s really sad about it.

Q: What were the greatest challenges and difficulties throughout the creation of “Fanal”, and how did you manage to overcome them?

Bruno Kramm: Yeah, I mean, the difficulty is of course when you’re having little children and doing then this realistic music, you need really to find spaces and time when you can do your stuff because you don’t want to project that all on your kids. You want that they have a happy life. And of course they start to ask you, ‘What is wrong with you, Daddy? Why are you so sad? Why do you do this sad music?’ So this is only one difficulty of many difficulties.

But honestly, the biggest difficulty today is getting dragged away because there is constantly so much input coming on you through social media, through all kinds of channels, and all the art which is presented constantly to you. It’s really hard there to find a way to filter all that and to find the silence in your head that you can create the music in your head, because you always need first—like a clean canvas for painting—the silence in your mind that you can create music.

Q: To what extent do the themes addressed on “Fanal” also manifest within the music scene itself, even at an underground level? After all, every scene is still part of the larger system. What are your personal experiences in this regard?

Bruno Kramm: That’s an extremely good question. Yes, I mean, I was telling in interviews before: the 80s and 90s were really somehow a revolutionary time when we were able to suddenly use channels of distribution also for alternative music, and suddenly really individual things came up which were not shaped by some marketing people.

And we had then this extremely growing Gothic and alternative scene. I can at the moment just speak for Germany, because I remember when we started in West Germany, it already looked like it was going slowly down again. And then suddenly came this reunification of Germany, and there were so many super hungry individualists with interest for dark music from East Germany that suddenly it became something really big.

And honestly, without this unification of Germany, there would have never been a Wave-Gotik-Treffen or something like this. I mean, basically without East Germany, I think the scene—or let’s say at least in Germany—would have not become as big as it became. So you can see that always political things and society’s paradigm changes play a big role, especially in the so-called alternative music. And I think that’s really interesting how much the current situation also addresses the underground scene.

And I think that’s also something what we’re carrying out a bit with the “Fanal” album, because it is this guiding light. You can see this kind of torch as something what helps you finding your way through these massive floods of information which are constantly flooding over you and taking away your direction. So it might be a light that guides you, but it also can be a light that warns you and shows you the past. So it’s basically both. And therefore I think we quite nicely found for us the definition of what we think we are right now.

Q: Das Ich, along with several contemporaries, was closely associated with the ‘Neue Deutsche Todeskunst’ movement of the 1990s. What remains of that movement today, and what do you see as its legacy for younger and future generations?

Bruno Kramm: Yeah, well, it seems to be perhaps the next thing what will be a revival. So it will be then the ‘new old New German Death Art’. And I can see that a lot of young people are suddenly really interested in this kind of expression.

I mean, for Das Ich—and therefore we were creating this term—we started doing the music. Most of the German song music had been like this Schlager music, this really horrible, idiotic music and folkloristic music. And we also saw a little bit our vision, especially as children of this Third Reich times, to denazify the German language and give it again expression like the Expressionists, showing how beautiful this language can be also in expression and not only used for propagandistic things.

Today, it is so normal to sing in German that it is not important to call it anymore something special ‘German’. But when we started, it was also a bit about revolutionizing this language and also emancipating this language for different kinds of music.

Q: This year marks the 35th anniversary of the Das Ich debut album, “Die Propheten”, which has since become legendary. How much of the ‘young’ Stefan and Bruno do you still recognize in yourselves today? And what advice would you give those younger versions of yourselves, based on what you know now?

Bruno Kramm: Oh yeah, 35 years. Crazy. Yeah, I think actually we are quite true still to ourselves. Of course, we have seen a lot of things, but when it comes to how we see the world—for example, you always hear that people become more conservative when they become old, also politically conservative—and this has not affected us.

So yeah, it might be that we are just not really becoming older, but that might be also because of music, because it keeps you really young. And for me, doing music or playing with synthesizers or whatever, it is for me still like being in Legoland.

For example, we just had a concert in Gothenburg and on the other side of the hotel was an amazing music store with all the old synthesizers and samplers—like Emulator II, the Fairlight, some Prophet-5 and really great old stuff. And yeah, I felt like a little child again because there’s nothing more beautiful than playing with these tools.

And today what’s really beautiful about today is that there’s so many mobile synthesizers, little ones—if it’s Teenage Engineering stuff or other brands—it’s amazing. You can take them with you, and I really enjoyed it a lot to do music with that stuff when my kids were playing in the sandbox and I was still being able then to do music.

Q: Das Ich has been an active live band for decades, and live performance seems crucial to your artistic identity. How have you evolved as a live act over the years, and how essential is the stage for an artist like Das Ich?

Bruno Kramm: Yeah, live performance is for us the most important, because when we create songs it’s for us always important that they are in a similar way moving the people like they move ourselves. And the only way how you can find out that is with a live show. So for us it’s always so beautiful to see when people react in a similar way to the music like us.

And we are really happy to have with Stefan someone who is so much into expressing himself with his face and with the way how he acts on stage. And of course with the swing and me, we have really big fun to always have a lot of action on the stage, and therefore we have these movable keyboards and love to be just not like normal Electronic bands.

Q: For my final question, I asked AI which philosophical statement it felt would best resonate with Das Ich. Its response was: ‘Man did not kill God—he replaced Him with a mirror and never left it again’. Do you find this thought inspiring or problematic—especially considering that AI itself is part of the same transient reality you critique?

Bruno Kramm: ‘Man did not kill God—he replaced him with a mirror and never left it again’. Actually that would be nice, especially when thinking about artificial intelligence, if it would be just a mirror, because a mirror can help you to see all the scars which had been painted by life into your face and your body and all the wrinkles which made you older but which are also showing how time was carving into your face. Perhaps an ugly one, perhaps also things which you think are beautiful. It’s always in the eye of the watcher.

But the sad thing is that AI even drags us away from those things which are really important for humans going further. I mean, technology is always having different aspects. One is, for example, we can live much longer. Perhaps one day we can all put our consciousness into some kind of hive and live then forever. This is really fascinating and great.

But on the other hand, you realize today that the technology—I mean the AI—will be the death of the internet, for example. With AI you can, with no other technology, so perfectly control people with fake news, the way how you train systems, how you use the bias of the data, the datasets on which the AI was trained. This is really scary.

But I think it’s really cool that you ask a philosophical statement about ‘Das Ich’ in that way. Yes, it was not man who killed God in an individual way, like stabbing him with a knife or so. But science was at least making God like a nice little old man in the corner which lost its power over us. And that is a great thing on one hand, but on the other hand it’s also the problem that we have no one anymore who controls our morals and humanistic ideas.

So just being free is bringing new risks, and I think at the moment we are not really well in handling these risks.