Bastian Bandt & Jörg Naßler

Pferd & Haus Tour

Tender, tragicomic songs of weighty melancholy, played on a steel-string guitar that sounds like it comes from outer space.

He lives on the edge of the Uckermark and sets off every weekend with his guitar and a Deutsche Bahn pass to play stages, clubs and festivals across the country. He doesn't go just anywhere - geographically and artistically he sits right between Wenzel, Felix Meyer and, yes, the solo Boss Bruce. (Buschfunk)

On his earlier albums, Bastian Bandt never hid his artistic affinities. But when you hear Wenzel or Gundermann in his music, they don't replace Bandt - the Uckermärker enters into dialogue with the Sorbian and the Anhaltiner. They are in good hands with him, to borrow from Hegel: in homage, in self-assertion, in contradiction. (H.-M. Klemt)

With his new album "Trauriges Tier" at the latest, the cultural press of eastern Germany has been calling him one of the greats - one of those Liedermacher who have something to contribute to the search for eastern German identity. (M. Bruck)

"Pferd & Haus" - the tour programme and title of the new album - deals a little more with the world, with politics and their effect on the individual, with Heimat and eastern German biography, with great love and with the act of moving on, again and again. Wounded, out of place, virtuosic and full of gallows humour, Bastian Bandt plays an evening that is genuine comfort and a pleasure in language, poetry and music. Wild, tender and seriously meant. Without a trace of cynicism, his audience laughs and cries its way through the songs, stories and adventures of the 47-year-old songwriter, arriving at the warm certainty of not being alone.

Bastian Bandt is a Liedermacher in the best sense: spare, honest, with a fine ear for language. His songs speak of everyday life and its abysses, of closeness, loss and quiet hope - without pathos, but with real impact.