Ottmar Seum aka Otto von Bismarck has been in what we call the music business for a very long time. First he worked for Grabhund in the early 80s, then he founded The Bonkers together with Caspar Brötzmann and later he was part of the legendary Space Cowboys. Since 1998 he has been traveling solo and has also written for other artists. And now.
After TOO MANY MEMORIES (2022), CAPITAL OF PAIN is released. And, yes, the title says it all. We learn a lot about the inner life of the artist, who deals with himself in a self-ironic and playfully critical way in the confusion of our time and a Berlin that in parts seems strangely alien to him. In the title track he expresses this in spoken word style.
Criticism of consumerism (“Everything is cheap”), appeals for freedom from fear (“No one dies anymore”) and instrumentals (“Chaconne No 2”, “Piano Suite No 1”) alternate with life-positive reflections on friendship and love. The album was composed and produced together with Daniel Nentwig from The Whitest Boy Alive, and definitely has something of the casual, funky, smooth, jazzy design density of this band. Seum, born in 1959, somehow thinks about the old Federal Republic of Germany in each of his pieces. It’s fun and sometimes has a melancholic tinge to it. A sensitive, perhaps also injured man in his mid-sixties who describes his inner world via pop? Why not. He gets on the trail of himself and the things that surround him in a relaxed and easy-going manner.
This review appears in Musikexpress 2/2026.
