Before the Charts Caught Up

Marteria—Marten Laciny, from Rostock, former competitive athlete—had the kind of origin story that’s too good to be incidental. Track and field gives you a specific relationship with discipline and failure, and it shows in his music: structured, built to last, with a northern bleakness underneath the melodies that keeps everything grounded. In 2011 he was at that precise moment where the underground years start converting into something larger, and you could feel the momentum in every room he entered.

He played a Sony event at HBC Berlin alongside Cassandra Steen, who sings with the kind of force that makes a room feel smaller, and Palina Rojinski—then the most recognizable face on MTV Germany, the cause of considerable distraction for anyone with a functioning nervous system. An odd combination on paper. In Berlin in 2011, when the city was still loose enough that things could collide without needing justification, it made complete sense.