Champion Sound: The Year Marteria and Casper Were Both Born

1982. Marteria arrives in Rostock, a city on the Baltic coast still half-submerged in the GDR even as it’s being born into something else. Casper arrives in Lemgo, somewhere in the Westphalian flatlands. Two kids, one year, one country, no idea they’ll eventually make an album together that opens with something called Champion Sound.

German rap has been doing something genuinely interesting for years now, and both of these men are central reasons why. Casper renewed the form at a moment when it needed renewing—his records hit the feeling of a generation that couldn’t quite name what it was carrying, and he named it anyway. Marteria built a career out of being the strange one and made that strangeness feel like the only sane position available. He sings about his ambivalence toward money and things, toward the version of success people expect from him, and then retreats into his past—Rostock, New York—and looks at the present moment through eyes still slightly bewildered to be here at all.

Together they’re celebrating the year they share, the geography they share, the trajectory—not always clean, not always straightforward—that brought both of them to this point. The album is called 1982. It sounds like two people who have nothing left to prove making music entirely for themselves, which tends to be the condition under which the only music worth caring about gets made.