Monika Hempel - Klaus Nomi

C86 Show - Indie Pop

Monika Hempel in conversation with David Eastaugh

https://www.verlag-reiffer.de/produkt/nomi/v

Singing space robot. Galactic Pierrot. The thing from the other planet. To put the phenomenon of Klaus Nomi into words, the media prefers to stylize him as an alien. In fact, the artist cannot be classified into gender or genre categories and appears to be a hybrid creature of human, machine and Martian.

He effortlessly bridges the gap from baroque opera to 1960s pop to new wave, from the frosty “Cold Song” to the ironic, infernal “Total Eclipse”. Despite a narrow oeuvre of two albums released during his lifetime, Nomi's influence is present not only in the world of music, but in all areas of art, forty years after his untimely death from AIDS. How did this ongoing fascination come about?

Monika Hempel went looking for clues, spoke to friends and companions, looked through archives and Nomi's personal legacy. It tells the extraordinary life story of the singer born Klaus Sperber and explains why his voice still speaks to us after countless revolutions in orbit