Featured Artist of June 17, 2022
with song songs from: Urban Bullshit

Artist's Biography

“If I ever hear my music in an elevator, I will have failed artistically.”
(Kurt Zeltner, 2024)

No, it wasn't elevator music. That much up front.
Always torn inside, still a country bumpkin at heart, Zeltner set out to bring his music into the city and into the 2020s. More urban, fresher, cheekier. The cow patty on Bahnhofstrasse, so to speak...


URBAN BULLSHIT - K U R T Z E L T N E R
Album release January 16, 2025


After the reduced, rather quiet songs of the last album, Kurt Zeltner is back with big cutlery! The twominute intro promises not only creative work, but above all an insight into Zeltner's world, not to say his soul. The intro and outro frame nine cheekily composed and cleverly arranged gems. Each one stands on its own, they are all different and yet they are all the same. Typical Kurt Zeltner.

As usual, he doesn't care about genres or no-goes in the music industry. So he starts the album with a trombone choir. Musically unmistakable and diverse, he quotes Robert Johnson's “Crossroad” just as uniquely as he sings a Gregorian choir in “Urban Bullshit”. After his first solo album, rock pope Dillier compared his voice to that of Mark Lanegan or Nick Cave on SRF3. Now, with his new coolness and unmistakable energy, he has gone one better. Kurt Zeltner lives, no, Kurt Zeltner is music.

Lyrically, Zeltner asks uncomfortable questions or wraps his thoughts in funny metaphors, as in “Leonard”, who has decided to go backwards to see the past because everything used to be better. In “Kitchen”, he lets the boys play with bombs and cleverly wraps up world events in a funny story. Or he straps on the saddle himself and carries his drunken pony home. This is the “almost true” story from “Pony Ride”.

Jean-Pierre von Dach, Jeannot Steck, MAX Müller, Willy Ramos & Simon Klopfenstein are first-class musicians who have been involved in Zeltner's productions for years.

Featured Artist of June 17, 2022
with the song: Where Did You Sleep Last Night

Artist's Biography

While everyone is sleeping, KURT ZELTNER sharpens the chainsaw and cuts a path through the pines of the musical landscape.

He drops Leadbelly's Song into the furrow of the forest floor and grows something that will leave you speechless.

You think you know how the song is developing? Never, never, never!

In the tried and tested manner with his favorite guitarist Jean-Pierre Von Dach, with his drummer MAX Müller and his friend and producer Jeannot Steck.

Artist infos:

https://bio.to/KurtZeltner
www.kurtzeltner.com
www.fb.com/kurtsings
www.twitter.com/kurt_zeltner

Featured Artist of December 3, 2018
with the song: Moon & Stars

Oh yes ... pointed shoes
They as just as much a part of him as his blue eyes and roguish grin. Preferably boots. Pointed shoes are his sign of individuality, creativity and spontaneity. One could say that it is symbolic – based on the artist's observation - that a build-up of pressure is needed to achieve a certain explosiveness when released. It is this unloading that releases the core of the idea. Casual and irrelevant creativity is just more or less the elegant tiptoeing around the core of a subject ...(just like this text should simply fill the pages). Kurt's observations:
“Yes. For budget reasons and with the entry of Zalando into the market, I have also shouted at a few mailmen. Maybe you also think that I found my way to music in this way? The “shout” is after all one of the forefathers of the blues....no, that's not how it was. It began in 1967 ...
As a classic barefooted kid growing up in the black mossy earth of the Bernese Seeland, I have never quite managed to get rid of the black dirt under my fingernails. My knees are also not always black due to praying. No, it's from weeding the beds.
When I was 18 I used my meager apprentice wage to buy my treasured snake-skin boots for around 400 francs (I earned 450 a month). Yes. Disgraceful. And I admit it. Captive bred snakes from Florida. Oh what the heck. After facing hostility from two thirds of all vegetarians, vegans and WWF members in the western hemisphere, I withdrew my boots from the public eye and only wore them in the bedroom. This cost me several mattresses and relationships but gave me plenty of material for song lyrics. I only recovered from the shock of my own cowardice 5 years later when David Lynch's “Wild at Heart” hit the big screen. A film in which Nicolas Cage had even fewer muscles but more hair. A film that I saw three times in the same week. The first time in sneakers and then twice in boots. I adapted Sailor's statement about his beloved snake-skin jacket to my pointed shoes and it has more or less accompanied me through life since then. No they didn't have a name, my shoes. They have supported me through a hundred concerts on the stage. They have been resoled at least three times and only gave up when a storm flooded my basement. Not authenticated - but plausible - is the story that they sang the blues classic “When the Levee breaks” during their death struggle in the debris and mud. Personally I'm not convinced about that.
The time came to refocus.
I found these handmade sneakers in Basel. From a designer who is no longer around and whose name I have forgotten. Unfortunately there is also no label in the shoe.... My favorite power shoes ever! Of course they are also great for all weathers and even for climbing.
The shoes are still long at the front, but not quite so pointed. Flattened through endless “ass-kicking” of stoned keyboard players ...the move away from the classic style of boot opened up a new range of music to me. With smooth leather soles and smooth leather uppers, my music became rather more socially acceptable like the fine, beautifully finished stitching.
Maybe even a little too mainstream. The result of commercial music hitting the ground ultimately leads to the addition of foreign bodies such as sandals, flip flops, stilettos ... whoops - I didn't want to mention them - in my shoe closet (which actually just consists of a couple of bottle crates.)
Now, arriving in the present day, I am guided by the shoe fashion of Kinshasa (not just because of Muhammad Ali. The greatest of all time himself. “Let‘s Rumble in Jungle…”)
The shoes of Zairean (not Tsarist - although....) musicians and drug dealers around the world cast their spell over me. I find it hard to get away from it. I admit that the cheap print on the cheapest leather in its upscale form requires a balancing act from me which I am hardly able to overcome. However, it is a fact that the said combination opened up a completely new world of color and harmony to me. If the willing reader (has a man managed to read this far???) now devotes herself to my latest works (whether painted or sung), she will inevitably find out that in my case too, a development was in progress which I would now call "upscale talent in the cheapest attire".

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