This is (going to be) the Stefan Neumann Music Site in English
Who I Am (My Musical Biography)
Backstory: The Laughing Man
I started playing Bands in my school time. They were called The 3 Harrys, Garden the Backseats.
While I was at College, I played the bass in The Ready-Mades. We gained some local fame in the early 1990s but disbanded in 1995. In the late 1990s I finally started my own project – The Laughing Man. At first I recorded songs with two cassette decks in a ping-pong process. Later I borrowed a Tascam four-track cassette recorder and recorded psychedelic soundscapes. In the early 2000s I finally bought my first digital audio workstation and recorded the first album on my own. It was called Beauty Cream Beauty, was released in 2003 and can still be heard on Bandcamp. It was my musical resurrection after leaving the Ready-Mades. And although it sounds quite basic, I still like the album very much today. The solo project became a real band, which will be told more about elsewhere. In 2011 we made the second album Strawberry Love (Bandcamp Link) together. The third and last album was called Midnight Voice (Bandcamp Link) in 2014.Some people played and sang on it, but in most parts I made this one alone again. At that time we had several spectacular live performances in different line-ups. In November 2020 the anthology Past Time Pictures (Spotify Link, Bandcamp link), came out to sum up the Laughing Man’s finest songs.
Stefan Neumann
After I started busking with The Laughing Man, I soon found myself playing alone. That gave me a lot of freedom to try out new things. I played covers and a songs of my own. My first live performance took place at the „Bandfabrik“ in 2017 – as the opening act for The Laughing Man. In 2019, I finally released my first album under my own flag. The songs had mostly been written over the past years. But I used some older material, too. The albums was called In Another Country (Spotify link, Bandcamp link). And that was how I felt – having arrived in another country. Although I had also made many songs of The Laughing Man on my own, it was a totally different feeling. I played two concerts to promote the album, which received some attention in the digital music world. A year later, we all went through a series of COVID lockdowns. Recording music became a life-saving measure for me. The result of this life-saving measure is my second album Second Thoughts (Spotify link, Bandcamp link), released in June 2022. There were concerts again. I also started busking again, as soon as the COVID regulations allowed. At the end of 2023, a digital single came out. It was a commentary on our digital world, which devours its children faster than they are aware of. The song „Digital Control“ (Spotify link, Bandcamp link) marks the beginning of the recordings for the third album. It is due to be released in 2025 or 2026.
