Marteria HHV Records 4 Items

Soccer player, model and rapper

Growing up in Rostock, Germany, Marten Laciny, born in 1982, was all about soccer: even before his rap career, he became a regular player for the U17 national team. While sports would accompany him throughout his life, he ventured his musical beginnings in 1995 and recorded his first mixtape together with friends. In 1999, he met a model scout during a trip to the USA and soon traveled around the world as a model for brands such as Diesel and Hugo Boss. After some time, he finally ended up back in Rostock and dedicated himself to hip-hop together with the guys from the Underdog Cru. In addition to a European tour, the group performed several times at the Splash! Festival. The former model then headed off to Berlin in 2003 to enroll in drama school, but Laciny’s music career also took off now: on the indie label Magnum 12, he released his first album Halloziehnation under the name Marsimoto – a stoner alter ego in reference to the side project of legendary producer and rapper Madlib, who experiments with the pitch of his voice in the same way. A year later, his debut album as Marteria, Base Ventura, followed, showing us Marten’s other side.

Purple clouds at the top

As Marsimoto, he supported Jan Delay on tour in 2007, and shortly thereafter joined the Four Music label, where he released Zu Zweit Allein. After a rather unsuccessful appearance at the Bundesvision Song Contest, he then released the Marteria album Zum Glück in die Zukunft in 2010 – the record soon reached gold status, and his single Verstrahlt infiltrated radio stations throughout Germany. Alongside well-known features such as Casper, Peter Fox and Jan Delay, Marsimoto was also heard on here more often – the Marsimoto album Grüner Samt charted even higher than its Marteria predecessor in 2012 and was celebrated by the press and fans as a Deutschrap milestone. Laciny’s most successful hit, however, came later that year with the collabo track Lila Wolken, which climbed to number one and left its mark on the youth over the next few years. In 2014, on the record Zum Glück in die Zukunft II, the Rostock native accommodated his sharp observations of everyday life on concise beats and created a Deutschrap classic – the singles Kids (2 Finger an den Kopf) and OMG! brought him to the front of the genre as an artistic innovator between mainstream and individuality. With the album track Mein Rostock, he was more successful at the Bundesvision Song Contest this time – Marteria took fourth place.

The first German rapper with a stadium show

In 2015, a hospital stay changed his life: after a charity soccer match, he collapsed and almost suffered kidney failure. As a result, he moved back to the Baltic Sea and paused his career. His comeback in 2017 was the Alien-inspired Marteria album Roswell, and supporting it, he shot a whole feature film in South Africa entitled Antimarteria together with the director Specter Berlin. After delivering Marsimoto fare again in 2018 with Verde, he teamed up with Casper for the collaboration record 1982, on which the two looked back nostalgically on their youth in the East of Germany. One of his biggest career highlights, however, came later in the year for Laciny, when he played a sold-out show in front of 32,000 people at the Ostseestadion in Rostock – by the way, the first stadium show ever by a German rapper, and for Marteria no less than the fulfillment of a childhood dream. Shortly afterwards, he performed at the Chemnitz #wirsindmehr campaign, positioning himself against right-wing extremism after the violent events in the Saxon city. On his new vinyl 5. Dimension, the Rostock native now raps in a more melancholic way – the single Niemand Bringt Marten Um was also released in a limited edition as an HHV Exclusive.