Bruno Kramm, a German musician who pioneered a brooding, pulsating electronic style in the early 1990s, then took a break from his art to enter politics — promoting digital freedom, online privacy and direct democracy — died on Friday in Granada, Spain, where his band, Das Ich, had recently finished a concert. He was 58.
Mr. Kramm, who lived in a suburb of Berlin, died after what Sven Hegewald, a band member, described as a medical emergency.
He founded Das Ich, or the Self, with his friend Stefan Ackermann in 1989. Mr. Ackermann wrote the band’s lyrics; Mr. Kramm wrote the music.
Over the next decade, they earned praise as one of the founding groups in a movement known as the Neue Deutsche Todeskunst, or the New German Art of Death, which mixed elements of punk, electronica, metal and industrial music.
The pair put down roots in Bayreuth, a university city in what was then West Germany, and in Berlin, which in the 1990s became a wellspring of the sort of searching, nihilistic, warehouse-filling sound that Das Ich defined.
Over a foundation of driving beats and rich, symphonic string samples, the band laid lyrics inspired by German Expressionist and French Symbolist poetry; favorite sources included the poets Georg Trakl, Gottfried Benn and Charles Baudelaire.
Das Ich was equally well known for dramatic live shows that resembled Japanese Noh theater. Amid swirls of fog, Mr. Ackermann, the vocalist, would emerge in stark white face paint; Mr. Kramm, on keyboards, sported horns of bright red hair.
Among their best-known songs were “Gottes Tod” (“The Death of God”), “Die Propheten” (“The Prophets”) and “Destillat” (“Distillate”), which became a staple of the dark-wave club scene across Europe and in the United States.
Behind the horns, Mr. Kramm was erudite and thoughtful, able to digress on a variety of subjects, including on the banality of the German composer Giacomo Meyerbeer’s interpretation of the poetry of Heinrich Heine and the impact of online media on underground art scenes like his own.
“I’m unfortunately a little bit pessimistic that art is still as important as in the past, because art and artists have really lost their function in society on a huge level,” he said in a interview in February with the music site Side-Line. “Today everybody is expressing himself or herself through social media.”
Mr. Kramm took that critical perspective with him when he paused his music career in 2012 to take up a leadership role in the Pirate Party, a small, left-libertarian organization focused on issues like free speech online and digital privacy.
He became the party’s chairman for the city-state of Berlin in 2014. But after a disastrous showing in the 2016 elections, in which the party failed to win enough votes to be seated in the Berlin State Assembly, he resigned.
Following a 19-year hiatus, Das Ich released a new album, “Fanal,” in 2025. It won critical praise as both a return to form and a furthering of the social and political themes of the band’s earlier work, points of view that Mr. Kramm underlined in interviews.
“You always hope that something gets better,” he told Side-Line. “But when you start to think as an artist about the world, then the nihilist look, which had been perhaps in the past more like a romantic nihilism, became a real — I would say — realistic nihilism. And that’s a painful thing.”
Bruno Kramm was born on Oct. 13, 1967, in Munich and grew up in Bayreuth, in northern Bavaria, where his father was a professor.
Bayreuth is home to an annual opera festival celebrating the music of Richard Wagner; partly for that reason, it developed a vibrant underground music scene that embraced elements of Wagner’s explosive theatricality.
Mr. Kramm started his first band, Fahrenheit 451 (later called Alva Novalis), in 1986. A year later, he met Mr. Ackermann at a club in Bayreuth.
Their first album as Das Ich, “Die Propheten” (1991), was widely hailed for its innovative blend of dark, pounding beats and complex, nihilistic lyrics.
He helped foster the Neue Deutsche Todeskunst movement by starting his own label, Danse Macabre, which produced like-minded acts — among them, Relatives Menschsein, Illuminate and Placebo Effect.
He is survived by his wife, their two children, his mother and his sister.
Mr. Kramm grew up playing piano and taught himself the cello during the Covid pandemic, incorporating samples of his playing into his music.
“It is for me a real natural thing to mix classic and electronics,” he told the music site Chain D.L.K. in 2002. “Since I was a kid I always have been in contact with classical music, through piano and composition classes with my father. Later I got fascinated with synthesizers, so I was just one step away from mixing both worlds, to create something new for myself.”
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