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The profile · researched 6 October 2026
The Berlin singer who took his drummer back on the road
Jan Blomqvist has spent two decades turning a rock singer's instincts into live electronic music, and since reuniting with his childhood band in 2024 he has been touring the 2025 album MUTE with drums, six synthesisers and a microphone. In 2026 the festival diary has been full and the headline diary deliberately thin.
A village, a maths degree and a city that wanted no pianos
Blomqvist grew up in a village in Lower Saxony on his parents' classic rock records, formed his first band at the age of ten and spent his teens and early twenties playing rock, hardcore and metal. The switch came in 2005, when he was studying mathematics at university and met Felix Lehmann, who pulled him into Berlin's techno scene; plans for a career in aerospace technology were dropped for music.
Berlin, where he had moved in 2002, was not immediately receptive. He has said club bookers turned down his piano-led material outright, and that the scene only widened around 2010, when the rise of producers such as Nicolas Jaar made room for approaches that were not strictly functional dance music. By then he had been testing a solo live act around the city since roughly 2008 and 2009, built on cinematic melodies, sparse drum programming and his own vocals.
The break was a filmed rooftop performance of "Something Says" in 2012, which travelled far beyond Germany and gave him an audience before he had an album to sell them.
Three albums and a concept that kept widening
The debut, Remote Control, arrived in 2016 through Armin van Buuren's Armada imprint: twelve tracks, two years in the making, and the record that moved him from Berlin clubs to festival stages. The second, Disconnected, came in 2018 as a three-part release and took its idea from Burning Man — the paradox, as he put it, of being disconnected inside a globally connected bubble.
Between the albums came one of his odder credits. "Synth For The Devil", a reworking of the Rolling Stones, came together during studio sessions near Pioneertown in California; he has said the approval from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards' side came back within a day. He also appeared as a musician on Schiller's Morgenstund in 2019, the album that went to number one in Germany.
Coachella became a recurring fixture across the same period — the Do LaB stage first, then the Yuma tent on Sunday 14 April 2019 with a return the following weekend, three visits in total. Burning Man has been more frequent still; by 2024 he was on his sixth appearance, playing the Mayan Warrior stage and previewing unreleased material.
MUTE, and a label of his own
In 2024 Blomqvist started the label Disconnected, named after the album, with a first release — "Destination Lost" — made with Rodriguez Jr. The third album followed on 14 February 2025, issued through Disconnected in partnership with Armada and titled MUTE. Where the 2018 record sat with the problem of hyperconnection, MUTE traces a line out of it, from fear towards something closer to self-discovery, across tracks including "Algorithm", "Underwater", "Destination Lost", "Muted Mind" and "Midnight Sun".
Response was warm rather than unanimous. Listener reviews praised the engineering and the sense of progression through the record while taking issue with heavily processed vocals and with tracks that run long on too little variation — a fair description of the risk his method carries, since the songs are built from texture as much as from chord changes. He has described texture as what turns a track into a room, and his own aesthetic as "perfection in the imperfect".
The album came with a European tour announced in November 2024: fourteen cities, opening in Berlin on 24 January 2025 and closing in Istanbul on 15 February, with Melkweg in Amsterdam on 30 January, Electric Brixton in London on 1 February and Élysée Montmartre in Paris along the way.
The band, back after three years alone
The significant change was not the record but the personnel. After three years of touring solo, Blomqvist brought back Christian Dammann on drums — a friend since childhood, who also handles the project's video work — and Felix Lehmann on keys, with the band format launching in the autumn of 2024 and carrying the MUTE dates.
The difference is audible and he has been blunt about the mechanics: a solo set runs on one synthesiser, the band set on six, plus live drums and more singing. He has talked about the point of a band being the moments where the three of them communicate through the music and find a new way through a track mid-performance, which is also the argument for keeping a drummer on a payroll that does not need one.
The workload is heavy by any measure — roughly eighty to a hundred shows a year across more than forty countries, and close to a thousand gigs by Armada's count.
2026: festivals, a dust storm, and two dates on sale
This year has been built around festivals rather than a headline tour. DGTL in Amsterdam took him in early April, Day Zero in Bali on 17 April, Rakete Openair at Richterswil on 6 June, Beyond the Pale in County Wicklow the following weekend, Wanderlust in Paris on 5 July, Untold in Cluj in early August, Open Flair in Eschwege the same week, and Beonix in Larnaca in late September.
The set people have actually been talking about was unplanned. On 5 September 2026 he played the Maxa stage at Burning Man during a severe dust storm, with visibility close to zero and the audience in goggles and masks, and chose to carry on rather than stop — his stated reasoning being that he had come a long way and wanted to leave with one performance worth remembering. The resulting film, directed and shot by Severin Koller and Unisono Films with drone work in the dust, was released afterwards; Gabriel Velazquez engineered the audio, Lehmann mastered it, and Beobê and Marvin Jam appeared as guests.
Against that, the ticketed diary is short. Cermak Hall at Radius in Chicago on 17 October 2026 is the North American date, and KOKO in Camden on Friday 11 December is the London one, programmed inside the venue's AW26 electronic season. Dubai sits between them on 24 October at the Five Palm Jumeirah. For an act that has run at a hundred shows a year, two headline dates on general sale reads less like a quiet patch than a gap being held open.
The show, now
A current Blomqvist show is a band set rather than a DJ set, and runs long: his Burning Man appearance at Maxa on 5 September 2026 lasted an hour and thirty-two minutes across nineteen tracks. The shape is a sung opening into a steadily firming four-four pulse — "Left Unsaid", "Muted Mind" and "Elephant Shunned" led the Maxa set, with "Packard" alongside Oliver Schories, a rework of RY X's "All I Have" and "Deeper Grounds" with Mahri later on. On stage he sings and plays synths with Christian Dammann on live drums and Felix Lehmann on keys; the band configuration uses six synthesisers where the solo show used one, and he leaves room for the three of them to redirect a track mid-song. Staging is lighting and video rather than spectacle, with Dammann also responsible for the project's visuals, and the billings are late-night club rather than theatre: doors at 22:00 for both KOKO in London on 11 December 2026 and Cermak Hall at Radius in Chicago on 17 October, where Parallelle and Watry open. KOKO holds 1,500 and tickets started around £22; Chicago opened nearer $66. Audience comment is consistent on two points — the sound and lighting, and the combination of his voice with the production — and consistently less interested in whether a given track strictly needed eight minutes.
Researched from beatportal.com · armadamusic.com · news.armadamusic.com · grammy.com · electronicgroove.com · livetracklist.com · songkick.com · dice.fm
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