Holger Naust is a musician, composer and sound researcher based in Berlin, Germany.

Starting Out

Playing drums and sound generators he joined bands early. Having been part of the local pop+rock-circuit for some time, he then decided to continue his studies in the U.S.of America, namely Los Angeles, to study Drumset with masters like Efrain Toro, early-Zappa-Drummer Ralph Humphrey and Hollywood Percussion-filmscoring great Joe Porcaro.

Improvised music

This is where he was first exposed to Improvised music.
Back home the urge for playing and experiencing the "Jazz-effect" with fellow musicians led him to visit jazz-sessions and eventually to a diploma-degree in Improvised Music at the Folkwang-University of the Arts.

While studying he met and performed with exceptional musicians playing jazz and popular music, among them the Christina Lux Band, Angelika Niescier and Polimeta, Nils Ostendorf and Paolo Dinuzzi's Vis a Vis, the Christian Brockmeyer Trio and an all-brass funk/ afro setup named Seven Trumpets.
Side-gigs included performing with the Junge Philharmonie Koeln (Fiddler on the Roof/ J. Stein), Wuppertaler Schauspielhaus (Mutter Courage/ B. Brecht) and Buehnen der Stadt Köln (The Black Rider/ Tom Waits).

Composition

Arriving at that point, he felt a strong urge to dive deeper into the structures of music and, taking chances, spent three years at New York's New School University/ The Mannes College of Music, mainly studying composition, arrangement and conducting from the ground up, experimenting and performing with electronically generated sound sources and playing jazz and rock-drums at the side.
Living in Brooklyn also led to late choreographer Alan Danielson, former dancer and teacher's trainer of the Limon Dance Company, commissioning music for his choreography trans/form, premiered in St'Marks-church, Manhattan.

Holger also conceived and played the percussion part in a Puppeteer-adaption of Oscar Wilde's play "The happy prince" by directors David Neumann and Amy Trompetter. It was premiered in "The Kitchen" in downtown Manhattan.

Back to Europe-this time off to Berlin, he wrote more music for stage performances, dancer/choreographer Livia Politi's work "Gerettet" was performed at 100Grad-Festival/Hebell am Ufer and choreographer/dancer Vivian Cruz used music of his in her piece "Azul", which premiered in Mexico-City.

He furthermore honed his compositional skills with studies in Counterpoint with Berlin based composer John Allison Campbell.

Film music

Holger then ventured out into film music composition, liking the notion of psychological input and fitting music to the rhythmic development of cuts.

He composed the music for Lisa Zielkes short movie "Modscheinsonate", was co-composer of the short "Roughtown" by director Gabriele Heberling (winner "Best German Short Film" at Berlin Short Film Festival 2014), adding the action sequence music, and wrote cues for the web-series "Filmstadt" by Dennis Albrecht, a satirical observation of modern-day film-business.

In the commercial realm he worked with director/producer Marcel Wehn on spots and documentaries for MKG Hamburg and Deutsche Schulakademie and lately with Berlin based creative agency Triad, composing and producing the music for the UFA-100years exposition trailer, an immersive 360º-movie that was part of UFA's anniversary-show at Deutsche Kinemathek.

Next to composing and producing music and doing sound research, Holger teaches drums, piano, music theory and composition in Berlin.