Artist · Since 2012
The Modular Beat
A multi-instrumental electronic project built from rhythm, texture and the chemistry between two distinct musical voices.
Sound
Electronic music with psychedelic, ambient and experimental elements — somewhere between pop, rock, indie, 1970s influences, ambient and jazz.
Line-up
- Dennis Klein
- Bass, guitar, cello, violin and percussion
- Michael Keuth
- Vocals, keys, guitar and drum programming
Archive
In pictures
01 / Story
A departure from the rock framework
The Modular Beat began in 2012, while Dennis Klein and Michael Keuth were still members of Die Engineers. Ideas that no longer fitted the band’s conventional rock framework became the starting point for a separate project built around electronic textures, improvisation and jazz-inspired thinking.
Coast documented that transition in 2013, with instrumental pieces, atmospheric movement and sonic landscapes taking precedence over familiar rock structures. ST.E.W, released only months later, went further: its entirely instrumental, extended compositions reflect a period of rapid learning in arrangement, mixing and sound processing. By Lift, layered electronics, live instruments and a growing use of samples had developed into a clearer identity centred on rhythm, texture and gradual transformation.
02 / Story
Concepts, cycles and inner landscapes
From Wétiko onward, the duo increasingly used albums as conceptual spaces. Wétiko translated greed, destruction and excess into an insistent experimental form; Tides explored recurrence, lunar influence and the rhythms of everyday life through electronic sound, unusual bass textures, voice and an expanded audiovisual idea. Fragments made the absence of a single unifying idea its theme, assembling contrasting pieces around searching, transition and the possibility of a new direction.
Intrusion turned inward through reduced electronic and ambient arrangements, balancing traumatic memory with dreamlike calm, meditation and chosen isolation. Kipuka transformed memories of the Danish North Sea coast and the beginning of the pandemic into an image of life surviving inside isolation. The compact Positions followed as a spontaneous study of spatial and emotional states, bridging that album and the work that came next.
03 / Story
An open method in constant motion
The Modular Beat is composed by Klein and Keuth and produced, mixed and mastered by Keuth. Across the catalogue, Klein’s bass and electric guitar were joined by cello, while Keuth’s keyboards and drum programming expanded to include acoustic guitar and increasingly quiet vocals. Acoustic sources remain tactile inside an electronic framework: repetition and groove may hold a piece together, but improvisation and changing textures keep it open.
The pandemic-era companion albums Inhale.Circulate.Enchant and Operate turned grief, illness, anxiety, distance and isolation into complex atmospheric songs with hushed voices. No Frame, Short Cuts then removed conceptual barriers altogether, placing concise pop forms beside long psychedelic passages and free improvisation. Nomask preserved the contrast between an earlier raw, expansive phase and later, more focused groove-led recordings. The Hidden Reveal continues that movement with clearer, more spacious arrangements, electronics, guitar, bass and cello, using rhythm as a way through loss, uncertainty and change without abandoning the duo’s experimental character.
Discography