about us

Carpe Diem is a creative German record label for Early Music, Improvised Music and stylistic border walks.

Carpe Diem was founded in 2008 by the balance engineers Jonas Niederstadt and Johannes Wallbrecher. Among the artists who recorded with Carpe Diem you find renowned stars, like Michel Godard, Hille Perl and William Dongois, but also many young talents which are yet to become famous.

Carpe Diem does not settle for repeating the existing or presenting time and again music that prevails in abundance, but strives to create a space for living art, music that comes into being between the worlds of composed work and free improvisation, between precious and artful music and mercurial instinct, between the old traditions and the musician’s spontaneous and intuitive feeling.

Carpe Diem searches the borderlands, the unexplored places in the landscape of our musical experience – not for resistance of the known but for fervor of the unknown. Carpe Diem expresses the quest for the sense and being of music, seeking the magic that inhabits the sound and connects people in time and space.

The sound of Carpe Diem is recorded in authentic places, in old churches, in monasteries and historic concert halls that offer ideal conditions for the instruments played and the sound being recorded. Thereby sound and atmosphere become an integral part of the music.

Just like the sound, the graphic design of the records aims at reflecting the idea of the musical oeuvre in image and composition. With most records a photographer is present to capture the intimate creational processes in images.

Carpe Diem’s most central cause is to convey and pass on the music in all its beauty, power and reality to people, to let them take part in the experience of the highly fragile and atmospheric moments in which a wonderful recording comes to be.