Martin Akeret was born in Winterthur, Switzerland. A father of two, he is a trained typographer/polygrafer and a passionate marathon runner. After a six-year detour into the study of classical and jazz music, he discovered electronic music in 1992 as his preferred playground. Soon, he took his first steps as a co-producer, and in 1997, he launched his own label: Poetenpop Records.
From then on, he began releasing music under various aliases such as Gary Rich, Drama, and Drama Martini. In 2001, the very first Popshop album «My Friend Frigo» was released. This record marked the emergence of his distinctive musical signature – a diverse sonic cosmos that refuses to be confined by narrow genre boundaries, instead thriving on its integrative strength. His music blends elements of electro, house, techno, and digital funk with indie, post-wave, and pop. Popshop feeds the hungry with a variety of synthetic appetizers that quickly appeal to the refined tastes of electro connoisseurs thanks to their original flair.
The positive reception soon attracted the attention of Hamburg-based label Raygun, which signed him in 2002 for the album «Salon Bizarre». The record climbed to No. 1 in several respected charts, including De:Bug and Groove Magazine (Germany). It also featured the video clip «Role Model», which aired on the program Electronic Beats on VIVA Germany. The following year, Popshop released his third album «The Distance Between Us», which helped spread his reputation across the Atlantic, leading to two live concerts in Montréal in 2004. In April 2007, his fifth album «New Bones» was released via the label Alpinechic. One year later, a major highlight followed: internationally acclaimed UK band Zoot Woman invited Popshop to support them on their Swiss tour in 2008. That same year, the acclaimed EP «Plaisir Noir» was released on Zurich’s renowned Stattmusik label. In spring 2010, Popshop returned with the album «A WARM PLACE WITHOUT MEMORY», which included the striking music video for «Basic Life Support». The refined work earned a TV licensing deal (Best-of CH:Filmszene). The elaborate and costly 16 video productions created in 2011 and 2012 were released together with an audio album as a limited double digipak (DVD/CD) entitled «Visual Heart Blood», distributed by Timezone in Germany.
In the following years, Martin Akeret focused on building his band Smooth Attack, which achieved several milestones in the Swiss indie scene, including reaching the semifinals of the MyCoke Soundcheck Contest. He also produced several collaborations with female vocalists, including the single «Until We’re Grown» with Dallan, which made it into the daytime rotations of SRF Virus and Radio 105. Most recently, Popshop returned to Raygun Records in Hamburg with a unique funky pop-electro-neo-Detroit album titled «GEOMETRY FOR BROKEN PEOPLE» – ten vibrantly colorful tracks featuring Popshop’s rhythmically layered synthesizer soundscapes and Acid-303 textures. His latest EP «MODERN LONELY TRUTH» was first released on vinyl in 2024 and is now available as a digital/streaming release (May 2025) on Winterthur-based label World Wide Web Records, which successfully publishes vinyl records internationally and distributes them via KMA60 in Berlin.
www.popshop.cc
