SNACKBAR the Ambassador

Dive into the musical odyssey of Matthias König, an artist whose journey began in the most unexpected corner of the music scene. As a child of the southern German suburbs, where the sterile sounds of the mainstream dominated the living rooms, König found his first rebellion in the pan flute. What started as an innocent plastic toy, transformed under his fingers into a weapon of mass entertainment in the glitter world of German Schlager. 

While his peers were still struggling with their first guitar chords, the young teenager was already touring the Alpine region, with his debut album Mit der Panflöte um die Welt under his belt, on the commercial Tyrolis label – an experience that would later prove to be the perfect breeding ground for his later musical subversion. 

The real game-changer came in the form of a stack of worn-out cassette tapes, a birthday present from a school friend, taken from the worn-out record collection of his Harley-riding father. These DIY mixtapes, packed with Hendrix’s guitar magic, RHCP’s funk-punk explosions and Lee Scratch Perry’s revolutionary dub, were like a sonic bomb in König’s well-behaved music world. Exit Schlager prodigy, enter rebellious guitarist. With Libido Froid, his German-language answer to the American funk-punk movement, he infiltrated the South German underground circuit, culminating in a legendary support show for Swedish indie heroes Mando Diao.

After his exodus to Dutch soil in 2008, König emerged as a versatile artist. During his ArtEZ AKI art academy period in Enschede he studied autonomous art and developed boundary-blurring hybrids in the field of art, kinetic and sound as a driven sonic anarchist. 

In 2011 he dropped the limited collab EP REWIRE with composer Jamie Ross under the alias There is a Raft. His sound experiments resonated through the Hague art scene from 2013 onwards, where he, first as an active member of artist run initiative Locatie Z, later as co-founder and board member of the cultural stronghold WD4X, turned the established order upside down. 

As a radio DJ he provided lonely taxi drivers and other night animals who were still awake at night with eclectic midnight snacks under the moniker SNACKBAR FM on Radio Tonka. His space-filling multimedia installations have played in spaces ranging from the Tweede Kamer and K21 Den Haag to the Luftmuseum Amberg (D), supported by the Mondriaan Fund and Stroom Den Haag. 

The year 2020 marked the birth of his most daring incarnation: SNACKBAR the Ambassador. This alter ego is König’s ultimate middle finger with a big smile for genre purists – a brilliantly deranged fusion of his musical DNA. Live, he brings a hallucinatory cocktail of electronics, analogue instrumentation and yes, that iconic pan flute, which now sounds like an instrument from a parallel dimension. The result? A psychedelic rollercoaster of deconstructed folklore, electronic psych-polka and Latin beats that shakes both the underground and the mainstream to their foundations. 

SNACKBAR the Ambassador is not a nostalgia trip or an ironic nod to König’s past – it is a radical reinterpretation of his musical heritage, a sonic guerrilla attack that definitively blows up the boundaries between high and low culture.

SNACKBAR The Ambassador’s single Avocado is like a melodramatic love story, which playfully uses the relationship with an avocado as a metaphor. The (German!) lyrics combine humorous everyday observations with a critical reflection on the Western superfood hype. Musically, the piece is a mix of bossa, polka and cumbia, with electric guitar and a swinging tuba-like Moog bass. 

This single is a prelude to the upcoming album KomKomMerTijd, to be released end of 2025.

SNACKBAR the Ambassador was support to bands like Henge and Pachyman and played at festivals like Peel Slowly And See, Nacht van de Kaap, Hoogtevrees (all NL), Changeover (Serbia) and Monkey Week (Spain).

“SNACKBAR the ambassador is the alter ego of multidisciplinary artist Matthias König who grapples with his laptop and keyboards to deliver a party set that is a big beat in dub with adventures into krautrock and tripped out cumbia in a Day-Glo delivery. It bounces and its use of dub reverbs an adventure into sound adds another layer to the death disco of the party beats.” – John Robb @Louder Than War

“Essentially the alias of Den Haag resident and music experimentalist Matthias König, SNACKBAR The Ambassador thrives on a subtle charm that leaves the audience gasping in anticipation at what he’s going to play next (the wasp synthesizer? the cymbals? the guitar?) while eliciting a playful demeanour that breaks down any immediate barriers between artist and throng.” – Dom Gourlay @Under The Radar

“What he is doing with a.o. a guitar, keyboards, loops and a cowbell he calls ‘Psychedelic-Kraut-Cumbia-Tropical-German-Carnaval-Delight!!!’ Maybe not that bad of a description, because we don’t know either. He turns frantically on buttons, samples some vocals, creates beats that feel surreal and creates a kind of electronic psychedelia that one moment leans to cosmic house and a little later even towards electronic Sahara blues.” – Guy Peters @Enola

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