Jumpel is the solo project of Joachim Dürbeck — composer, producer and sound designer based in Cologne.

A drum kit, a piano without a teacher, four-track tape, a computer: a journey into sound that has never really stopped. The question was never about genre or form, but simpler: does it move, or doesn't it?

As a member of BONES, Dürbeck released records with EMI Electrola and performed hundreds of concerts across Europe. Later, as co-founder of the composer duo Dürbeck & Dohmen, he spent more than two decades writing music for film and television — work that earned multiple awards, among them the German Music Authors' Prize. Throughout, the question remained the same: how close can a sound get to something true?

That question also shaped his work as co-founder of Cinematique Instruments, where designing virtual instruments became a practice in itself — dissecting timbre, isolating texture, and understanding what a sound carries before it becomes music.

Jumpel distills all of this. Since 2007, the project has moved through ambient, downtempo and experimental electronica — music that works with reduction rather than accumulation, finding weight in silence and meaning in the moment just before a sound dissolves.

With Dürbeck & Dohmen no longer active as a creative partnership, Jumpel marks the beginning of a new era — open, uncertain, and deeply personal. It is a continuation of a journey that began long before film music, before commissions, before the structures of a professional life in music. A journey that was interrupted, or perhaps shaped, by the search for pop recognition as a band and by the fascination of working with moving images.

Jumpel returns to the question that was there from the beginning: what is music really about? Truth, integrity and soul — as something universal. Jumpel is a way of remembering that, and of continuing the journey with sound.

In 2026, Dürbeck founded Toneveld — a browser-based platform for sound instruments and listening culture, built on the same question: what happens when you give sound the space it needs?