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LP
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IMARA 004LP
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The very long-awaited debut album by Cologne's finest popstar Heiko Voss. Heiko Voss has earned near mythical status as a torchbearer for the emotional, deeply felt and quietly radical style of electronic music. With his new album, 3:30 Minutes To Live, released by Michael Mayer's label Imara, Voss returns after a long silence with a beautiful collection of songs that hymn heartbreak with a lusciously melodic touch. There is something definitive and newly confident in 3:30 Minutes To Live that has it feeling like a real statement of intent if compared to his earlier releases. Bunkering down in Teary Eyes Studio, Voss worked up somewhere between thirty and forty sketches of songs, which he whittled down to the twelve collected here, all of them situated in a unique space, but very much in accord with Voss's defining aesthetic, which he describes as "indie pop music with a lot of guitar, electronic elements and a great love for melancholic '80s synth-lines." Voss is sensitive to both variety and consistency -- 3:30 Minutes To Live sits together as an assured, vibrant collection of pop songs, but it's marked by all kinds of surprising incident, like the guitar solo that erupts out of "This Is My Life", or the acoustic guitar-led melancholy of the closing "This Summer". It's all borne of the alchemy of the studio process and the intimate romance of music-making. There's also a delicious tension between the push of the music, its melodic lushness and gliding, ballerina-like movement, and the darker currents that pull through Voss's lyrics, inspired by a "short, dramatic and toxic love affair." This may read like familiar terrain for a pop album, but the way Voss weaves language through both the extra-linguistic joys of music and the inarticulate speech of the heart somehow allows for direct communication that is simultaneously plain-spoken and deeply profound. "Say It" is a simple, devastatingly effective plaint of alienation; "She Wasn't Lonely" a simple portrait of everyday living set to chiming, clacking guitars, the music in the bridge taking astral flight as the titular character "lets herself go." A smart and sharp collection of songs that captures you with its gorgeous melodicism just as it blindsides you with its aching heart, 3:30 Minutes To Live is Heiko Voss at his most assured and open-hearted best.
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CD
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FIRM 002CD
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This is Cologne-based Heiko Voss' debut album whose childhood influences include: the Elmi-Radio-Show, die Ärzte, Falco, punk rock, Iron Maiden, Prince, Michael Jackson and the Pixies. Including a lot of techno, Heiko's musical perception can be seen as a walk-in wardrobe with many drawers, all of them half open and ready to be of service to him. Two Sides starts with talking a lot of crap and with that, he paves the way for the following 19 tracks to break through these borders while pushing everyday clichés regardless of morals or scruples. Heiko Voss harkens back to a time when FM Gold ruled the airwaves. When easy-going melodies slouched through your radio, skulking to a loose beat and singing with aplomb. While updated with digital detail, Two Sides could well be an update of Steely Dan's Aja or an album's worth of Boz Scaggs reworks. It's right there in that swinging backbeat and that mellow gold bassline. Except instead of the cocaine-dusted studio decks of 1970s L.A., we have the vegan-clean laptops of 2005's Köln. It's all super-cool and done with sang-froid, so lean that seat back and dial into the new sound of strut, because Mr. Voss is in the booth.
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12"
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KOM POP003EP
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"You are drunk, extremely excited and you shout: 'music is a command!'. The idea is slowly ascending together with the warm air, condenses and falls back down in black threads on dyed hair. The result is a felt which I read as: 'the snare has to sound very dry in order to hear the machine. And the guitar has to remind you of this other track so that no one is alone anymore. And the bass drum has to be loud, if not, it doesn't work. And the more artificial the voice, the more you'll be able to change, to transform. And this is music!' Ten minutes later: the glasses on the table are bursting almost on command, thus forming a lake of toxic colours. A heart opens and a hot laughter predominates the scene. A dancer enters the stage and starts dancing in the grim light. A bit of the real reality is looming from the background. We won't look but what we do is going down under the table. Slowly, we are getting human at the crack of the dawn outside. 'Have you got a spare fag', you ask. And I say 'yes!'."
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