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viewing 1 To 3 of 3 items
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IMARA 005LP
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Michael Mayer's IMARA imprint announces a reissue of German electronica maestro Schlammpeitziger's second album, Freundlichbaracudamelodieliedgut. Originally released in 1996 by Köln's A-Musik label, it was the first Schlammpeitziger release to signal to a much wider audience that there was something very special going on in the music of Jo Zimmermann, the mastermind behind Schlammpeitziger. And while he's subsequently gone on to release a further eight albums for labels like Sonig, Pingipung, and Bureau B, Freundlichbaracudamelodieliedgut is where it really all started for this most singular musician, illustrator and performance artist. Like all Schlammpeitziger's music, Freundlichbaracudamelodieliedgut is overflowing with melody. Using the simplest of set-ups -- much of his early music was made with Casio keyboards -- Zimmermann magics entire worlds of joy and melancholy. The nine songs here are both rich tributes to the joys of the everyday, and surreal fantasias. Zimmermann's unique signature is everywhere on Freundlichbaracudamelodieliedgut -- simply put, no one else makes music quite as lovely and incandescent as this. The album's initial release coincided with an explosion of interest in the music coming out of Köln. This was a unique moment -- one where pop, techno, house, ambience, avant-gardism, musique concrete, heavy DSP, and all kinds of other creative phenomena got muddied up in the "general jelly" of Köln's fast-moving, spirited musical communities. Zimmermann was closely aligned with the music coming out of the A-Musik and Sonig labels -- a tightly-knit collection of artists centered around the A-Musik record store, making all kinds of weird and wonderful music, from the electronica of Mouse On Mars to the compositions of Marcus Schmickler, from the electro-acoustics of C-Schulz and Hajsch to the digitalia of FX Randomiz. Zimmermann himself would collaborate with the latter on an album under the name Holosud; friends such as Mouse On Mars and Kompakt's Reinhard Voigt turned up on Freundlichbaracudamelodieliedgut's remix EP. Here, then, is one of the loveliest albums of its era, a pop-electronics album of serious play, one as moistly melancholy as it is melodically riveting. Freundlichbaracudamelodieliedgut is rare beauty indeed.
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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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IMARA 001LP
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Imara present a reissue of Ofege's debut album Try And Love, originally released in 1973. Music history is full of miracles and wonders. Ofege is certainly one of them. It's quite easy to imagine this band's story turning into a movie. In 1973, a bunch of teenagers with an abundance of passion for music got their hands on the official school band's instruments and jammed away. Inspired by the psychedelic rock sounds and guitar wizardry of Carlos Santana, Jeff Beck, or Led Zeppelin they wrote an album worth of songs and decided to have them recorded. The goal was to press them on vinyl -- one copy for each band member -- as a souvenir of the fun times they had together before their school careers would rip them apart. Shortly after, they found themselves with a major record label contract in their pockets, propelled to stardom in their hometown of Lagos/Nigeria and soon across the whole country. Three studio albums followed in the years to come. The unavoidable enviousness and bickering over "who's the true band leader, who's gets the most love letters" and such led to alterations of Ofege's line-up and subsequently to its decay in 1978. With the turn of the century, Ofege's coming-of-age drama has fortunately found a new generation of fans across the globe and will certainly continue to do so with this dearly needed reissue. It's true what they say: Life's writing the best stories.
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