Imara Vinyl, CD & Tape 4 Items

Heiko Voss has earned near mythical status as a torchbearer for the emotional, deeply felt and quietly radical style of electronic music. The blissed-out radiance of his Kompakt Pop single, “I Think About You” remains one of the label catalog highlights and a stellar run of collaborative singles as Schaeben & Voss; others might know him for his stewardship of the excellent, much-underrated Firm imprint. But 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. “Although it’s not, 3:30 Minutes To Live feels like my debut album,” Voss reflects. “All releases before were more song sketches or electronic dance tracks.” 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. “If you constantly feel a little bit like you’re in love while writing and producing your music – simply because of the sound of the synth flowing warmly and gently through the room, or because the sequence of notes awakens something in you, or even a randomly arising groove in the loop of a guitar lick makes you shout, ‘Ha!!’ – then it usually becomes a beautiful song,” Voss nods. “Those moments make me happy.”

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.

A download code is included.

Originally released in 1977, American soul-funk-R&B group Greenflow’s Solutions is one of those rare marvels – a privately pressed soul-funk record that lives up to its mystique, an album whose magic is matched by its seemingly unknown provenance – where did this gem appear from, and how did it magic itself into being?

There isn’t too much to know about Solutions. Greenflow was the Californian vision of Art Greene, a trombone player and singer who formed the group sometime in the mid 1970s with his sister, vocalist Eleanora. They dutifully played the circuit, blasting out R&B numbers and originals in clubs. The group also took part in United Services Organizations (USO) tours to perform for US military deployed over the world – one tour, in 1976, took them to Japan. One of the members of Greenflow for that tour was bass player Rick Bozzo, who also worked with Meatloaf in his early years, when the latter was the young Marvin Lee Aday, in the group Popcorn Blizzard.

Bozzo doesn’t appear on Solutions, which was recorded after Greenflow’s Japanese tour, but for the album session the line-up does feature Allan Talbert on sax and Joe Banks on trumpet, both of whom, it appears, had connections with jazz organ player, Wattstax musical director and Inner City and Parlour Records owner, George Semper; Talbert, it seems, was also in one of Arthur Lee’s early bands, before the Lee formed legendary psych-pop gang Love. So, there are some heavyweight players here – but the real test is what’s hiding deep in the grooves.

Solutions is a mercurial album, one of rare charm and spirit. Some might already know one of the album’s key cuts, the deep, sensual “I Gotcha”, with its winding ‘doo doo doo’ melodies, from its inclusion on Numero Group’s WTNG 89.9FM: Solid Bronze compilation; lush and lithe, it’s a dream spirit of a song. “No Other Life Without You” is a sweet swoon, a slow burning boy-girl duet; “Sugar Daddy” is a funked-up streetwise prowl; “Every Single Time I Dream” is a lover’s vision, with a sly, snakecharming flute writhing through the verses before the song opens out with gentle droplets of tinkling Rhodes.

Solutions fades out with the lush AOR soul of “I Wanna Hold You”, a righteous drift of longing and languor. Long out of print, selling for upwards of 300€ on the rare occasions that an original copy actually surfaces, and only previously reissued on CD in Japan, as part of Yusuke Ogawa’s legendary Deep Jazz Reality series, Imara’s public service of 2021 is making Solutions available again for the discerning buyer, burnished to a gorgeous shine thanks to Jörg Burger’s incomparable mastering.

A download code is included.

The second release of Michael Mayer’s IMARA imprint – the self-titled debut by Juliana Martínez, recording as Servicio al Cliente – is exactly the kind of unexpected and quixotic experience you’d want from a label run by a core member of the Kompakt family. In its six gorgeous songs, Martínez teases out both joy and melancholy, her sweet pop melodies set against a backdrop of intimate, gentle, yet beautifully brave arrangements for beats and electronics.

Now based in Berlin, Martínez grew up in Colombia, the daughter of a Colombian mother and Uruguayan father, both psychiatric doctors, from whom she learned a thing or two about the joys of creativity: “My mother especially believed music had no boundaries in what it can do for your brain and soul. Like sort of what sport does to your body.” Martínez attended an all-girl Catholic school, but she also took private music lessons, from which she was expelled “since I composed melodies instead of rehearsing.” In retrospect, this experience reads like a sign of things to come.

After studying law at university, including postgraduate studies in Spain, Martínez decided to change things up: she’d already been playing in a group called Las Palabras Correctas (The Right Words), and eventually found herself embedded in a community of friendship with other artists who “always made songs and art and shared with each other in what we called the ‘Ambassadors of Colombian Music,’ a name taken from a popular Colombian TV show. These friends kept me involved and interested in my keyboards and songs.”

The lovely songs on Servicio al Cliente came to Michael Mayer via an unsolicited demo – “there was no Soundcloud or Dropbox link,” he recalls, “but a beautifully designed website containing an mp3 player. The slightly surreal artwork in combination with Servicio al Cliente’s heartwarming, somehow naive music instantly broke my heart.” There is indeed something deeply moving about these songs, possessed as they are of an uncanny charm, full of ticking rhythm patterns, levitating organ drones and gentle, luscious keyboard patterns. Above it all, Martínez’s voice sails through the air, her delightful Sprechstimme filled with offhand confidence. “It sounds like something that I’ve always known,” Mayer marvels, “like an old forgotten friend or a childhood memory that pops up in a dream.”

Servicio al Cliente reaches us fully formed, the complexities of Colombian life etched deep within its DNA. Its surface sweetness, the sensual sashay and sway of melodies like “La mujer que bailó con el diablo” or the opening “Romántico”, betrays a deeper sense of longing that inhabits the songs’ folds, evidence of Martínez’s sharp, smart awareness of the work of memory, a kind of happy-sad splendor. “I feel my music is full of a South American nostalgia,” she agrees, “and is a try to recall a wider understanding of reality which Colombia forces you to have. A bittersweet irony where most things are simply possible. I try (for) my music to sound like this feeling.” And indeed, it was in a moment of great loss and sadness that Martínez decided to share her music: “It was only when my father passed away that I pushed myself to write to Michael with my songs.”

“And Michael replied back.

Michael Mayer’s Imara imprint is proud to announce 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. Named after the ‘Schlammpeitzger’ or Weather Loach, a fish that breathes through its intestines, moves through substrate, and is surprisingly sensitive to changes in barometric pressure – hence its name – Schlammpeitziger is a similarly remarkable, singular creature.