HEIKO MAILE + JULIAN DEMARRE - NEOSTALGIA

Heiko Maile and Julian Demarre, both pop musicians and film composers, have been collaborating since the mid-90s album classic "MEANWHILE" by Camouflage. While Heiko continued pursuing the perfect pop song, they both landed their first feature film score gigs. In recent years while working together on several films, they felt they should create something for themselves - a love letter to 70s and 80s electronic music. With some esoteric 1970s keyboards from Japan designed for the sound of tomorrow they have now recorded an album for all the days after tomorrow. The result is the genre-bending album NEOSTALGIA, a unique blend of various electronic styles and 1970s Krautrock with pieces featuring intros/outros, flutes, flanger guitars and vocoders, and tracks pushing the six-minute mark.

About the origins of NEOSTALGIA By Heiko Maile and Julian Demarre

Stuttgart / Los Angeles, Spring 2024

It's no secret that we love electronic music. Bebe and Louis Barron were before our time, Oskar Sala's abstract sounds for 'The Birds' still resonated as far as Trumansburg, NY, when Bob Moog, together with Herbert Deutsch, introduced his groundbreaking synthesizer modules. Meanwhile, in distant Japan, IkutarÅ Kakehashi built his first rhythm machine. Later iterations would then become very important electronic instruments for us. Born in a decade in which the term ˜synthesizer' rarely came up in a West German household, especially in conversation with a 12-year-old, my parents’ music-loving acquaintance came to visit at just the right moment. This led me to a completely new world, to never-before-heard sounds of a Bach arrangement by Wendy Carlos and to, at least at the time, futuristic-sounding pop songs like ˜Popcorn' and 'Magic Fly'.

Growing up as teenagers with Krautrock, Pink Floyd and Roxy Music were an essential experience that led us to the cool sounds of John Foxx, the cross-genre electronics of the Yellow Magic Orchestra and the artistic radicalism of Conrad Schnitzler. In general, our youth in West Germany was shaped by the Cold War, which gave rise to the 'no future' zeitgeist. In this context, the sounds and images of Ridley Scott's 'Blade Runner' and the esoteric sound experiments of Brian Eno with Robert Fripp had a powerful impact. The DIY attitude of many post-punk bands from Europe such as The Human League or Liaisons Dangereuses, who produced their music exclusively with electronic instruments, was the deciding factor to try it out ourselves.

We had worked together for a good part of the 1990s. Years later, when each of us lived and worked in different cities, it was by chance that we both experienced a similar development in our first attempts to create music for a film. This was such a mind-altering experience that ultimately led us both to the wonderful craft of filmscore composing. Creating music for moving images opened us up to a wider range of expression, making us more aware of the relationship between song, sound and narrative. All of this can be found in NEOSTALGIA, the album being a collection of diverse influences of electronic music over the past 50 years. A style book of sorts, in which sometimes contradictory elements and references are deliberately combined, superimposed or quoted as part of a collage. Not as a corny exercise, but as our personal expression how we feel thinking about the past and the present: a homage to our musical influences, but also a commentary on the present state of things.

After losing track of each other for a while, we got together again in 2018 which then led to working on music for the crime drama KILLERMAN directed by Malik Bader. In our work routine between Stuttgart and Los Angeles (we usually greeted each other with 'hello from the nighsthift', a multitude of compositions, textures and soundscapes were created long before the first roll of film was shot. When we had finished work on the film, we realized there were so many ideas that we had put aside and just wanted to keep working on, so we did. Like everyone else in 2020, all of a sudden we found ourselves in the midst of a global pandemic and weeks of isolation at home, and so NEOSTALGIA also serves as our personal Corona diary. We got interrupted in between by film projects, so it took a little longer to get to the finish line. Which makes us all the happier today to finally hold this album in our hands.

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Tracklisting

A1 Patience

A2 Reflection (Dark Horses)

A3 Number Stations

A4 Serengeti Ostinato

A5 Universal Universe

B1 Helios

B2 Melancholia

B3 Between Trees

B4 Hollow Earth

B5 Eternal Drift

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