Heiko Maile and Julian Demarre – ‘NEOSTALGIA’

Track By Track: Heiko Maile and Julian Demarre take us through the tracks that make up their latest album, NEOSTALGIA

Release Date: September 6, 2024

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, vocoders, and tracks pushing the six-minute mark.

Follow along as Heiko Maile and Julian Demarre take us through the tracks that make up NEOSTALGIA.

1. ‘Patience’

This piece became essential for the final scene of a feature film, the crime drama KILLERMAN (the track is called ‘Leaving New York’ on the OST), giving closure to the story arc. For our album we enrich it with new atmospheric sounds, additional parts and a new melodic sibling in the second half. Heiko takes out his Roland CR-78 for “Freur vibes,” while Solina strings and synthetic drops from a VCS3 (aka “the Putney” as it was called in the 1970s) add ethereal ambience in the middle section. Julian discovers the beauty of randomness with a melody in the background.

2. ‘Reflection (Dark Horses)’

Another track that got used in the feature film KILLERMAN and changed quite a bit over time. Originally there was just this ebb-and-flow feeling, a slow breather dark instrumental with a yearning melody in the middle. In this new version Heiko puts a foreboding drum machine at the front, an electronic choir-like atmosphere follows… which leads us to considerations of a drone pilot on a mission, featuring the voice of director and performer Malik Bader. The pilot weighs a big conundrum in an unsettling world: how to be a decent human being when your job commands you to be the opposite. A fairy tale of good and evil comes to life in this dystopian sonic landscape.

3. ‘Number Stations’

Mysterious radio stations were used during the Cold War (roughly from the 1950s to the 1990s) to transmit coded messages between secret service organizations and their agents abroad. Encrypted messages broadcast as strings of letters or numbers. The recipient had a device (or book) to decode the columns of letters and numbers into words and sentences. Growing up in West Germany at that time, we heard these seemingly senseless yet innocent sounding announcements of numbers and letters throughout our youth as we swept through radio frequencies, wondering what they really meant. It felt adventurous. Thanks to technical advances, these transmissions became obsolete, but for us these voices, radio signals and codes have lost none of their mysterious effect.

4. ‘Serengeti Ostinato’

Gabriel Le Mar and the ghost of Holger Czukay meet famous zoologist and animal conservationist Bernhard Grzimek in Africa. A pulsating electro collage with a cheerful melody paying homage to our childhood when we watched Grzimek’s tv documentaries about the Serengeti while wishing we were really there (likely this was past our bedtime). Efforts have been made to capture the wonder of untamed nature and excitement of exploring the wild. Support our field trip expenses and buy this record.

5. ‘Universal Universe’

This track emerged from a discussion about Stephen Hawking. It attempts to illustrate Hawking’s view of the world, in which he brings together concepts like free will, pre-determination, and what it might have to do with a divine force and the laws of physics. Our modest contribution for aspiring philosophers and astrophysicists.

6. ‘Helios’

We sent a lot of sketched ideas to the editor of the movie KILLERMAN, based on material we had gathered for an album over some time. ‘Helios’ was one of these – originally a quiet, meditative piece which transformed as it found its role in the film. It turned into a piece of seething revenge, driven by a purpose. Note Heiko’s unusual drum loop driving the song with a relentless pulse – made purely from medical recordings of heartbeats. When we went back to working on our own album the track evolved once again: added is a second part that answers the question of the first. The instrumental is now earthier, more hallucinogenic, it features a grim John-Carpenter-ish synthesizer and a melody that seemingly tries to fit as many notes as possible into two bars.

7. ‘Melancholia’

In 2020 Julian was about to go on the road for a few months. So he had to say goodbye to his YAMAHA CS60 COMBO SYNTHESIZER (1977). He switched it on and played. Within a few minutes there was a melody and a left hand part… not recording this was not an option. The demo made Heiko pull out his trusty Korg PE-1000 POLYPHONIC ENSEMBLE (1976) and had him come up with “piano-like” rhythms going through a weird filter circuit named ‘Traveller.’ Both of these instruments could only exist in the 1970s, some of the first japanese polyphonic keyboards designed to create the sound of tomorrow. There is something very inviting about organs and synths from that time, you just sit down and something magical happens.

Heiko had the idea of going further into Krautrock with Jaki Liebezeit in mind, so he invites Torsten Kamps (vocoder/flute), Ran Levari (drums) and Ingo Ito (flanger guitars) featuring a lose feel drum track. We loved the idea for an intro so much that we record another intro before the intro. Heiko describes this piece as the core of the album: “without this track the album would not exist” he says, “‘MELANCHOLIA’ was always driving us to finish the album.”

8. ‘Between Trees’

First there was the idea of using real or the re-imagined sound of trees and their movement triggered by light wind. Heiko wanted to leave as much room as possible for this atmospheric setting. This piece is about the ideal of a quiet place in nature, far away from all the noise of civilization. It is about the sense of openness between tree branches and the safety we might feel with stoic trees being around us. Trees that defy weather for decades or even centuries. The flow of the track might bring back memories of places you have once discovered and ever since wanted to visit again.

9. ‘Hollow Earth’

This instrumental had its beginnings as a sketch for a tv series set in a mysterious environment with a sinister undertone. Shortly before the commission we had also been discussing Golding’s Lord Of The Flies. Much of the glowing sun sound is Julian’s Korg LAMBDA string machine. Heiko comes up with a hypnotic sequence and a beat for the flow and short backwards loops to make it strangely organic, while Ran Levari’s drum fills underscore the pulse. Guitarist Ingo Ito and drummer percussionist Thomas Saup then take the final segment once more into a different direction.

10. ‘Eternal Drift’

The melody and chord sounds on this instrumental (Korg LAMBDA) would likely feel at home on a 70s or early 80s film soundtrack. Heiko gives it context with contrasting elements sent through an ancient spring reverb, such as metronome clicks, a strange sounding Vox Humana choir and drums that sound like they come straight from a Can album. The melody seems to say goodbye to an old friend, the octaves getting lower and lower as a pulse appears. While recording the demo, Julian thought of ‘One of Our Submarines’ and early Ultravox. At some point the mood shifts to free-flowing ambient music.

(Clockwise from top left) Heiko working on the Killerman soundstage, cuts and crossfades, classic 80s sampler, Heiko Maile and Julian Demarre at pre-mix in LA, and on-the-spot re-edit of a scene for final mix.

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