The traditional stereotype of your average techno producer goes something like this: pill-popping, skirt-chasing empty vessel that makes a lot of noise (alright Sven?).
28-year-old German Johannes Heil is an exception to that rule. A producer since the mid-90s, Heil’s impressive back catalogue has one common theme – darkness. Well, maybe two common themes: darkness and clattering, paranoid techno. But on his new album Freak R Us, the darkness has been replaced by something else: not exactly light, but a lighter touch.
“I worked on it for three or four months,” he says. “Some of the tracks were out already (on German label Weave). The vision for this was clear: I wanted to make my homage to the clubs, to where I come from, my passion. It’s full of positive energy – and it’s very different to my last records – they were darker. And on the last one, there was poetry – it was all very dark. I think I was trying to change things through my music back then. I thought things were going in the wrong direction in the world, in politics and spiritually…and I wanted to help change things with my music. I was angry.”
Heil speaks with a passion and an almost naïve honesty that would sound comical coming from anyone else’s mouth.
“There has been a change,” he admits, “now I want to give people a good time, to be positive as opposed to negative. I wanted to get back to the root of things on this record and to spread some fun. I think it’s like good against evil, there are different ways of making change happen. My mind is changing. I am a sun child; I am rediscovering my
If one track sums up his new perspective, it’s ‘Tree Of Life’ – a bizarre and brilliant Green Velvet-gone-Lord Of The Rings stomp, with Heil reciting cryptic verse over the top.
“The lyrics were inspired by a book I read on Kabbalah’s Tree Of Life,” he explains. “I thought it was quite magical and the way I made it is quite dark but quite positive.”
In terms of musical geography, Heil admits, Freaks R Us references Chicago and Detroit, the Windy City’s rawness, the ferocity of the Motor City.
“I remember hearing Steve Poindexter’s ‘Work That Motherfucker’ when I was younger and thinking, ‘Wow’. I had a Casio keyboard and understood from that record that what he did was programme the drums, the rhythm and the vocal – so I knew what he was doing. That was a big influence. I love what Detroit and Chicago stand for; it’s about the stomach, the heart, and not so much the head. And records like Red Planet and the Underground Resistance were important.”
Certainly, it’s easy to imagine an angry young Johannes getting off on UR’s politics-on-a-platter records like ‘Riot’. But fittingly for a man sporting a shiny new outlook on life, ‘Freaks R Us’ contains a couple of genuine surprises. The closer, ‘The 1st’ is a simple, string-drenched piece made with Ralf Hildenbeutel, former EyeQ boss and Uncle Sven’s production partner, who has just come out of retirement. The other is ‘Lost’, a fantastic slice of machine music with soul: just like them funny Kraftwerk lads used to make.
“For me, it's not that easy to make a track like that,” Heil concludes. “I remember making it, it was a sunny day, and then the summer rain came. It was so beautiful. And I just felt like the music was moving through me, I was the pen. So I can’t force this music – when it happens, it happens.”