Carlo Heller, born in Amsterdam in 1998, grew up in Cologne and has lived in Berlin for nine years, recently recorded his first record on the 85-year-old pianoforte a mezza coda, which is located in the Berlin house of Anne and Moritz von Oswald. It has the decidedly matter-of-fact title "Recorded" and includes nine short pieces.

From the first to the last composition, these are hermetic meditations on a state of being that moves between wakefulness and sleep, the so-called hypnagogic moment, for which there is the beautiful Italian expression "sognare ad ochi aperti" - dreaming with open eyes. The hypnagogic state describes the last moments of consciousness before a person passes from wakefulness to sleep, and in which he can imagine, and sometimes even control, melodies, sounds and compositions. Attempts to grasp these dreamed works can fail; a certain amount of imagination is required to reconstruct these musical structures dreamed or imagined in the twilight when waking up, to give them exactly the form that was previously dreamed.

This is also why Carlo Heller insists that the nine compositions, whose central track, which connects the A and B sides, is called "Halbtraum" (is it a coincidence that Halbtraum rhymes with nightmare?), are improvisations. The other pieces have more clandestine titles, as if he had ventured too far out of hiding with "Halbtraum": "A Few Things", "Fewer Things", or "Unmentioned". Only those who listen superficially might initially suspect a contradiction in this statement; the music seems too restrained, too hermetic, too cohesive to be improvisations. If you listen closely, however, you will recognize exactly that in them: they are free improvisations on things that were previously dreamed very specifically, but also things that slipped away. In this sense, these first recorded and published pieces by Carlo Heller are, in the best sense of the word, nine attempts to grasp nocturnal clarity in the waking state – in improvisation, with full concentration and focus.

Max Dax