On the 85-year-old pianoforte a mezza coda, which was in the Berlin house of Anne and Moritz von
Oswald stands, Carlo Heller, born in Amsterdam in 1998, grew up in Cologne and has been
years living in Berlin, recently recorded his first record. It bears the distinctive
factual title »Recorded« and includes nine short pieces.

These are, from the first to the last composition, hermetic meditations on a
State of being that moves between wakefulness and sleep, the so-called hypnagogic
Moment for which there is the beautiful expression “sognare ad
ochi aperti” – dreaming with open eyes. The hypnagogic state describes the last
Moments of consciousness before the person transitions from wakefulness to sleep, and in
with which he can imagine and sometimes even control melodies, sounds and compositions.
The attempt to grasp these dreamed works can fail, it
requires a certain imagination to capture these dreams or thoughts that are dreamed or thought
to reconstruct musical structures upon waking up, to give them precisely that shape
that had previously been dreamed.

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

Max Dax