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| Popmatters |
 When you listen to a Maximilian Hecker album, certain things are assured. The album will be beautiful in a fragile way, there will be sadness, and its worst flaw will be occasional dips into melodrama. I Am Nothing But Emotion, No Human Being, No Son, Never Again Son lives up to this formula despite being a departure in sound for Hecker.I Am Nothing But Emotion is a quiet, piano-based affair. The understated arrangements help move Hecker’s voice to the forefront. While his delicate vocals have always been captivating, the melodrama of the music, paired with the emotion in his voice (which, sonically, fall somewhere between Morrissey and Antony Hegarty) and lyrics, has been, on occasion, too much. On I Am Nothing, he reaches a much stronger equilibrium. Perhaps the most startling, out of character moment is on the opening track, “Blue Soldier Night”, which is delivered in a robotic female voice. This is nothing new, but it shows some levity that one wouldn’t expect from Hecker. Paradoxically, the song becomes that much more moving for that aspect, especially when the robot delivers the title line, “I am nothing but emotion”, which would sound simply insipid had it been delivered by Hecker....full text |
| Maximilian-hecker |
| »In 2008, I reached a point at which I was no longer able to find any satisfaction in my career. I felt that, since the decision I had taken seven years earlier to make music my profession, I had seldom been successful in expressing genuine emotion in concerts or studio recordings. I felt myself to be constricted in a corset of perfectionism and conventions – partly self-inflicted, partly dictated by outsiders. Retrospectively, I realized that a large part of what I had achieved on stage and in the studio had been only a rudimentary excerpt of my feelings, that the channel to my soul felt as if it had been obstructed in such recordings and live performances. It was a series of cathartic and at the same time traumatic experiences – including my encounter with a Japanese woman called Nana in Tokyo in November 2008 – that heralded for me what I call the »decomposing mode«: in order to »survive«, I started to destroy all the suffocating elements in my environment – I liberated myself from narcissistic demands, stopped shaving, wore jogging pants as everyday clothing, distanced myself from women, even from the idea of finding true love one day. I began to make street music again, or rather, to »meditate publicly«, up to six hours at a time, just singing if no one was specifically listening to me – for this was the only way to keep open the path to my soul. And eventually, I began to record my new songs at home, shortly after composing them, using the simplest equipment (often only one room microphone). Exposed to all the street noise and »dirt«. Holding on to the moment of inspiration. My soul, my pure emotions immortalised on tape. All rational processes that before had deadened and delayed my feeling – such as arranging, determining the instrumentation, writing succinct lyrics (the lyrics on the album derive largely from a stream of consciousness emanating directly from my heart, improvised at the moment of recording) and finally the professional recording – these were eliminated. Just the essence remains: the pure emotion, the pure, artistic innocence.«...full text |
| Musicalcoma |
| “New and 6th album by Maximilian Hecker. In 2008, Maximilian Hecker reached a point at which he was no longer able to find any satisfaction in his career. He felt that, since the decision he had taken seven years earlier to make music his profession, he had seldom been successful in expressing genuine emotion in concerts or studio recordings. Hecker felt himself to be constricted in a corset of perfectionism and conventions – partly self-inflicted, partly dictated by outsiders....full text |
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