loving

"To share and to increase the love, to let the soul speak through the music, is a feeling which can hardly be described with words. With "Loving", I want to embrace the whole world, because this journey to the origins of electronic dance music in between Modern Detroit, high tech Soul and House is coming from the very bottom of my heart." (Johannes Heil, 2010) What time is love? With this question, Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond - better known as "The KLF" - have o ffi cially introduced the acid- orientated second Summer of Love 1988. However, the answers to this question might be numerous as the number of people living on the earth. Some think that it is the Summer of 1967, where the Hippie movement had its peak, others may hope for the perfect love in 2525 or maybe the time of love is now, in the year 2010. Obviously, Johannes Heil belongs to the latter group. For more than fi fteen years, he is an essential part of the German Techno scene and - with his classics from the likes of "Paranoid Dancer" (Kanzleramt, 1998) or "Calling" (1999) - belongs to the acoustic long-term memory of Techno. However, in the last few years with his releases for Klang Elektronik, Anthony Rother's Datapunk label and several own imprints like JH Records, Metatron or, most recently, Shit happens, Johannes remained one of the guarantors for musical enhancements. With his eleventh studio album "Loving", Heil is taking stock of his 15 years of musical past, in a modern and at the same time traditional way. He uses in fl uences from Detroit House only super fi cially, the history of modern dance music that he tells is that of music as the universal language between all continents. So, one can fi nd African chants in a marching rhythm ("Hallelujah") as well as terri fi c pumping pizzicato strings ("The Ace"), hypnotically dance fl oor-binding sub bass runners like "To The Groove" or Samba percussion tracks with marching band citations ("Glockenspiel") and Detroit high tech House ("Freedom Of Heart") - all of them being equally part of the comprehensive vocabulary of... yes, love! After all, love as an emotional condition still feels the best in present tense.