Synthpop album by Michi Heinkel: The synthesizer shimmers frostily

The summer of 1981 was pretty bad. It remained wet and cool even in sun-drenched Munich: “While in 1980 the absolute highest air temperature was measured at 34.5 degrees Celsius, in 1981 it was only 29.4 degrees Celsius.” Egon Dheus, then director of the Munich Statistical Office, wrote in his report that there was only a lower maximum value in 1978. Munich didn't record a single hot or tropical day that year.

Phil Collins' “In the Air Tonight” and “Checkered Love” by Kim Wilde were playing on the radio. Somewhere in the Bavarian capital, Michael Heinkel was sitting in front of his Roland System 100, an analogue and modular synthesizer, and turning the knobs.

Like so many at that time, when musical instruments from companies like the Japanese manufacturer Roland became cheaper and the industry made the emerging synthpop hype possible in the first place. Heinkel did not contribute much to his international commercial breakthrough. Others achieved great fame with this. Heinkel's fame was limited to Munich, where he hung out in the nightlife in places like the “Dance Bar Großenwahn”. Several photos prove this in the facsimile tome that the makers of the 80s pop culture magazine Elaste published last year.

Michael Heinkel: “Own works 1980-1983” (Elaste/Compost/Believe)

Elaste Records, in turn, are now releasing for the first time an album of the electronic sound experiments that Heinkel tinkered with in his home studio in the early 1980s, a contemporary musical history that sounds quite idiosyncratic. He recorded a complete album under the profane title “Eigenwerke 1980-1983”. This is now only being published at the insistence of two colleagues, Andreas Dorau and Ralf Hertwig, former drummers of Palais Schaumburg.

Michi Heinkel's music has aged well. Perhaps their former obscurity was due to the fact that Heinkel lived and went out in Munich and not in the well-known electronic circles of Düsseldorf, Hamburg or West Berlin, where synthpop bands had it easier thanks to better infrastructure. In any case, the music Heinkel extracted from his System 100 in the early 1980s disappeared into a drawer, where the cassettes and tapes were at least reasonably safe over the decades.

You can read about the fact that he later sold the synthesizer he used to make music to the producer and soundtrack specialist Harold Faltermeyer on Heinkel's newly filled Instagram account.

You can also learn there that Faltermeyer also composed “Axel F” with Heinkel’s System 100, better known as the theme song for the action comedy “Beverly Hills Cop” with Eddie Murphy in the lead role. Heinkel's own tracks could also sometimes be imagined as soundtracks. The two-minute film dedicated to the plastic chair “Monobloc” with its crazy runs, for example, or the almost cinematographic “K70”, named after a Volkswagen limousine.

Heinkel's piece "Spielautomat" actually jangles around much like one. His ode to “Summer 81 (Beautiful Views)”, to come back to it, seems frosty in keeping with the temperatures thanks to the cool minimal synth sound - despite the babble of outdoor pool voices in the background.

Other tracks sound feverishly excited to shimmeringly melodic, as if the only thing missing was the vocals for an NDW hit. But they are all purely instrumental, only in the very last one does a Kraftwerk-like robot voice send greetings from Munich to Düsseldorf: “So close and yet so far”. Everyone who lives somewhere else can feel included, whether they were there in the 1980s or not.