These are the Demo Tapes Heiko Maile made at home using a rudimentary techno set up of a 2 track Stereo Cassette recorder, a drum machine and sequencer, with live instruments played over the top of that. It was all recorded in analog and then the tapes were filed away and have been resurrected and edited and brought back to life by our current state of the art digital technology. This is the sound of Heiko learning how to become the musician he needed to be in Camouflage.
The Demo tape opens with Beat For Ikutaro (Tape 52) that is an ambient techno dance tune with a cool drum loop that has synth sounds built around it and it sounds somewhere between Yello and Kraftwerk.
Vega Drive (Tape 13) certainly has a bit of the Suicide style motoric beat and keyboards that almost recall Visage's Fade to grey.
Heizungskeller (Tape 66) almost sounds like it made of odd noises recorded from shortwave radio with an added tone and odd keyboard sounds as if the bleeps and noises could be a message in morse code.
Ear Piercer (Tape 48) lives up to its title with some piercing sounds and a marching bass drum loop with buried vocals that are more textural than anything.
Murky Water (Tape 02) has some computer games sounds and a cool repeating keyboard part with some slightly offbeat sounding bass noises to make a weird almost underwater sound.
Floating Bottles (Tape 04) as the sounds of spinning bottles a drum pattern and some dreamlike synths creating the soundtrack to some sort of weird German sci-fi film.
Spoken Letter (Tape 75) has what sounds like a Japanese woman reading a letter while all sorts of sounds build around her quite repetitive voice that make her reading sound full of foreboding for whatever she is talking about, mainly making sure this can never be mistaken for a Harold Faltermeyer tune.
Wavy RX (Tape 57) builds some cool wavy synth sounds around the drum pattern. Nachtspaziergang (Tape 40) uses the sort of Drum Pattern that Metal Boys had experimented with and adds flourishes of Synths in a similar way to how Hans Lundin was doing around the same time, as so often with this sort of ambient techno it sounds very filmic.
Grandma's Kitchen (Tape 29) sounds nothing like my Grandma's kitchen as that would have someone singing Oh How We Danced all the time on a loop, this is more in hock to Can than most Grans I know with a cool keyboard riff at its heart.
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Steam Engine (Tape 40) certainly has the chuff chuff chuff of a good engine going at full pelt as this tune motors down the tracks at you.
Bike Spokes (Tape 02) does sound like some Bike Spokes are being played and manipulated in places over the drum beat and odd synth sounds this builds the atmospherics nicely.
Fernsprecher (Tape 75) has all sorts of weird bleeps and crashes coming and going through this very brief track.
Submarines In Space (Tape 07) has the classic submarine noise at its core as a sense of foreboding and dread is built with weird almost quacking sounds and what sounds like an amplified metal sheet being shaken in places, I was waiting for someone to start shouting dive dive dive.
The album closes with Film Drei (Tape 09) a very sparse almost morse code style tapped almost xylophone sound, that synths slowly build around as what could be the end credits for a super weird German film roll and the drum machine helps to anchor things down.
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