Sogar

minimal

Jürgen Heckel, also known as Sogar, was born in Nuremberg in 1970 and has been living in Paris for 14 years and is now located in Munich. He started playing music when he was 19 and became part of several groups as a guitarist. He then got interested in creating and processing sound in unconventional ways. Thus Jürgen manipulates accidental sounds to create light and fragile melodic textures. The sources of these arrangements are guitars as well as sounds from mixing consoles, amplifiers, cables or other aural finds. These sounds are then reworked on a computer to become a music made of cracklings, and rich melodic oscillations exploring the extremes of the sound spectrum by associating acoustic technique and software. Sogar’s music is formed of richly layered textures, a delicate transmutation of static and formerly “nonmusical” sounds, a music where the melodic elements are created out of particular sounds of uncertain origin. All elements in this music slide and cover one against each other, running into itself yet still keeps a very controlled balance, while creating myriads of peaceful new lifeforms in the process. This music call attention by the constant wish to escape from any attempt of qualification or any act of nomination. Extremely dense and abstract as much as it becomes impossible to apply a classical epithet like “melancholic”, “sad”, “happy”, “beautiful”, etc, the music of Sogar is no less than a source of a new musical grammar. Witho...