HDK 39 † HETTA HONDA "Ihre Stimme war im Turm eingesperrt" CASSETTE

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WHITE CASSETTE / J-CARD / INSERT

Listen / Buy digital version here:  HETTA HONDA - Ihre Stimme war im Turm eingesperrt

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It will seem odd to you, but what we know about this HDK release is ... almost nothing!

It all started with the clearance of a vacant apartment in the city of Dusseldorf, Germany. The apartment had been vacant for a long time: the new owner decided to renovate it and get rid of what the previous tenant had left. That job was given to a friend who, knowing our insane fetishism for tapes, saved a box he had found in apartment's closet from trash. "There are a few tapes - he told us - maybe you, goofy punks, are interested". Oh gosh, we thought, they could be old C90s with cheesy albums by Phil Collins or Michael Bolton copied on it. But instead...

On the dusty lid of a shoe box "HETTA HONDA" was written with a felt-tip pen. Inside there was a packet of yellowed sheets of paper with drawings, notes, bleak poems, and there were also photos that seemed to have been taken in the early 90s, in almost all of them there was a girl with black hair and she was dressed in dark style. And then - the thing that interested us most - there were some no name audio cassettes. We listened to them with mild curiosity and the contents ... it dazzled us: long, minimal synthesizer patterns, which in some cases sounded like tests, but in others they seemed complete compositions, because we noticed overdubs and cuts. One of the tapes struck us particularly: it contained two long ambient tracks, icy and mysterious.

The name "Hetta", diminutive of Henriette, was 100% German, but the odd surname Honda (like the motorbike) sounded like Asian. The apartment was located near Immermannstraße, the area where the Japanese community of the city lives: in the post-WWII period, many Japanese companies opened their European offices in Dusseldorf and today the largest Japanese community in Europe lives there.
Anyway, we tried to trace the person who lived in the apartment hoping it was the author of the music, but we couldn't. The previous tenant seemed to have disappeared into thin air...

But the stuff was too special to remain unheard: we decided to publish it. We have created the artwork with the drawings found in the box and we have chosen two poetic verses that we found on some of the sheets as titles to the songs: "Ihre Stimme war im Turm eingesperrt" (Her voice imprisoned into the tower) and "Warum bin ich immer noch da?" (Why am I still here ?).

And here we are! So, enjoy this unaware dungeon-synth music probably dating back to the early 90s, a little jewel of winterly and nightly ambient-music in cold teutonic style. Will the dark musician who recorded it ever run into the HDK bandcamp and show up to us? Who knows! Sometimes the world is so small!