"What is a memory? Is it a residue of our past conjured into being by pictures in

 

our minds? Is it our former self communicating with our present one or the other

 

way around? Is it a recurring emotion or smell we notice in a déjà vu or a

 

daydream? Is it an individual sum of those aspects? What I know is that memories

 

help me to define who I am. They establish connection between me and

 

everything that is not present or future – sometimes sharp and palpable, more

 

often soft and frail. Unfortunately, some memories fade away irrevocably. Hence, I

 

am quite afraid of losing them.

 

The idea behind memory sketches is to give particular memories a form, to

 

preserve them if you like. So I compiled a collection of my most precious

 

memories like bringing our grandma to the hospital in an RV, crossing the inner-

 

German border in Bornholmer Street for the first time shortly after the fall of the

 

Berlin Wall in 1989, the moment of coming home from graduation, my dad’s

 

funeral and trying to communicate with him via a radio, just to mention a few. All in

 

all, it’s a collection of intimate moments covering a time frame of roughly twenty

 

years. The oldest memories go back to my childhood/youth in the 80s and 90s,

 

the latest one goes back to 2002, year of my father’s passing.

 

The most important instrument on the album is definitely my upright piano which

 

is way older than the oldest memory I possess. In the summer of 2016 I bought

 

one expensive and three cheap microphones and started recording first sketches.

 

Sometimes it was very easy but there were also moments of frustration when I

 

couldn’t find the right melody to embody what the memory encapsulates.

 

However, it is not only the upright piano that creates the sound of memory

 

sketches. Having grown up in the 1980s I have been surrounded by the sounds of

 

synthesizers quite naturally. There was no doubt I had to use them for this album.

 

In addition, I invited Sebastian Selke (CEEYS) to play cello on a few tracks and I

 

also recorded a lot of noise which emphasizes the vague/blurry quality of most of

 

the memories. The whole production process took me more than a year.

 

Everything was recorded in my living room studio Wallring Cabin.

 

Eventually, this album is like a ride through the years of my past life and the past

 

lives of family members from one material point to the other, it is a reflection on

 

time, life and death.

 

On the other hand, it is nothing more than music."

 

 

Tim Linghaus, December 2017