Early 80s. Retreat into the depths of lonely rehearsal rooms and intellectual, and over time also digital, worlds. Drum computers, tape machines, synthesizers, guitars, voices. From bass player and band musician to the Mann project. Trying for years, creating, putting nights around your ears, making debts, working on the realization of your own dreams, getting better.

After various band projects and the unsatisfactory experience as a solo artist under the pseudonym «Tomes Beluga» back on field one. Alone again. In order not to have to be in the foreground, the idea for a pure studio project was born in the late 1980s with the concept of presenting touching voices from PopRock music in something other than their usual musical environment and integrating it into his music, initially without it their attribution, as these trigger expectations and could therefore mean a musical restriction. This self-composed and produced music was of a purely synthetic nature and initially did without guitars. There were hardly any considerations about marketing and saleability, naively the focus was on music and the joy of working with great musicians.

The first of these voices belongs to the Englishman Rick Laine, whose voice reminded Manfred of the first singer of one of his favorite bands, “Deep Purple”: Rod Evans. This laid the basis for his long-term project “Manfred Ehlert's Amen”.

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Vocals: Rick Laine

All instruments & programming: Manfred Ehlert

All texts written by Rick Laine

Recorded by Heinz Reutlinger, Al Dente Studio

Mastering: Gary Jones

Layout cover: Peter Frey

 

Personal note:

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From this studio session, which I recorded in 1988 together with Heinz Reutlinger in his studios, which was then in an old building barrack, these 5 songs were created, which are now being published for the first time. It was recorded on a B-16 Fostex machine, the first affordable tape machine that professionals had not taken seriously for a long time. Back then I had an Atari 1040 computer with a floppy drive, a Roland D-50 synthesizer, an E-Max for the wind instruments and a Sequential Circuits Studio 440 (sampler / drum machine).

The singer Rick Laine, who did a really great job on the 5 songs, only confessed to me at the end of the recording sessions that he had stomach problems at the time. His claim to perfectly implement my clear ideas about singing and the knowledge that the booked studio time had to be paid for made this possible. My great respect for this achievement and its discipline! He also worked on the lyrics for various songs of this project.

In order to pay the studio bill at the time, I had to sell my car at the time. Therefore this cover as a reminder of the 80s. I had to sell the Audi 100 car model shown for a new bass guitar many years earlier.

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