Summer evening in the city. The young and old single women are full of desire for love. They will again seek their happiness on the open-air dance floor in their neighborhood. Seemingly casually, they stroll to the still empty dance floor. In their imagination the sweet music is already playing and their prince charming is already waiting for them. Hopefully it won’t remain just a dream again.
That’s what storyteller Horst Grabosch is all about as a music producer. A little story told in four minutes – the emotional world and culture included. These are not sensational stories, but everyday things that make up our lives. We are somewhere in South America. People are coming together for a garden party with barbecue and dancing. All worries are forgotten for one evening.
This is the highlight of your year. All the worries have stayed at home. The water in the pool of your hotel glistens in the morning sun. It’s going to be a wonderful day. A new musical story by Horst Grabosch in collaboration with composer Moritz Grabosch. Feelings are explored that arise in hopeful anticipation and do not always live up to the reality that follows – but in this moment they are real.
Political allusions are by no means rare in Horst Grabosch’s late work, but he is more observer than revolutionary. The personal happiness of ordinary people is at the center of his interest. Cuba is a politically torn country, but the people have preserved their dignity. With the help of Ry Cooder, who brought the old musicians back into the limelight with his project “Buena Vista Social Club”, the hope of preserving the cultural roots lives on.
The song Gospel Train is not about religions, but about transcendence. People are searching for soul and inner peace. For the critical observer and author Horst Grabosch, spreading religious messages would be out of the question. That the guilt of religions is too great to celebrate it as well, he has emphasized several times in his writings. Nevertheless, he respects praying people who are searching for meaning in life. Accordingly, he has created this song full of hope and love.
“Icy Days” describes the feeling on a clear but freezing cold day. Even the sound seems frozen, but you feel infinitely alive. Storyteller Horst Grabosch proves his ability to transform landscapes into sound. And life also plays a role in every hymn to the landscape. Crunching ice and enchanting melodies. Voices resound from the hostile ice and sing as if there were no more beautiful place in the world.
“Marry Me” is the story of the desire for idealised beauty. The man professes his love, but the beloved remains a vague fiction. A wedding that never happens – an unusual plot for a pop song. There is no happy ending, but perhaps the feelings during the dream are more beautiful than any reality. With songwriter Horst Grabosch we enter the next dream world and underneath the house track by Moritz Grabosch reliably does its job.
India is hard to beat in terms of diversity – geologically, politically and culturally. India is and will probably always remain mysterious. The song “Indian Slide” tries to make this enigma audible. Except for a tabla at the beginning, there is no Indian folklore in this song, and that is what makes it authentic. While the house beat does its work, voices sing and instruments play peculiar turns – and that is precisely the connection to the elusive India. Songwriter Horst Grabosch can be heard here on the electronic wind instrument EWI.
Time for Serenity is a compilation of songs by writer and music producer Horst Grabosch. Here the quieter songs from the years 2020 to 2021 are summarized. The stylistic range of the eclectic is considerable. The selection ranges from simple ambient tunes to complex meditation units and is further complemented by three musical stories from his stage play “From Ape to Human”.
Unlike an album, a compilation can feature different artists. Superficially, this is also the case here, but the devil is in the details, because Horst Grabosch wrote and produced all the tracks. The author started 2019 with a late comeback under different project names. It was not until 2022 that the artist profile was staked out, and the songs published until then were to appear under this profile. However, the projects were not arbitrary, but combined songs with different intentions – here are the dance tracks summarized.
Historic Moods by Horst Grabosch is a compilation of songs that take up historical events and comment on them in the style of the period. This compilation is virtually the meta-level of Grabosch’s eclectic approach. We learn where then the influences within his lifetime come from along with a view into the future. The voice-over commentaries speak to some socio-political details of the era not necessarily associated with this musical style in the memories of contemporaries. They are small pieces of evidence for Grabosch’s theory that the reception of the hits are essentially dominated by a transfiguration he calls “popanz”. What is meant by this is something that is transfigured into an imposance that intimidates and does not correspond to the true meaning.
Let the author speak himself: Hello listeners, this is Horst Grabosch with one of his favourite machine voices. Welcome to my second compilation of songs that came out between 2019 and 2021. This is a mixture of songs that were written for different reasons. “The Bard of Lost Dreams” was written many years before in the darkest hours of my life, and was produced in 2020. The story of “Field of Love” is also older, but was only set to music in 2021. Three socio-political songs follow. “Summer on the Island” deals with the problem of migration and “The Ways We Go” describes the situation of South African miners. The song even made it into the South African iTunes charts. Finally, “I Wonder How Strong I Could Be” is about the production of cheap mass fashion.
Let the author speak himself: Hello listeners, this is Horst Grabosch with a foreign voice. Like a late message after death – read by a robot. We know that from science fiction films, don’t we? And science fiction is my keyword. Even my second CD, which came out more than 30 years from today, was based on a science fiction novel, and stories from outer space still fire my imagination. This compilation, which brings together songs with the topic of outer space, still begins on earth. “Star Dream Waltz” is about a child’s dream of flying and airport scenes. But already with “Massive Space Shuffle” we are clearly in space. Both titles are part of the stage play “From Ape to Human”, which, however, deals more with the topic of “man and machine”. This is followed by everyday scenes from a fictional spaceship. I came up with the three “Diner” songs and the “Ambient” song as machine-produced music that resounds from the speakers during dinner or in the corridors of the spaceship – more like background music. It is quite different with the 8D tracks. These songs represent emotional moments in which four astronauts meet to improvise with their instruments in order to mentally process the endless journey. In fact, these pieces of music are based on recordings from 1995 that were meant to translate exactly this plot into improvised music. The overdubs and sound alienations are from 2021. The final track stands out because it not only contains German vocals, but also describes a fictional live scene. While, as previously described, music is normally produced by the intelligent coffee machine during dinner, in this scene there is a small concert by a young person born on board. By the way – this is my son more than 10 years ago. He stopped struggling through the music business a long time ago. Have fun on the journey.