voices cover

voices (2006)

voices

august in me

party piece

still

septic

faith

second thoughts

after

curtain call

forget me now

ghosts

 
 
 

music and lyrics by t
all voices and instruments performed by t
mixed by andy horn and t
engineered, recorded and produced by t at black box studios
mastered by andy horn and t
artwork by marco scheiper
photography by katia tangian
thank you to patrick becker for giving me the oportunity to do this (again!) - andy horn for sound sourcery - dominik hüttermann for helping me with "forget me now" - anifan for design help.
thank you, katia, for arrangement help, support and patience.



lyrics (1997-2006)

voices

neon hell a dream of whatever lost it anyway why should i find the strength to stop holding my breath? oh stupid me wasting air for vows never meant to keep i want to get closer but it s not about what i want

crossed-out lies is that truth? how could i hope to find you without losing me first? can you dream without sleeping? i can sleep without dreaming, does that count?

you say i m here but i am too i m told yet i can t close my eyes tight enough to find you so i look for myself in you? is that love? is that the question?

straight through forever in a sudden town everybody s guilty your dreams the empty script that i m supposed to write but you know i cannot even read

you re so healthy i only have my sickness against your blue blue skies so we rather sit and talk to walls about my walls time not running out but please please do

and the summer burns a lifeline into my palm but i can t recall my local colour there s a back door in your rear view left ajar and we cast a dream of lands beyond far you wrench me to the backseat of your car you rape me like the victims we are there s a blind spot on no-matter-how-far drag me to pipe-dream hearts

 

***

 

august in me

the sun in my eyes so bright still so sleepy yet high and dry woke up as sunday all in bloom no regrets there s nothing to loose

the taxi s waiting the door falls shut all bridges burning and that was that she s in her bed behind that wall the next night is waiting and i won t call

it s alright just don t get involved i hope that she s smiling too and so i walk off into the dawn that s my friend that s my home

and the world turns like a dream today and the clouds fly south out of my way it s the august in me

the scent of her hair still with me one last thought of her and me all she needed was in my eyes a poet's look and a hatful of lies

it s alright just don t get involved i hope she is smiling too and so i drive off into the dawn that s my friend that s my home

and the world smells like a dream today and the clouds turn south out of my way and my feet don t touch the ground these days though the faces blur to one that s dead there is autumn in me

 

***

 

party piece

and then you topple off all that you are the vampire the victim the knife and the scar you roll back your fangs and you fold up your blade the sun lets you sleep while your life is awake

but all the monsters still reek of your fires discarded and crippled from wounds that you sired outcasts and beggars in vanity s reich raped stabbed and strangled yet still hold the line

always a next one to sacrifice blood always a virgin to spill what she s got your beach sunset smile and your butterfly words do you recall what you covered in dirt? what colour is dirt?

there s a crack in the world since that day

 

***

 

still

and so it ends i crawl my way with empty hands yes so we tried and then we spoiled ourselves and died

she sent all my letters back she said they re wrong and badly set

i ll stay here in silence

yes so it ends i ll sell my flesh for even less just stroke my hair and break my neck

she sent all my poems back she bought a vcr instead

i ll stay here in silence

your voice in my head in silence and i know where to go in silence no matter how far in silence and you know where i am in silence

 

***

 

faith

there s a crack in the world since that day there s a blind spot your rear view evades and there s suddenly too much at stake

there s a wound propping up its own crust there s a heart you don t know how to trust there s a dream that you hope might just rust

up your tree so high making friends with your fears every night the little girl you hide and you d die to remember her smile up your tree too high?

are your demons still tracking you down? can you feel what your head won t allow? and you can neither swim nor you drown? is there still enough voice for new vows?

and you look at your eyes and they re older than you you re mirror does not want to tell you the truth there s nobody under your skin the last years want to know where you ve been

but tonight we re gonna be alright no need to draw the line we re going home tonight

up your tree over the wire are you alone or just lonesome tonight? pent-up world too vast to hide and there ll be nowhere to go but inside up your tree too high?

there are 8 years that lurk on your back (there s still blood in your bed) and you laugh and you cry to forget (that you cannot forget) there s a world built on no's and instead's (and on bitter regrets) you re too tired to know that you re sad

so you put on more skins as you re cold (in the back of your soul) cause you can t trust the fire you hold (in a world that you know) and your breath feels like air that you stole (from the quiet on your phone) will you change all your ravens for crows?

but tonight we re gonna be alright we ll let our hearts unwind see how our hopes unite

up your tree over the wire there will be nowhere to go but tonight pent-up world bursting inside the answers you craved for right there in your eyes little girl it s your time to rise you don t have to starve to be hungry for life

i know that your stars have been cut from your skies i ve been to the swamp you re so desperate to hide there s so many tears there ll be so many fights but these are our heartbeats and these are our lives

up our trees but don t cut the wires the dreams that you gave up just there in our eyes

 

***

 

second thoughts

but the voices you weave and the wasteland you breathe make me drown in the shower tonight make me hold you too tight

make me cut out my tongue make me scream out my lungs you rip the softness from sweet summernights you hold the day in your fists like a thief in the night

cause the sun might burn the secret off your charms and the greasepaint off your local colour your lies are like a door that s left ajar we all turn to stone from afar

but i remember your eyes i remember... i remember your kiss i remember... i remember <we shall be together>

so i ll stay here in silence your voice in my head and i know who i am no matter how far i will know where to go in silence

 

***

 

after

yes that girl remembers too and is she coming after you pointing fingers whispering whys her shadow echoes through your wall and her breath still locks your door her breath keeps sticking in your throat behind your back her naked eye

she will be right outside your door when your eyes close and darkness cries she will be whispering through your mouth and make the truth drain through your eyes and she ll feast on the beast that you ll leak

and when you dream you dream of sleep sleep without her bloodstained teeth sleep to kill her throbbing tears kill the scorches on her skin kill the seed you placed within kill the pleas from her stuffed mouth scathing scarves to hold her down

she ll be the dissonance you ll hear inside the laughter of your child she ll be the skin you cannot peel when you are naked with your wife will she see sniff her squeals through your ears?

can they smell her breath? does it linger in your hair? can they trace your memories through the alibis you swear? have they found the fingerprints you left inside her pants? her lipstick s on the sleeve of every single shirt you wear

the summer painted in her eyes so bright her pureness shivers down your spine snowblind

did they see you stare at her last weekend at the mall? has she told her parents? do the cops now tap your calls? your voice might reek suspicious the mirror makes you sweat the prostitutes are helpless against the limpness in your bed you re a vampire sucking daylight past redemption past regret

and the smile she smiled that night so bright you had to feel it from inside snowblind her summer painted on her thighs her hair the sweetness of blue skies her skin like china in first light your mouth like ash her eyes clenched tight

 

***

 

curtain call

and the streets that you walked all empty and cold and the buildings you passed will miss you at last and the rain has come back like the ache in my head and your flowers all dead like skins that you shed and my coffee is bitter in the cups you don t touch and i drown in the litter of chatter and laughs

and your street and your house on the day you moved out turned to places i fear turned to ghosts i still hear and the songs that we heard they now stop my whole world make the oceans feel drowned and the stars all crash down

and the letters that you send lay my heart into your hands every day my life is leaking sometimes tears might not be bad but today they re all i have and tonight s a void repeating

and the mirror you smiled at has shut down his glass and the water you bathed in is ice on the past and the bed that you slept in now barren and dead and all that is missing is all that you said

and the doors that you opened they creak now and sigh and the bus you would sit in goes slower tonight and though i might keep talking i ll forget how to sing and with all my friends laughing i can t feel a thing

and the days you write about they re like candlelights gone out ever since my life s been leaking and the rain might make amends and its chill might understand but those summer smiles are cheating and i m not living i m just breathing though i miss you too much and i m not trying to go on lest i forget your last touch and all i really have to say is the same old clichee i confess i must have loved you

 

***

 

forget me now

are there ashes in your heart? are there relics that you guard? do your shutters leave you dark? and when you sleep that s where we are? do your summers leave you cold? like there s too much dream you owe like you cannot pay the sun passing listless passing numb

and those holes in your sky were they stars in days gone by? did they twinkle did they cry when you banned them from your sight? came off easy or stuck tight? did you have to scratch or wipe? do they whisper still at night?

sell me now replace me now erase me now forsake me now reject me now regret me now forget me now

forget me now cause i m always waiting

bleed my blood and close my eyes efface my breath and mute my voice burn my letters with daylight let you touches exorcise all my music from your head all my fingerprints instead blur my picture with new eyes and all kisses you might try

though those holes in your sky may be stars from days gone by though they twinkled though they cried when you banned them from their light and though they really did stuck tight and you had to scratch and wipe they ll stop whispering tonight

sell me now dissect me now detach me now replace me now forsake me now regret me now forget me now

 

***

 

ghosts

burned out colours scarred lies like dust on the floor the pages of your broken diary drowing slow in the rain that pours

and could you cry if i had to? and walk my streets if i let you? could you come where i went to? to breathe my breath if i forget to? for that s the way my story goes and that s the secret everyone knows that there s the rain there s the rain

and the silence bites my fingernails too many truths to be told you and me that s three always always a voice on the wind a whispering dream

but that s alright just don t get involved i hope that you re smiling too and so i walk off into the dawn that s my friend that s my home

rear view mirror: bits and pieces.


voices

written in katia's old flat in duesseldorf in a fury of insecurity and sleeplessness, the lyrics preceded the music by about fifteen hours. the whole song was recorded within one day. note the guitar solo: as almost always, my solo is utter improvisation - but it seems to be so obvious from what the background track suggests that i played the same solo note for note twice. i took both takes and just doubled the track: i still love the sound that this brings.
this song also marks the starting point of what is a loose trilogy: voices - anti-matter poetry - psychoanorexia. i do not wish to spoil the fun and explain the weird kind of (non-)story underneath, but this lyrics is the most unashamedly honest catharsis i ever put down somewhere. "do i look for myself in you? is that love? is that the question?" - this is the staring point of a journey of how society and its moods and my innermost outlook correspond - or don't.


august in me

"a night out" pt.2, you could say: a new approach to the same topic, maybe more laid back, maybe more resigned - it seems to flicker and change its mood according to the listener's point of view. however, the faces *do* blur to one, and they have always done so.

party piece

the consequences of this lifestyle didn't seem too obvious back then, but of course they are in retrospective. "party piece" explicifies more about the abyss of my nightlife than i ever wanted to know... i was stone drunk when i sang this, and this is a status i am not to be met in very often.

still

utter disappointment and a struggle to keep my calm inside a whirl of erased hopes and fulfilled fears. i simply love the melody of the chorus, and i still wonder whether i might have stolen it from some artist a lot more talented than me.
this piece was written the day i got my baritone guitar, and i don't think that the grave elegance of the sound could have been achieved any other way.

septic

i remember writing this in a frantic attempt of creating my instrumental absolutional prog-track. today this seems ridiculous, but the album seemed far too new-wave-y to me when it was finished. so i simply set out to get some more proggy touches. this is the first, and hopefully also the last, track that i ever wrote with this kind of program in my head. strangely enough, it is not that bad, although i still get a bad conscience when i hear it. that many reviewers claimed it was the best track on voices served me right, i suppose.

faith

the tragedy of almost-perfect love stories in combination with the contingency of the world, as mr kant so flatly put it, was an omnipresent theme in my life when the millenium began. sometimes, beauty simply cannot stand itself. whenever i think back at this episode, i am honestly unhappy about how everything turned out, no matter how great my life has evolved since then.
i am, also, still dearly unhappy about the mix of this, and i hearby swear that there will be a remix / re-recording some day that will do the song more justice.

second thoughts

this is a track about the academic's typical strive for metacognition, of transcendency... which, of course, has to fail, as it comes from within. the second part then acknowledges the priority of unexplained needs and feelings over analysis: "i remember we shall be together"

after

how does sexual misuse feel for the "wicked uncle" (auden, the capital) afterwards, assuming he has some kind of conscience? that thought was introduced to me when reading some long forgotten crime novel back in the late 1990s. for reasons to be figured out by the hearers themselves, this rather old track fitted in perfectly at this time and place of the album.

curtain call

there was an exchange student at my university that i got to know only 2 weeks before she had to leave the city for what seemed like south of pluto. there was a very brief love affair, but you might know yourselves that intensity and lifespan don't always congruate within this realm... i still miss her, really do.
funny thing about the music is that it was written for organ originally. organ? there is no organ in it, you might say. no, there isn't: when i was doing the mixes, i just couldn't get it to sound right. someday my wife came in and just said: sounds great, but this organ disturbs the flow. there would not have been another way that i could have gotten rid of the organ part that in my thinking defined the whole piece - but as soon as it was gone, everything sat in its right place.

forget me now

could also have been called curtain call pt.2. it sometimes really is better that way. forget me now has come a long way. there is a version of it on a clouds can demo dominik and me did that only has the refrain in common with this one. i still love its minimalistic stanzas very much.

ghosts

back in that bar again (see above). back with talisker. getting a grip again. when all's said and done, it's always like this, isn't it? btw: the guitar solo is played on a johnson jazz guitar that i bought for 120 euro... great piece of wood, that is. sometimes the prize does not mirror the value.