Review

Achim Maerz

Relief

Freund Der Familie • 2022

Who the hell is Achim Maerz anyway? For a little over a decade, the Hamburg native has been releasing occasional EPs on trusted labels such as Wake Up! or Don’t Be Afraid, regularly exploring (and crossing) the boundaries between dancefloor-ready tunes and neighbouring genres—electronic music with many facets, a lot of feeling, and occasionally also a forceful thump. There is a lot to be found in this eclectic mix, but little to be found out about its maker. He’s a Hamburger, graphic designer, baseball cap wearer—that’s about all a brief research will reveal. All the nicer to be able to delve directly into the music, which, thanks to his quasi-debut album »Relief« on Freund der Familie, twelve years after his first single there, is an experience as multi-layered as it is beautiful. What begins with a dramatic synth-drone etude that semes to mediate between Jean-Michel Jarre and Fuck Buttons soon gives way to a plodding techno groove surrounded by melodic elements very clearly reminiscent of Carl Craig’s »At Les«. Over the course of the other seven tracks, Maerz calls up even more references, reveling in mid-zero IDM sounds, visiting an eighties disco armed with nineties deep house chords, or even hinting at bass-driven rhythms that would have fallen on fertile ground in Bristol in the early 2010s. It’s an impressive range of stylistic influences that Maerz very consistently translates into his own sound. Friendly, warm, at times slightly melancholic and, despite all the retrospectives in the sound, by no means nostalgic. And so, track by track, it is revealed who the hell Achim Maerz is anyhow. »Relief« is one of those incredibly rare, deeply personal records that also offers a broad audience plenty of moments of identification.