Landscape Photography by Jürgen Heckel

Jürgen Heckel is a professional male photographer, based in Munich, Germany. Jürgen Heckel, also known as Sogar, was born in Nuremberg in 1970 and has been living in Paris for 14 years and is now located in Munich. He started playing music when he was 19 and became part of several groups as a guitarist. He then got interested in creating and processing sound in unconventional ways. Thus Jürgen manipulates accidental sounds to create light and fragile melodic textures. The sources of these arrangements are guitars as well as sounds from mixing consoles, amplifiers, cables or other aural finds. These sounds are then reworked on a computer to become a music made of cracklings, and rich melodic oscillations exploring the extremes of the sound spectrum by associating acoustic technique and software. The result of this work was his first album “Basal” on the New-York based label 12k in 2001. After the great critic success of “Basal”, Jürgen Heckel had the opportunity to record two new albums, “Stengel” on the French label List and again on 12k “Apikal_Blend”, as Sogar. In 2003 the Italian label Mr.Mutt release Sogar’s live album “Eel and Coffee” with recordings from the 12k Japan tour. In 2004 the Belgium label Stilll release the Album “Conceal” which is a documentation of an improvised collaboration during 3 days in Belgium staring A-Mute, Mitchell Akiyama, Sébastien Roux, Christophe Bailleau and Sogar under the band name “Arden”. Except his contribution on many Compilations (12k, n160, List, n-rec, Spekk, Beau Rivage, Electroni[k], Mr.Mutt, DSP) Sogar is also asked to remix tracks from other musicians (Fonica, R.Chartier, etc.) and to reinterpret Yoshihiro Hanno’s album “Platform”.