"2nd 49" is a speech-sound composition, in which Kazuya Ishigami comes to grips with a very personal experience – the death of his father. 14 years would pass before he could listen to his father's voice on tape without difficulty and could create a composition with it. The Buddhist "Tibetan Book of the Dead" teaches that the transition between death and rebirth takes 49 days. Ishigami reconstructs this cycle of 7 x 7 days once again to music: His composition is as a result structured by the number 49. 49 music tracks of sounds and voices – prayers and original sound recordings on tape – are consistently divided into time periods lasting 0.49 secs., 4.9 secs., 49 secs., and 49.49 minutes. A performance in thoughts of a man on his way from his past life into his new life.

The city of New York was both home and laboratory for John Cage. The composer found plenty of like-minded people and stimuli for his radical innovations in the exuberant art scene.
The Canadian sound artist Chantal Dumas follows John Cage's traces in the Big Apple. While doing so she combines the background noises of his places of activity with the sounds of his favoured instruments: Piano, turntables, voice and percussion blend as if by chance into the sound image of the city.

In the middle of the last century some composers found classical notation too rigid and they began to experiment with musical notation. The British composer Cornelius Cardew was a pioneer in the field of graphic notation. Between 1963 and 1967 he created the composition ›Treatise‹: It consists of 193 pages of geometric and abstract shapes, modified musical symbols and numbers. The interpretation and performance of the characters remains entirely with the interpreter.
The composer Christopher Williams has merged numerous versions of Treatise in a remix and combined this with texts by Cornelius Cardew. A musical essay thus came into being on the ambiguity of notation and about a piece of music history.

Götz Naleppa, founder and long standing director of Deutschlandradio's sound art slot, reitred in 2008. For his farewell, he received sonic presents from all over the world.

With contributions by Andreas Bick, Hervé Birolini, Colin Black, Alessandro Bosetti, Frieder Butzmann, Christian Calon, Rilo Chmielorz, Francis Dhomont, Thomas Doktor, Chantal Dumas, Stephan Froleyks, Stefano Giannotti, Heiner Grenzland, Hanna Hartman, Ricardo Haye, José Iges, Arsenije Jovanovic, Kaye Mortley, Georg Klein / Steffi Weißmann, Felix Kubin, Wolfgang Peter Menzel, Cathy Miliken, Kaye Mortley, Norbert Walter Peters, Proton Sonic Arts Group, Lucia Ronchetti / Thomas Seelig, Sabine Schäfer / Joachim Krebs, Mario Verandi.

Adventurous language games, exuberant chains of association and luxuriant cascades of words: Johann Fischart’s ‘Affentheurlich Naupengeheurliche Geschichtklitterung’ from 1575 preempted literary modernism by centuries. The Strasbourg poet relies on the sound of words and focusses on a network of absurd and pseudo-etymological linkages. From Modern High German language excess, the musician Reinhold Friedl has created a radio play which exposes the phonetic and linguistic structures.

“So hört nun, Ihr meine Orenspitzige und offenmaulvergessene Zuhörer”. (Johann Fischart)

Composition and realisation: Reinhold Friedl based on a text by Johann Fischart

Speakers: Bernhard Schütz, Maurice de Martin, Andreas Harder, Thomas Herbst, Elsa Kammerer, Max Knoth, Georg Mariot, Sabine Schall, Wolfgang Tschöke, Christian Wittman, Georg Zeitblom           

Musicians: p.o.p. psychology of perception:  Elena Kakaliagou (Horn), Nora Krahl (cello), Hannes Strobl (electric bass), Reinhold Friedl (piano), Cantantes a pueris Berlin – Conductor Vinzenz Weissenburger

Sound and Engineering: Hermann Leppich and Philipp Adelmann

Through a process of listening and speaking, African Feedback documents an exchange between artist Alessandro Bosetti and residents of villages throughout West Africa. Playing music by various experimental and avant-garde composers to people met in villages, Bosetti records their responses, asking them what they are hearing, and how they relate to the music and sounds. Composing their responses, with field recordings made throughout his travels, African Feedback is a musical portrait of cultural translations, misunderstandings, different voices and languages. Including an audio CD and the transcriptions of the listening sessions, along with an introduction by the artist, African Feedback is a beautiful and beguiling work cutting across the ongoing questions of cultural difference.

Frieder Butzmann likes to go to the cemetery. When there he visits the grave of Baron de la Motte-Fouqué, whose novel "The wonderful events befalling the Earl Alethes von Lindenstein" is full of spirits and strange phenomena. Alethes has a lot of adventures with ghosts and tries to solve all of the mysteries, but in doing so conjures up strange new dangers once again. Frieder Butzmann continues this conjuring up of spirits acoustically. Sound was once considered to be disembodied, the first sound transmissions using electromagnetic waves were regarded as materialisations of the invisible. In "Alethes Soundbeams" these techniques are used to make other disembodied entities sound and speak.

“What would I be without the Internet?” The Tunisian DJane Deena Abdelwahed asks herself. Her answer is a radio performance with elements from radio plays and club music. She tells of the conflict between the Tunisian "Generation Y" and their parents, of the precariousness of youthful identities between Islam and Internet.

‘All Hail Mother Internet' won one of the two production prizes from Deutschlandradio Kultur and CTM Festival Berlin at Radio Lab 2016.                

Translation: Julia Tieke

With excerpts from the Tunisian Constitution and the book "Murderous Identities" by Amin Maalouf

Contributors: Adyan Al-Zohaery, Ayad Al-Zohaery, Hanan El-Ali, Manuela Oforiatta, Antye Greie and Deena Abdelwahed

Text recordings: Hermann Leppich

Wooden clogs / clock mechanisms / rattling trains / the ice cream man's bell / a beetle crunching / jet fighters / milk churns / spades in the garden / Granny Möcker calling...The list of sounds from our childhood seems endless. The musician and composer Stephan Froleyks quotes examples from his own personal archive of sound memories. From a multitude of specific sounds and verbal descriptions of sounds, he has composed a purely acoustic life story. As subjective and self-occupied these audio recordings are, all those born in the 60s will also recognize many things: a squeaking dummy / the school bell / the theme song of a radio show / spoons in dessert bowls / Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert / reggae by Bob Marley...

The Hardangervidda in southern Norway is a rugged plateau, which was eroded by glaciers. Here is where the early polar explorers trained for their expeditions; here was where water power first made possible the production of heavy water, needed for making atomic bombs. A power plant built by Norwegian scientists in Rjukan was hard-fought over during the Second World War and destroyed.Werner Cee uses this tension between elemental nature and short-lived human intervention for an acoustic land art project. The Norwegian percussionist Terje Isungset places artificial sounds in the landscape, plays materials found there, communicates with the existing soundscape.

"apónivi" – in the language of the Hopi Indians means "wind that blows down the canyon", the wind that passes through the huge canyons in their reservations. It carries with it the spirits of the invisible powers of life, the "Kachinas". But these are only visible in the dance wearing elaborate masks.
The play is an acoustic exploration of the ritual mask dances of the Kachinas, whose symbolic importance is reflected in musical pictures. Embedded into the rhythm in particular of the virtuoso drummer Terry Bozzio, the libretto plays with the sound of the Hopi language, with associations, meanings and misinterpretations of their culture.

What remains of a culture? Sites, buildings, stones - doggedly they resist eternity. The sound worlds of past cultures have long died away. The young discipline of Archaeoacoustics connects the audible with the visible, the ephemeral with the permanent. It explores the hidden sound worlds of thousand-year-old sites. The finding: early cultures quite consciously shaped and formed their acoustic environment. Numerous buildings bear witness to a sophisticated game with sound effects and phenomena. The visual continues to dominate as a source of knowledge in Western sciences. Archaeoacoustics concentrates solely on hearing. Annie Goh takes part in a caving expedition with researchers Iegor Reznikoff, Rupert Till and the flautist Anna Friederike Potengowski.

An architectural commentary is a form of ‘reviewing’ architecture, in which functional, symbolic and aesthetic aspects of a building or a bigger architectural structure are analyzed.Inspiration for this cycle of compositions is drawn from architectural criticism, structures, buildings, involuntary cityscapes (‘architecture without architects’), and technological noise within buildings.Together they cover three different areas of work: 80 minutes of sound, a catalogue of photographs, and line graphs that stem from volume and stereo pan settings in the multitrack composition software.

"Architectural Commentaries 4 & 5" has also been published on CD: Entr'acte (http://www.entracte.co.uk).

Joachim Krebs has been working on the project series ARTIFICIAL SOUNDSCAPES for more than five years. All of the compositions in this cycle represent artificial soundscapes between pure naturalness and pure abstraction. Their sound elements are without exception of "natural" origin, the artificial aspect of the composition is created through the digital editing of all of the parameters of the organic sound sources used. Inaudible sounds become audible, the inner life of the individual noise-sound-particles is laid bare. In these organic artificial intermediate milieus, the focus is not least on a "development of transitions", the sounds of people, animals and nature becoming clean lines, pure color, clear sound, absolute rhythm. We recommend the use of stereo headphones.

Dickson Dee, alias Li Chin Sung, has been working as a producer, composer and music blogger in Hong Kong for over 20 years. He has collaborated among others with Zbigniew Karkowski, Otomo Yoshihide, Werner Dafeldecker and Tetsuo Furudate. He runs the Noise Asia and Dicksonia Audio labels.

Born in Tuva in 1957, Sainkho Namtchylak has been studying Siberian ritual music styles since her childhood. She has worked with musicians such as Peter Kowald, Werner Lüdi, Shelley Hirsch and Jan Garbarek.

Wu Wei is considered to be the world's leading virtuoso of the sheng, a Chinese mouth organ. He has performed traditional, contemporary and improvised music with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Ensemble Modern, Peter Kowald and Gunter Baby Sommer among others. He has been commissioned for compositions by Musica Viva in Munich, the Fondation Royaumont and the Slought Foundation, Chicago.

She is 1,000,045 years old, and yet is reborn every day: Art has always lived on the tension existing between tradition and freshness. No one knew this better than the Fluxus artist Robert Filliou, who declared 17th January 1963 to be the 1000000th birthday of art. Following this, the art world has celebrated the planet's oldest child every year.For Art's Birthday in 2008, the Ars Acustica Group of the European Broadcasting Union proclaimed the motto "Forever Young". Many radio broadcasters across Europe dedicate their birthday celebrations to the interaction of sound art and pop culture. Deutschlandradio Kultur confronts a veteran of the German underground with a central formation from the modern electronic scene: The percussionist Endruh Unruh from the Einstürzende Neubauten, the group Rechenzentrum and the composer Frieder Butzmann together explore pop as the eternal fountain of youth for sound art.
Art's Birthday 2008: Forever youngOrganized by the art of sound art department of Deutschlandradio Kultur with Radialsystem and the 2008 Ultraschall-Festival

On 17 January, the Ars Acustica group of the European Broadcasting Union establishes a European-wide sound art network for Art's Birthday as they do every year. Deutschlandradio Kultur contributed with the network opera SOBRALASOLAS! The title is taken from the novel Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.SOBRALASOLAS! does not have a preestablished scenario, tells no story and is not a documentary. It is rather a place for glossolalies and echolalias, on-the-fly recordings and collected improvisations.SOBRALASOLAS! combines collected and improvised sounds, with the aim of creating a new listening and auditory environment, which is both fictional and real, time-specific and site-specific. The participating artists are all located at different places around the world. They improvise from there, orienting themselves only to a jointly developed score. Jérôme Joy mixes the sound event live in pfefferberg house 13 in Berlin.

On 17 January, the Ars Acustica group of the European Broadcasting Union celebrated the 1,000,043rd Art's Birthday, the birthday of art, and simultaneously the 90th anniversary of Dadaism. Large numbers of sound artists and radio stations networked via satellite for an international birthday party under the motto TransDADA Express. The sound art department of Deutschlandradio Kultur congratulated with a live event from the TESLA in Berlin. Tetsuo Furudate and Georg Klein were commissioned to deal in their own way with the legacy of Dadaism: DADAyama.Marcus Gammel presents the highlights of the live concert from 17 January 2006 in this summary.

"I'll just take the rubbish out." – An everyday act is observed, ends up in the background and disappears. It is replaced by an acoustic, artificial course, which is run through again and again. Reconnaissance is based on speculation. Orientation goes out the window.Serge Baghdassarians and Boris Baltschun break well-known acoustic spaces into pieces with their microphones. Acoustic details define an apparently logical sequence, are taken out of their surroundings and start to become independent. A chronology topples in schizophone sceneries."To walk is to lack a place." (Michel De Certeau)

"Childhood as a black mirror, from which appear dreamlike beings from a hidden life, visionary beings, called the 'bad children' because they see what no one else can see. They make life hell, because they foresee everything and forget nothing. The composition is structured as a suite. In each movement the children's voices tell different stories in a cryptic, yet understandable language. Black theatre, in which the scenery comes and goes and sounds and voices appear as visions from the dark." (Sheila Concari).

Entry in the logbook on 5 October 1991. Location: far out in the Adriatic Sea on a sailing boat. Time: 7.30 a.m., in the middle of the Balkan war. A composer and a deserter are steering their boat across the almost motionless sea, when suddenly a little bird, seemingly from nowhere drops out of the sky, settles down next to the sailors and falls asleep. A magic moment – and now there are three on board and all seemingly with the same objective: to escape the war, the borders, the human madness. The passionate sailor and composer Arsenije Jovanovič personally experienced this moment and has kept the memory of it in this sound composition.

A "journey on paper": The long distance from Australia to Brazil, covered in letters. Two countries lying far away from each other, two languagesthat are alien to each other, become audible, converge and dance together. The fantasy of the "boats of paper" creates a place where language, sounds and images interact with each other, without having to pass through cultural or political boundaries. The result is a "Terra Incognita", released from logical time and space information, in which poetry and songs become the means of sensual and musical communication.

The composition is an acoustic journey into the heart of Brazil. It includes characteristic sounds from the city Rio de Janeiro as well as human and animal voices and music. Whereas for Hermeto Pascoal the meaning of the texts or words is of less importance, compared with the acoustic variations attainable with the sound material. His compositions are characterized by a love of experimentation: he combines the sound of conventional instruments for example with the sounds of pots and pans, animal sounds and the human voice.

Without him, E.T. would not have been able to telephone, Luke Skywalker's lightsaber would never have hummed and "Wall-E" would have walked through a mute future: Ben Burtt is one of the old masters of cinematic sound design.

Over the last 30 years he has brought entire families of strange creatures to life.

The Berlin composer and noisemaker Frieder Butzmann now uncovers the traces of this life like the fossils of a lost world. He separates them out of the debris of significance and into their own time.

There short scenes, dramas and symphonies develop between the most diverse creatures. Speeder bikes, extraterrestrials and natural disasters develop a sound world of their own.

This radio play is the third part of a trilogy that Stefano Giannotti began in 1999. "Fine del messaggio" (DLR 1999) deals with communication, "Battaglia Navale" (DLR 2000) addresses the themes of power and violence. The composition "Calendario" now devotes itself to time and its memories."The protagonists of Calendario could actually be the survivors of the last battle in 'Battaglia Navale', who have sought shelter on a lonely mountain and want to leave something behind from there for the next generation." (S. Giannotti)"Calendario" musically lists events that have shaped, shocked and delighted mankind: Verdi's birthday, the bombing of Hiroshima, the first birthday cake, the first step on the moon...

A stereo system is fastened to a cart that has been cobbled together. Verses from the Koran and Islamic music ring out from the speakers: In this way the Carroussa proceeds through the streets of Morocco.
This form of mobile radio inspired the artist and curator Younes Baba-Ali to an unusual project: In June 2012, he drove his 'Carroussa Sonore' through Rabat, laden with experimental music, radiophonic plays, soundscapes and text compositions.  The cart pulls a soundtrack along behind itself, which is soon lost in the dusty streets. For a brief moment, the 'Carroussa Sonore' creates a previously unknown cartography of the city. Younes Baba-Ali and Anna Raimondo trace their paths for the radio.

In the so-called fight against terrorism, multilingual language recognition programmes are being used worldwide to search telephone, fax and email connections for suspicious "emotive words".Rupert Huber examines the phenomenon of "censorship", the character of which is transformed in the course of the piece from a specific prohibition into a fighting machine fearfully lashing out around itself.Thus the catalogue of stimulus words, once drawn up from the fear of possible consequences, has to grow continuously, as paraphrases and synonyms are used to help. Ultimately, everything is forbidden, and the censor himself becomes suspect.

John Cage and his famous "Roaratorio, the composition on "Finnegans Wake" by James Joyce, inspired Ward Weis to this radio play. Its literary source is the unfinished text by English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400), "The Canterbury Tales", a collection of stories in verse that tells of a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Thomas of Canterbury.Tom Hanna approaches Chaucer's medieval English text in the spirit of the master Cage, seeking the sounds, noises, images and places in the words and setting them to music.The title "Chauncecleer" results from the connection with a character from Chaucer's tales, "Chauntecleer": a rooster, who pluckily repels imminent death and sends it away for the time being...

The sound artists Bordoni and Dalo imagine an acoustic space, characterised by a centre and their (personal) environment – a circle. This space becomes audible through their following the traces of sounds and voices, and thereby themselves move ever further from the centre towards the periphery. The "physical state" of this sound image remains circular, as does the wave which is carried further and further away from the origin and whose meaning comes alternately from the original and the echo, from the present and the memory, from the centre and from the circumference.

On 16 January 2009 the radio artist Brandon LaBelle and the electronic musician Benny Nilsen constructed a radiophonic experimental set-up comprising music, electromagnetic waves and human bodies: In the "Maria am Ostbahnhof" club in Berlin they staged a silent disco where the dance music was heard only through wireless headphones. They had previously located a series of microphones The dance floor of the club, so that the sounds of the dancing bodies could be recorded, processed and fed back into the room. From the resulting material, LaBelle and Nilsen have created a radiophonic 'Performance Lecture' on virtual sounds and physical control.

"What does a continent sound like?" Sound artist Christian Calon pursued this question on a long journey through North America. During this time he oriented himself towards the "Continental Divide", the watersheds between the rivers that drain into the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Arctic Oceans.

On large-scale maps, such structures only appear as areas of abstract colour and cryptic signs. For this reason, Christian Calon views his passage through the mountains and plains as a temporal flow.

His map is formed acoustically: He combines textures and contours, the rhythmic and the material variations of the landscape to a musical form between soundscape and sonification.

Organization of the tables

Each watershed comprises several ecosystems/ecozones. The sound cutting in tables corresponds to these zones. Names of the tables and type of ecozone.

1 - Atlantic watershed
the zones are located in the province of Quebec between the Great Lakes and the Gulf of St. Lawrence
Main rivers/hydrographic network  :
    Great Lakes - St. Lawrence River

1. Lower St. Lawrence    Atlantic maritime - Mixedwood Plains
2. Lower North Shore    Boreal Shield (forest)
3. Charlevoix    Boreal Shield mountains
4. St. Lawrence River valley    alluvial plains of the St. Lawrence
5. North Shore    tundra of the Boreal Shield (subarctic) (Gulf of St. Lawrence)
______________________________________________________________

2- Arctic and Hudson Bay watershed
the zones overlap the central Canadian provinces (Manitoba (MB), Saskatchewan (SK), Alberta- (AB))
Main rivers/hydrographic network  :
    Bow River + Oldman River > South Saskatchewan River
    Saskatchewan Glacier > North Saskatchewan River
    Qu'Appelle River, Assiniboine River
    Lakes of Manitoba
    Nelson River   

1. Hudson Bay (MB)     Hudson Plains and Boreal Shield
2. The Prairies (MB-SK-AB)     Prairies
3. The Rocky Mountains (AB)    Montane Cordillera
4. Arctic (Ogilvie Mountains, Yukon)    Taiga Cordillera
______________________________________________________________

3 - Pacific watershed
All of these zones are included in the province of British Columbia (BC)
Main rivers/hydrographic network  :
    Fraser River
    Skeena River
    Thompson River
    Columbia River

1. Prairie        Prairie (north of BC)
2. Cassiar    Boreal Cordillera (forests and mountains (within the Coast Mountains) north of BC)
3. Skeena    Pacific Maritime (Skeena River and Coast Mountains, (North BC)
4. Thompson    semi-arid zone - Montane Cordillera (interior of BC)
5. Pacific Rim    littoral, Coast Mountains and rain forest

Volcanoes: bound, sleeping power. Years of silence, soundlessly slumbering. Then suddenly the concentrated energy is discharged in a roaring concert of sound: along with the bursts of fire, threatening sounds emanate from the earth, mingling with the muffled sound of the massive boulders and leaving behind desolate cratered landscapes. "Cratere" is what the Italians call the huge holes left behind by the eruption of Mount Etna and other volcanoes. In her sound piece, Hanna Hartman has collected and processed recordings of the eruptions of Mount Etna and other volcanoes, especially in Italy and Costa Rica, and assembled them to a sound composition.

China - that is a sunset on the shore of a lake,a group of pensioners practising Tai Chi, the rhythmic brushing of cotton, and finally Chinese hip-hop music from a car radio and the underground announcements in Beijing. Stephen Erickson travelled through China and found himself facing a overcrowded, complex Chinese painting in which the past, present and the future, religion, and ideology are united.His soundscape "Dancing River - Crying Dragon" captures many of the details of contemporary China, connects these sounds with classical Chinese music, and tells the story of more than 5000 years of Chinese history.

The heart is not just a bodily organ, the heart is a mythical place. Many cultures attribute a significance to the heart which refers to feelings, beliefs or the supernatural. The Aztec warriors tore open their prisoners' chests at the top of the pyramids and held the twitching hearts in the sun. A heart for the Gods. What the conquering Spaniards considered to be the height of barbarity, was for the victims nothing more than a religious rite. They died cheerfully and calmly: "This is the blissful death, that our ancestors proclaimed and praised for us." The cruelty of the Europeans was of a different nature. Wilhelm Hauff recorded it symbolically in his fairy tale "Das steinerne Herz" (The Heart of Stone): "Such a heart feels neither anxiety nor terror, neither foolish compassion nor other grief."Iris Disse (Story and direction)has embarked on a journey into the heart of two worlds. With the sound engineer Peter Avar (Direction), she has visited ritual festivals in Mexico and contrasted them with European perceptions of the heart.

The Arcana, the picture cards of a Tarot deck, already inspired José Mataloni to a first composition ("Die Arcana", DLR Berlin, 2002). Now he once again takes up the motif of randomly selected card reading musically and in so doing questions the Arcana as the source of divination. Nine further picture cards are laid, nine acoustic symbols can be freely interpreted by the listener: The Devil, Death, The Wheel of Fortune, The Tower, Temperance, Justice, Judgement, Strength and The Hanged Man. "The dealer is imaginary and thus sows the seeds for the subjective perception of the listener as well as that of the composer – so that a dialogue can develop between the two." (J. Mataloni)

"Soto Voce" plays with the name of the South American sculptor Soto. Soto has created a vast sound tube sculpture in Tuscany which stands outdoors on a small hill. Michael Vetter and his colleague Natasha Nikprelevic have improvised to connect their voices with the sounds from the sculpture generated by the wind, and have thus composed a piece out of the sounds of the tube sculpture, voices and the sounds of nature in the Tuscan landscape.

The overtone improvisation "De Profundis" lets the voices of both artists sound in an old tank which is to be found in Rocca, also in Tuscany.

The scientist, naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt is the focus of this composition by Daniel Velasco. 200 years ago Humboldt travelled to Cuba and there - quite in keeping with his cross-disciplinary science - went on a quest for insights about nature and man. He recorded many of his experiences and thoughts in writing. Acoustic images from Havana, Trinidad and the Alejandro de Humboldt national park appear in Velasco's composition: Places that Humboldt visited and where he researched in the early 19th century are made "audible" here. The texts from Humboldt's travel diaries are quoted in four languages and form the musical counterpoint to Cuba's rich and diverse soundscape.

Two Indians stumble into a concert of the Darmstadt Summer School in 1958. From that time on, one of them will never let go of electronic music again. Back in India, he buys oscillators and filters, his friend lends him a tape recorder. Under the name Dhvanivala (dealer or sounds specialist), he recorded numerous tapes. His pieces are made up of
field recordings and electronic sounds, he calls them sutras (formulas).
When he disappears without trace in 1967, his old friend is only left a box of cassettes. And then these recordings also go missing. In India’s intellectual scene, the sound art pioneer Dhvanivala is today considered a mythical figure. The son of his friend, now a composer himself, sets out to find the lost sutras.

Cast: Ingo Hülsmann (Narrator), Judith Engel (Scientist), Meriam Abbas (Sutras), Fabian
Raabe (Sutras), Olaf Oelstrom (Ranjit Hoskote)

Sound needs space to develop. The artists' collective 48nord has launched an acoustic reflection on the real and imaginary resonant spaces of our society: Utopias, dystopias, heterotopias. While the first ufos are landing in the background, we are entering Michel Foucault's theoretical structure and strolling through Andrei Tarkovsky's zone. In the centre the dialectical entanglement from within and without: Sound situations next to and on top of each other. Fading away. Building up.

"It's the quietest place in the world. You'll see for yourself. It's so beautiful here. Here, there's no-one else here." (Arkady and Boris Strugatzky).

With quotations from:

"Roadside Picnic" by Arkady and Boris Strugatzky
"Stalker" by Andrei Tarkovsky
"Of Other Spaces" by Michel Foucault
"Smut: An Anatomy of Dirt" by Christian Enzensberger

"Die große Stille" (Into Great Silence) is a film about "La Grande Chartreuse", the head monastery of the legendary silent order of Carthusian monks. 19 years after the first meeting between the director Philip Gröning and the prior of the monastery, he created the first film that was ever permitted to be made about life behind the monastery walls. A strict, almost silent meditation on monastic life in its purest form. No music, no interviews, no comments, no additional material. Only the passage of time, the change of seasons and the recurring element of the day: prayer. In this wordless silence every noise is significant. That is why the director has made a radio version of the soundtrack on behalf of Deutschlandradio: Listening to silence.

The author has taken the train from Berlin to Romania. The journey took her one week. On her route she passed the stations of Prague and Budapest, Bucharest was the end of the line. Hanna Hartman eavesdropped on these three stations with a microphone. There are similarities, but each station has it's own sound. In the feature these three stations meet acoustically across borders and over distances in a space that the author has composed for them. The feature is a sound collage of travellers and people waiting.

Bernhard and Ferdinand, two dog experts have determined that a dog doesn't go "bow-wow" in Chinese, but "Wangwang". Bernhard and Ferdinand listen raptly to the mutts, as does Joe, a postman, who compensates the unbelievable monotony of his life with 15 different types of bark.In the search for fundamental clarification of the problem both dog experts demonstrate true inquiring minds. They storm the scientific institutions and demand exact information. All the stops are pulled in the high and low barking sector. The dialogues are interwoven with the signs and sounds of dog language. A number of hilarious musical structures of animal onomatopoeia are created.

Drehungen und Windungen (CD1, Track 1) – 00:06:44
Segeln mit Schubert (CD1, Track 2) – 00:04:21
Die Kammer des Kranken (CD1, Track 3) –  00:08:52
Corpo libero (CD2, Track 2) – 00:09:41
Body in Music (CD2, Track 3) – 00:11:04
Le bonheur / Glück – 00:07:44

The Swiss composer Bernadette Johnson is a master of the small form which she calls "acoustic poetry", associative sound structures of noises, instrumental sounds and language elements. The goal is to create certain volatile moods with minimal resources. She herself says: "In my acoustic works, I am interested in finding other layers of reality, the imaginary, the ambivalence of a mood. When everyday things are surprisingly linked together, something mysterious is discernible for a few moments." 

Sonic Arts Lounge revisited 1
Jungle music with percussion and vocals
by Sven Åke Johansson and Rüdiger Carl

The American 'National Security Agency' has operated a worldwide intelligence monitoring network for decades under the name of 'Echelon'. Its antennas and sensors are usually concealed beneath large white domes. Thomas Ankersmit and Valerio Tricoli enter into the decommissioned listening complex on Teufelsberg (Devil's Mountain) on the outskirts of Berlin and play with the metaphoric and acoustic resonances:
 
"The radar building in the espionage facility in Grunewald forest is the most fascinating acoustic background I have ever experienced. The dome is made out of fibreglass hexagons, the floor out of concrete. This results in spectacular reverberation, as well as a complex arrangement of strongly focussed echoes. The place becomes a real being, which responds immediately to musical stimuli." (Thomas Ankersmit)

In 1913 Luigi Russolo published the Futurist manifesto "L'arte dei rumori" ('The Art of Noises'). In this he proclaimed the age of noise-sounds: The machine has created "such a variety and such a contention of noises that pure sound in its slightness and monotony no longer provokes emotion".
100 years later, Lithuanian composer Arturas Bumšteinas goes looking for signs of Futurism. He finds what he is looking for in the Baroque era, where noise machines arrived in theatres, René Descartes described the human body as a machine, and equal temperament was not yet alone in determining the tonal system.
Bumšteinas combines recordings of old theatre machines with sounds from the harpsichord and prepared harpsichord:
Emotive Baroque music meets futuristic effect noises.

August Walla lives in the "Haus der Künstler" (House of Artists) belonging to the Gugging state psychiatric clinic near Vienna. He is a world-famous representative of "art brut", art by the so-called "insane". But for him and his admirers, his mind extends far beyond the cosmos that is known to us: here he paints and describes the "Ewigkeitsendeland" (Eternity's end country), which begins at the end of eternity, but is now already connected to our universe through "worm holes" (as modern theoretical physics refers to it)...

Faust, following moving and shocking events nevertheless accepted into heaven, desperately tries to justify his way of life on earth and is no longer able to understand what he himself is saying. Not on account of the loud singing of the angels, but because of the different nature of heavenly language. Nonetheless he overindulges his speech and his "Faustian vitality" and forgets himself in the depths of the moment, which turns out to be exactly what he had been arduously seeking in the first two parts of J.W. von Goethe's tragedy.This composition for voice and gongs originated during the work on "Die Gesetzestafeln" (The Tablets of the Law), a piece from 1999 that was produced in Michael Vetter's "Academia Capraia".

Matilde, the baby, is having a restless night. Between waking and dreaming three fantasy worlds open to her.In her first waking dream, the only inhabitants of the Earth are a man and a woman. They have to imitate birds, in order to communicate because they do not speak a language. It is a world without words.In her second vision, the world is being listened to from the Moon: Voices, bells, war cries and machines can be heard; electronic instruments mimic Morse code.Speechlessness once again prevails in her third waking dream. Only isolated computer voices break the silence to announce: "Fine del messaggio" (End of the message).

"The two related sound compositions fire pattern and frost pattern listen to the sounds of fire and ice, and, through their identical structure, emphasize the acoustic relationship between the two temperature poles. Fire pattern deals with the sound phenomena that occur during combustion processes and high temperatures. Centre stage is given to sound recordings of volcanoes and geysers from Vanuatu, Costa Rica, Iceland and Sicily. Besides this, the prolonged tones of the singing flames and a spectrum of the quietest heat and fire noises, recall the role of fire as man's constant companion throughout the course of civilization." (Bick)

For many years, Jovanovič and his tape recorder have recorded the different moods and atmospheres around a wall, which protects his property from the powers of the sea, the Adriatic near the Croatian city of Rovinj.The examination of the sound material confronted him more and more with his own history. At the same time, the wind shifted in the diversity of its appearances into the centre of his attention. He had traversed many seas as a sailor and the wind regulated his life in exile on the Adriatic coast. The four-part composition is like a four-time approach, which penetrates ever deeper into the element of wind and into his subjective perception. It is a confrontation with the force of nature, the moods, but also the significance of wind.

The forbidding barrenness and beauty of Arctic deserts are the starting point for the sound composition "Frost Pattern". Sounds produced only by ice are the focus of an acoustic journey. It leads from Greenland's enormous glaciers to the barely audible tinkling of ice-covered trees in native climes. A permanently frozen world is acoustically described, beneath the surface of which enormous tensile forces are acting. In fascinating original recordings, the action of these forces can be imagined: with glaciers calving, icebergs rolling and bursting and cracks forming in the icy surfaces of frozen lakes. This extremely loud explosive sounds are contrasted with the microscopic sounds made during the formation of frost structures.

"Paris, 50 125 before Christ. In a café, a couple of Neanderthals are chatting with some representatives of the species Homo sapiens. Suddenly, the waiter reveals himself to be a not quite extinct Australopithecus and blows himself up. The tremendous explosion opens the door to an imaginary landscape of atoms and elementary particles. The clock is put back 14 billion years, to the time of the Big Bang." "Geologica" transposes the different periods of the Earth's history into a playful and ironic sound composition. Quite incidentally, the piece reflects on the smallness of man in the face of the gigantic expansion of the universe.

One need only visit Berlin's Olympic stadium once during a Bundesliga football match in order to experience truly impressive worlds of sound. Tens of thousands of people shouting, ranting, clapping, booing, singing or forming choruses. Weekly ecstatic mass concerts. These mass voices - in all their diversity - form the foundation, the orchestra, this composition. The musical counterpoint are two singing voices. They stand up against the crowd and sing to texts by Walt Whitman the irreplaceability of the individual.

Vilified and disappointed by the German world of music, the composer Stefan Weisz emigrated to New York in 1933. In search of new sounds he meets colleagues who are keen to experiment, such as Edgar Varèse and Henry Cowell. He notes: "Manhattan is big, wide, fast, and above all lonely. Can this be the future of the music?"
Shortly before the outbreak of the war, Weisz returns to Berlin, where he makes an astonishing musical discovery. His last diary entry in 1945 reads: "Make a list of the voices."
Allen S. Weiss combines historical compositions, facts and fiction to create a radio essay between philosophy and phantasm.

The sound material for this composition are recordings by the two composers of two extended trips to India. Without passing judgement, they examine the different qualities of acoustic energy and the broad dynamic range in large cities, in bazaars or livestock markets: It is an exuberant noise, which allows the old town streets of Delhi to sink in a gigantic noise concert before sunset; at night there is a ghostly stillness at the same place. It does not have to do with a realistic picture of the places, but rather with the dynamic and tonal richness: a complex blend of spices - "spicy"!

The Yaghan were nomads of the seas. They navigated their canoes between the islands around Cape Horn and lived by hunting sea lions. Their language was closely connected with nature. It is considered the most concise idiom in the world. "Hamoni lapude anan" means something like: "In the past I also used to build canoes - today I don't do that any longer."
Joaquin Cofreces visited the last two Yaghan spokeswomen. With the help of anthropologists he reconstructs the everyday sounds of the Yaghan. And he wanders through their natural habitats with his microphone.
 Today Tierra del Fuego is characterized by immigrants of many different origins. Cofreces creates an acoustic meditation on old and new nomads at the southernmost tip of the world.

For this project, the term "Hausmusik" (house music) was taken literally: The composer Thomas Gerwin and the sound engineer Lutz Pahl were out and about in the DeutschlandRadio Berlin broadcasting studio to capture sounds both typical and unusual for the place: Fragments of music recordings, spoken word and studio atmospheres, or even just the silence of an empty cellar.In the sense of "Musique Concrète", Thomas Gerwin isolates the tones recorded in reality, fanning them out tonally and thus freeing them from their original meaning.This composition is a very personal, subjective and idiosyncratic musical portrait of our broadcasting studio in Berlin-Schöneberg.

A farm house in the wilderness, a hollow in the hills, a hiding place in a dam, sleeping between blueberries and lava rocks: What gives a place its secret? What is hiding behind its vegetable or mineral architecture, its sounds, the sound of a voice that tells of it?
Iceland and Australia form the two poles of this montage of situational field recordings, interviews and musique concrète. ›Hidden places‹ deals with the state of travel, thinking, speaking in two diametrically opposed countries that have surprisingly much in common.

"'Hudson Street' came into being in 2005 / 2006 between New York and Nancy. At first I had no other interest than simply to record the sounds of New York by systematically walking from street to street. Later I naively searched for the music in the sounds and composed a musical fiction – something between folk, rock and noise music. 'Hudson Street' is the starting point for an even longer as yet unfinished piece on the memory of sound." (Hervé Birolini")

In the second part of "Hungarian Soundscapes", we introduce the composers Gyula Bánkövi and Janos Decsényi with their sound compositions. Gyula Bánkövi's tone poem "Die Stimme der Seele" (The Voice of the Soul) is based on the "funeral oration" and Gaspar Károli's translation of the Bible, which made the Holy Scriptures accessible to Hungarians in their native language for the first time. Janós Decsényi's symphony "Should I rather leave with the cranes?" combines original recordings from the "Hortobágy" puszta with Hungarian folk songs, violin melodies and a rhyming chronicle from the 16th century.Both compositions were produced by the Hungarian Radio "HEAR study".

"This work is a musical portrait of Rome through the sound of its old doors. Their sound gives a shadowy report of the lives once lived behind them. I have tried to listen to each door in order to describe the complexity of this noisy city with its overlapping centuries of sound. The opening of each individual door involves music, shouts or dialogue. Not unlike Ariosto's 'Castello di Atlante' (Atlas' Castle), to which all those are drawn who are seeking a loved one, I have tried to capture the life on the other side of the door by mixing a sound spectacle of personal memories and realistic projections." (Lucia Ronchetti)

The composition "im klangrand" (in the edge of sound) examines various aspects of the acoustic events at the horizon of perception: Auditory thresholds, transitions and passages, playing with sound in the foreground and background as well as with the distant sources of sound which reach the edges of the universe. Johannes S. Sistermanns found the material for this work in the Australian Outback, the Rhine valley, the Atlantic Ocean of France and in the movement of the stems of a corn field. He listened to the Deutzer bridge spanning the river Rhine in Cologne, New York's Times Square, a Chinese pedestrian tunnel between bustling main streets, and the spacious district around the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. Sistermanns composes with everyday items and everyday actions, text margins, edges of voices, with extensive interior spaces and not least with the sounds of pulsars. These distant stars emit radio waves which can be converted into audible noise signals.Sistermanns does not use any artificial reverb and echo effects in the processing of his recordings. A part of his composition is created directly in the recording process by the spatial relationship between the microphone and the sound source. In the studio Sistermanns allows these sounds to become porous and frayed, rupturing and merging into new mixtures. In this way he creates a play of identity, self-assertion and constantly newly emerging sound passages.

In the dark world of the deep sea, most organisms orient themselves through their auditory system. This insight inspired the Argentinan-Mexican sound artist Sol Rezza to a phantasmagorical radio piece: Based loosely on the novel '20 000 Leagues Under the Sea' by Jules Verne, she designs a mysterious world of recordings of hydrophones and synthetic soundscapes. Please keep your headphones ready!

The project "In the Darkness of the World" was supported with a realisation grant as part of the Radio Lab from the Goethe Institut, CTM Festival, ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst, Ö1 ORF Kunstradio, ICAS-ECAS and Deutschlandradio Kultur. A multi-channel version of the play premièred in HAU 2 at the CTM Festival on 26 January 2015.

"Jacob Räume Zen" (Jacob Spaces Zen) combines the texts and visionary pictures from Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) with the experience and statements of Zen Buddhism. Johannes S. Sistermanns uses the spiritual closeness of these geographically distant worlds to bring the respective sound spaces in contact with each other. Boehme's texts are transferred from his home town of Görlitz into Japanese everyday places and monastery rooms. Words from the Zen monks journey acoustically from Japan into the living spaces occupied by Jacob Boehme. In the course of the piece, the sounds gradually interweave with each other. They create an atmosphere of non-conceptual recognition, into which Boehme's experiences are silently absorbed.

"The Klingons are belligerent and stubborn. They are known as a warlike people from the planet Qo'noS from the TV series Star Trek. But the Klingons also love music and poetry. Their greatest poet was Shakespeare from Earth, who was allegedly one of their own.The Klingon opera "juHrop" (pronounced tschuch-rop, in German: homesickness) plays timpani and trumpets without restraint in a heroic monumental orchestra, which is supplemented by synthetic Gregorian and electronic hi-fi and lo-fi effects. The story is as bloodthirsty and heart-rending as is its setting to music. The singing is in Klingon and Chinese." (Frieder Butzmann)

The Sorbian Pastor Jan Kilian (1811-1884) had a dream: In order to keep his Old Lutheran faith from the clutches of the Prussian authorities, he decided to seek salvation in a foreign land. His initial emigration plan, was to go to a continent of which he could have only have had a very vague idea: Australia. The Australian composer Colin Black travelled to Jan Kilian's homeland in Upper Lusatia. He made location recordings of Kilian's churches, interviewed Sorbs who live there today, and researched historical documents. From this material he reconstructs an acoustic phantasm of his own homeland: Australia becomes a shimmering sound space between imagination and reality. - Jan Kilian never set foot on Australian soil. He emigrated to Texas in 1854 with 550 other Sorbian Lutherans.

In the art carousel of the 80s, Martin Kippenberger's bizarre performances were the cream of the crop within the scene. The nights were his, and he was inexhaustible on his journey as an impresario, dancer and entertainer. There was silence and solitude in front of the screen. "Aufstehn / Stuhl kaputt machen / you / yellow / you" (Martin Kippenberger).The radio play collages texts, poems, music and original recordings of Kippenberger with music by Augst, Carl and Johansson.

For the duration of the MaerzMusik festival (14.3. to 23.03.2003) DeutschlandRadio Berlin was a guest in the SONIC ARTS LOUNGE of the Berlin Festival House, or Haus der Berliner Festspiele, to perform sound art live as part of the night programme. The motto for one of the evenings was: KLANGKUNST (SOUND ART) meets TANGO = KLANGO. Therefore a tango, which for once does not require a bandoneon, but instead is composed of noises, electro-acoustic elements and concrete sounds. Many internationally renowned sound artists were invited by the Radio Drama Workshop, to compose 3 to 5-minute "Klangos". Very different compositions were created – with one thing in common: You can dance tango to them. That is precisely what the dancers from the tango scene in Berlin, who were in the SONIC ARTS LOUNGE, did until late in the night.

"La Parata is a psycho-acoustic composition of phrases and words from European politicians of the 20th century. The speeches are reassembled according to tonal and rhythmic aspects in the form of a march, disengaged from their original meaning, so that they transform themselves into a "danse macabre" – a dance of death.

»... all reality is indescribable, and I know instinctively: Consciousness is structured like our language (and for good reason!), yet not the world, and not the unconscious.« (Alain Robbe-Grillet)

With his book 'Ghosts in the Mirror' (1985) Alain Robbe-Grillet reflects and breaks the genre of autobiography. He exposes memory as a construction, whose references to what is remembered move around in a dream-like fashion. On the 90th birthday of the pioneer of the Nouveau Roman, two musicians follow the traces of his automythography. René Desalmand collects sounds from Robbe-Grillet's home in Brittany. With the drummer Michael Wertmüller, he develops musical structures which are derived from Robbe-Grillet's texts. Music is to noise as fiction is to sensory perception.

The composer Luc Ferrari travels with a tape recorder. He has brought back original sounds and atmospheres from almost everywhere around the world and woven them together as compositions in numerous radio plays. For his new piece "Les Anecdotiques", he has used recordings from Japan, Spain, France, Mexico, California and Berlin.Luc Ferrari coined the term "anecdotic music" in the '60s to describe his "acoustic photos", his minimalistically composed soundscapes and travel portraits."Les Anecdotiques" now closes a circle ranging from Ferrari's early works in anecdotic music up to his mature work.

"Small discrete sounds. Chants which are too subtle to attract our attention. Sounds on the edge of the auditory threshold. Noises that we take no longer take any notice of, because we are continually surrounded by them. This is the material of 'Les petits riens'." In her new work, the French-Canadian composer Chantal Dumas guides our hearing through a suite of acoustic spaces, through a cabinet of curiosities with precisely selected sound objects. She calls our listening habits into question and turns conventional sound structures upside down. "In 'Les petits riens' I would like to bring to light a poetic rhythm of everyday life which we have missed out on up to now." (Chantal Dumas)

"The Aboriginals believe that an unsung land is a dead land, for when the songs fall into oblivion, the land itself dies."

Bruce Chatwin's bestseller "Songlines" made the musical culture of the Aboriginal world-famous. The Canadian sound artist Robin Minard now approaches this unique connection between music, landscape and everyday life with the microphone. Field recordings, interviews, songs, history and archival recordings are woven together into many-layered narrative levels. Minard's radio composition uses the resources of modern sound processing to sing the interpenetration of culture and nature.

"Sonic X-radiation" is how Thomas Köner refers to the instruments with which he tirelessly shines through the stone shells covering modern cities. He has composed a "sound letter" from a different global metropolis every month since January 2008 for Deutschlandradio Kultur. These five-minute miniatures can be heard regularly as the "Sound of the Month" in the radio drama and feature programme. As opposed to simple "Cityscapes", Köner's compositions penetrate deep below the surface of tonal and social daily life. They expose sounding archetypes, which are localized and placeless, primitive and highly modern at the same time. In "Lithosphères" (Lithospheres) the media artist combines the horizontal movement from time to time, from city to city with a vertical drift through the sound sediments of urban life.

The living room is a special room. Nowhere else is the private and intimate as strongly intermingled with the public and universal. That's good to hear: From chamber music to radio reception, living room sounds constantly reflect the tension between the internal and the external world.For his composition "Living Room Music", Alvin Curran invites a number of musician and artist friends over to play in his living room in Rome. Built on the ruins of Nero's Domus Aurea, with a view of the Colosseum, filled with musical instruments, sheet music, books and objects from around the world, this place becomes a resonance space for meetings, conversations and musical improvisations.Curran processed this material into a radiophonic room composition. "I want the sound of my living room to be the sum of all of the sounds that can ever be heard in this room." (Curran)

"A forest in Bali at dusk: Thousands of rhythmically chirping crickets create a magical harmony... A village in eastern Senegal at dawn: women's voices whispering, water splashing, a child crying, every so often the sound of a wooden pestle pounding the millet ... Santiago de Cuba at midnight: Tens of thousands of fans in the street celebrating the baseball victory over arch-rivals Havana ... Sounds, like I have recorded them in various places around the world. My composition for an ensemble of selected musicians sends us on a journey, makes distance and convergences audible, traces the acoustic secrets of past sound experiences." (Wolfgang Hamm)

Caspar David Friedrich's famous painting "The Sea of Ice" provided the impetus for this project. The painting has been cited over and again as an icon of the scepticism of progress. For the composer Werner Cee a similar symbolism clings to an industrial ruin in Bitterfeld, a never-used water tank - particularly evident during the flood disaster in the summer of 2002. Werner Cee confronted musicians with the image of Frederick in the resonant "sound tank" and lets the piece arise as part of the improvisational processes. The unifying sound element is the e-Ch'in, his electronic Chinese zither. It's long reverberations lead to paralysis and "deceleration" like the floes drifting in Caspar David Friedrich's Sea of Ice.

On an extended trip, Eva Pöpplein and Janko Hanushevsky followed the lower reaches of the Mekong River through Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam down to the delta where the river empties into the South China Sea.
The Duo Merzouga counterpoint the acoustic landscapes of this enormous water world with electronically processed electric bass sounds.
"You can hear the trickle of the pebbles in the riverbed, the peaceful chugging of an outboard motor and the occasional call of a water bird, while the trickle slowly changes colour, the cool, small-scale clicking of the pebbles accelerates into the unreal, the diesel engine suddenly develops a droning sound"

In the second part of the "Memoirs of a century", hundreds of digitised original sound recordings from 1900 to today will be "destroyed". Each of these decompositions however, leads to new sound material, which now in its own way tells stories - and not just history.The memory of the original material remains.

The composer Thomas Gerwin constructs a virtual landscape of sounds."I am populating this landscape with large and small acoustic beings, which appear individually, in pairs or in droves. These beings live in this soundscape, they are born, grow and evolve, some also die during the piece." (T. Gerwin)The composer builds his virtual world of sound in the computer chapter by chapter; the beings are created and further developed - however: the further the process advances, the more independent the sound creatures become. They increasingly decide themselves on the metamorphoses they undergo...The composer allows you to "look over his shoulder" during this piece. The listeners accompany him in his deliberations on the construction of the sound labyrinth up to editing in the sound studio.

Human conscious activity is one of the discoveries of the 20th century. This phenomenon has been approached in literary terms by the "monologue intérieur" or "stream of consciousness". The composition "Mindscape" is an acoustic representation, which follows on from the multidimensional sound continuum in our heads. External stimuli such as noises, snatches of conversations, muffled noise and sounds ceaselessly penetrate into our consciousness and mingle with our feelings and memories. This constantly changing chaos is what makes up consciousness before the perceiving "I" is able to arrange the individual sensory impressions and feelings into proper order. "Mindscape" is an expedition into the "Babylon inside the skull".

Molly Bloom, protagonist of the final episode of "Ulysses" by James Joyce, scans through all the threads of the story in her soliloquy and weaves them back together again. Divided into eight sentences without punctuation, the text provokes a kind of hypnosis, a loss of sense, caused by the overlapping and collision of ideas. This loss of sense can however create a free space which activates the imagination. Disjointedness is no longer an obstacle, but rather the door to more open perception. The two composers have tracked down all of the words that make one think of tones and sounds in Joyce's original English text and in the German and French translations. An odyssey develops through Joyce's text, through a woman's sea of thought.

"If I as a painter design a surface, I have to work in shifts. The application of a single layer paint would simply lead to a lifeless coating. If I however build up the colour from a variety of different, loosely overlapping areas, so that the respective undercoat always shows through and has its say, then I can create a complex colour, which shimmers and oscillates in itself." (W. Cee)In "Monochrom", the composer Werner Cee draws on his experience in painting. The focus of the composition does not lie in its temporal structure, but rather in the stratification of a noise surface. The sounds overlap each other without covering each other. They form a shimmering, dazzling web of sound moving within itself.

For his composition Tetsuo Furudate used a story from the Japanese Noh theatre from the 13th century: On a pilgrimage to the capital of Kyoto, a young monk meets the spirit of a woman at a burial mound who was condemned to hell because she was responsible for the death of two lovers. The noise musician Furudate, using a motif from his own culture for the first time here, found the relentlessness of her conviction by God in the story interesting, and the sharp contrast that is generated musically between the idyllic opening scene and the report from hell. In addition, he was fascinated by the Noh theatre's blurring of the boundaries between life and death, I and you, past and future.

On a trip through Vietnam, Marcus Mohr collected the source material for his sound piece "muoi (zehn)", which is based on the concept of the five elements: metal, earth, wood, water, fire. Marcus Mohr assigns each of his recordings to one of the five elements and treats them in the same the way a DJ plays his records: from the sounds of an element, he generates a track and then combines this with the tracks of the other elements. Gradually more and more elements are added, at first running synchronously, then offset, and finally alternating. Ten different combinations are created in this way, in which each element is mixed with one of the other four elements. "Muoi (zehn)" tells of the balance and interplay between the five elements.

Our electronic traces on the Internet have become one of the most important commodities. Governments and companies create personal profiles from the vast collections of supposedly insignificant information. ›Anticipatory Computing‹, i.e. the forecasting of possible behaviours is considered as the next logical step in this development. Computer programmes will then tell their users what they will do, want, or experience next. An attractive scenario, in particular for the creative industry which would like to use this method to forecast changes in fashions and tastes which have to date been difficult to gauge.
By analysing the freely accessible data on Deutschlandradio Kultur’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, Mathew Dryhurst speculates on listeners’ preferences and holds up a digital mirror to us.
Unlike commercial media makers, Mathew Dryhurst is however not bent on numerical success alone. He would also like to highlight the issue of the new development. This is why his radio play is not a highly polished blockbuster, but rather a multi-layered reflection on the present and the future of the media narrative.
The process of translation plays an important role here, because Dryhurst doesn’t speak German. Just like multi-national corporations or powerful intelligence services, he has used algorithms to translate his material into English. With this approach, the context is often lost and mistakes creep in.
From the resulting fragments and topics he has made a surrealist science-fiction story in English, which he has fed back onto the Internet. With the help of online portals for freelancers, he found translators and speakers to translate his text into German and record it. A patchwork of voices and styles was created, corresponding to the diversity of communication on the Internet.
The sound compositions for “Muster” ("Patterns") were created in a similar fashion. Dryhurst used software to collect all the audio files he came across during his research and extracted from them the source material for his musical work.

The world above ground opens itself to us through our eyes, the world below through our ears. Inside a cave, drops break their way into the silence and take us further and further down... In the cycle of poems enitled "Nachtkarst", Károly Koller undertakes a lyrical "advance into the depths", fragments of an expedition become visible: the ascent to the cave entrance, the descent into the depths where fissures and narrow places block the path. Silence, cold, night and time are the recurring themes of the radio play. The labyrinth below ground becomes audible in the maze of sounds and words, the expedition develops into an advance into the depths of man's inner self.

The composer Cathy Milliken collected her auditory information with a microphone: Construction sites, rehearsals, walks, music and recordings of nature. In "New Looks" she lets these sounds encounter piano music and vocals. Shakespeare's sonnets tell of timelessness and the passage of time, at the same time they organize and structure the acoustic material by intonation and metre. "The processing and setting into relation of these acoustic impressions and elements recall photographs that permit a very personal reality to be experienced through cross fading, inversion, magnification, repetition, solarization and snapshot." (C. Milliken)

With the sound composition "Niemandsbucht" (No man's bay) the composer Thomas Köner follows the trail of a hero. Keuschnig, the protagonist in Peter Handke's 1994 novel "My year in no man's bay", documents the course of a year in a Parisian suburb. Thomas Köner spent more than a year visiting the places whose acoustics Handke describes in detail, looking for sounds that portray "No man's bay" acoustically. Through the musical composition of recordings made at the specific locations, a sound space was created which tells of many places and everyone's "No one's bay".

The composition "nota.thión" - the "ideography" - dedicates itself to the experience of disaster and entropy. Norbert Walter Peters lets three voices – an old man, a child, a woman – quote from the epic of Gilgamesh, an anonymous Babylonian poem, which originated around 1800 BC and comments on the Flood. Peters only quotes ancient oriental languages: Akkadian, Old Assyrian, proto-Hattic, Hittite, Hurrian, ancient Egyptian, ancient Hebrew, Arabic. Languages,in which words and what is named are still consonant, attuned with each other. In the composition they are spoken by three voices and, as it were, enter into in a dialogue with the cello.

In 1963, off the coast of Iceland, Surtsey emerged after an underwater volcanic eruption. The birth of a volcanic island is a rare event that occurs on average twice a century. Unlike Surtsey most of these islands disappear quickly. After 50 years of existence, Surtsey is still tenacious, but its days are numbered due to the rough tides of the North Atlantic that will erode the island sooner or later. Closed to the public, only a few scientists have access to the island since its emergence, to observe and study the explosion of life on an a priori sterile ground.

Scientists envision the island as a time capsule. As the youngest member of the Westman Islands, Surtsey is a window to the past of the older islands of the archipelago. Reciprocally, those older islands are a window to what Surtsey might become like in the future. Lending the approach of science, Nýey orchestrates an abstract conversation between the sound environment of the island – past, present, future – and the community exploring it.

"Okyo" is the name of the prayer texts which Zen monks in the Far East recite as a spoken song. They are sung on a tone to visualise they are beyond all emotions. Here, the Okyo is understood primarily as a phonetic experience, as a sound event which puts the meaning of the texts in the background. "For years my Okyo meditations consisted of improvisational drill processes concerning the inner life of the tones. For many hours every day, while singing I observed the tone, how it went into and came out from within itself." (M. Vetter) Traditional Zen music forms the starting point for this audio piece, in which Michael Vetter and Natasha Nikeprelevic reinterpret the Okyos while adding instruments. They demonstrate in particular their ability to masterfully produce harmonics.

›Operation Olympic Games‹ is the name of a US Government Programme that was commissioned to develop computer viruses, Trojans and worms for intelligence services and cyberwarfare.
The artist James Hoff infected his sound material with malicious software and uses dangerous programmes with names like Stuxnet, Flame or Skywiper as composition tools. His sound miniatures, which allow us to hear the computer viruses at work, have been available since the beginning of the year in our ›Sonarisations‹ series.
Hoff outlines a speculative scenario. What does it sound like when a virus becomes independent? At the same time the work raises questions about the spread of viruses. Do not some ideas also work like viruses?
In the broadcast, James Hoff explains his fascination for injected code: »Viruses, like art, need a host. Preferably a popular one.«

"Out of Range" is an audio work based on ultrasound and echolocation used by bats, dolphins and other creatures who operate beyond the range of human hearing - 'seeing' with sound, or perhaps 'hearing' objects.

Sound is invisible. Ultrasound is inaudible. Of course, many species have a greater range of hearing than us humans and also more specific and specialised with complex combinations of the different senses… Creatures on both land and under water produce and/or perceive very high sound frequencies. Some species of insects, birds, fish, and mammals can emit and hear ultrasound, which is used for communications, hunting and orientation. These creatures operate on a different level of perception to us, in an inaudible range above 20kHz...

Many animals also use the acoustic properties of space; a bat, for example, can use the echo from a tower block to amplify their calls for mates in the autumn; toadfish use caves to amplify their calls to protect their habitat. Whales use the different acoustic properties at different depths of the ocean at different pressure levels to send their long distance calls. An astonishing fact about moths is that they have a reflex action using their wings to shut down when they hear a bat's echolocation calls… That we think, this to be astonishing, does that say something about us?

The mix for the piece is based on ultrasound, hydrophone recordings below the water and also of echolocation sound in audible range. The recordings were made at various locations in Central Park and on the East River in New York, USA, a forest outside Kaliningrad in Russia, Regents Park in London, UK, and various locations in Norway, Denmark and Sweden. The ultrasound recordings are time-stretched to bring them into a frequency range audible for humans.

"Paso Doble" is the meeting of two artists and two media based with the aid of one and the same material: The Catalan sculptor Miquel Barcelò and the Hungarian dancer/choreographer Josef Nadj handle, record, orchestrate a room full of clay. From transient images, living sculptures and forming gestures, they create with their performance a very personal and universal cosmogony of art.
Alain Mahé composed the soundtrack for this performance. Together with the documentary producer Kaye Mortley, he has now transposed the stage event into the world of radio. An ephemeral sound sculpture which unfolds behind closed eyes and targets the ears.

After the plants and the animals, the first humans were made out of clay. But they were too soft and dissolved. The second humans were made out of wood. But they forgot to honour their creator and were destroyed again. The third humans were made entirely from corn, they thanked their creators and founded families and nations... So it is told in the Popol Vuh, the unique Maya book of creation, which was passed on to a missionary in the 16th century in the Mayan language "so that the lore of our people will survive". Götz Naleppa has created a sound composition combining German and Mayan text, jungle sounds from Mayan temple sites and music played on pre-Hispanic instruments, in which the cruel and cosmic-comic aspects of creation become tangible.

"He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging." With these words Walter Benjamin describes a time which moves forward synchronously, preserved in many layers lying on top of one another rather than chronologically.

In 'Progress', the musician Marc Behrens gently uncovers fragments of his family history in Germany and Poland. The various layers of time interfuse and overlap each other continually: both field recordings as well as speech are recorded using contemporary and historical devices. They merge with original sound recordings of his father, a telecommunications engineer, who maintained the listening facilities at the East / West German border among other things.

'Progress' questions the concept of progress, whether historical, genealogical or technical in nature. For the actual, almost magical potential of history lies not in its course, but in the productive interleaving of layers of time in the here and now.     

The Austrian composer Peter Ablinger does not direct his attention at "Art" but rather at "what-is-there", and above all at how we assimilate or perceive "what-is-there" at all.The programme introduces various works from different creative phases: "Weiss/Weisslich" is a digression on noise, for instance the noise made by different species of tree; the "Quadraturen" is about the transmission of acoustic reality (such as sound recordings of city noise or speech) onto instruments - including a computer-controlled piano. The creative work of one of the great inquiring minds of sound art is situated in this area of tension.Story and directing: Götz Naleppa

In this work the composer looks closer at the fundamentals of sound art, of history and the music of the 20th century. The five "thematic areas" of the composition each reflect a particular period of the 20th century: Prologue and epilogue set the time frame, TANZ (DANCE) reflects the destructive energy of turmoil, which discharged itself in the two world wars, ZEIT (TIME) the traumatic horror of Auschwitz and Hiroshima - and SCHWEIFUNG (UPSWEEP) the forsakenness of the last third of the century in the increasingly unreal search for something new.

Cuba - a dream destination for travellers, the myth of the socialist revolution, and a longing for Caribbean simplicity. When Werner Cee travelled to Cuba in 1998, his impression was out of focus. For three weeks he explored the islands with his tape recorder. He stumbles upon the story of "Che" Guevara's hands, which were chopped off by the Bolivian army as proof of their victory. Sounds and noises lead us to a world between times, where horse-drawn carts drive along motorways and the splendour of the past has long since decayed.Werner Cee condenses the original sounds into a poetic composition, assembles sounds from the streets of Havana to create a surrealistic painting and allows specific noises to become sound metaphors.