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.

During the last ten years I occasionally recorded at subwaytrains and stations in various places, but in A Narrow Angle: Taipei Metro Easycard 500 NT$ I focused on a very particular aspect encountered in the Taipei Metro (hence ‘narrow angle’). This piece is the second of three parts: part one focuses on recordings from crowded urban game parlours; part three on recordings from around a Taoist temple at the edge of the forest north of Taipei.

"A Narrow Angle" was also published on CD: Entr'acte (http://www.entracte.co.uk).

John Cage set a milestone of modern music history in 1958 with "Fontana Mix". For the first time a composer was not writing directly for musicians, but in the first instance for other composers. Cage's graphic guidelines first have to be musically worked out before they can actually be heard.Volker Straebel created a realisation of the "Fontana Mix" for his new version of Cage's "Europeras" at Aachen Theatre in 2006. In addition to Cage's own audio tape realisation, he primarily used sounds which he found at his workplace: sounds of the city of Aachen and the surrounding area, recordings from rehearsals in the theatre, from the workshops, the public foyers and so on.He processed these sounds, 1181 in number, on the basis of Cage's score to create a separate audio tape composition.

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.

»Falls ich noch einen letzten Film drehen würde, dann über das Zusammenspiel von Wissenschaft und Terrorismus.« (Luis Buñuel)
 Kurz vor seinem Tod zieht sich Luis Buñuel gemeinsam mit Jean-Claude Carrière zum letzten Mal in sein mexikanisches Lieblingshotel zurück, um an einem Drehbuch zu arbeiten. Enttäuscht stellen beide fest, dass die Bar des Hauses verschwunden ist. Der Film wird nie gedreht.
 30 Jahre später konfrontiert der Klangkünstler Werner Cee das apokalyptische Skript mit dem Sound der Karfreitagsprozessionen aus Buñuels Heimatstadt Calanda: »Dieses Trommeln, ein unglaubliches, mächtiges, kosmisches Phänomen, das das kollektive Unterbewusstsein anrührt, lässt den Boden unter den Füßen beben.« (Luis Buñuel)

The story of the German scientist Ludwig Leichhardt, who disappeared on his third expedition in the Australian bush in 1848, becomes allegorical for Colin Black. The Australian composer takes it as an example of the European conqueror who, in an osmotic process, is defeated by the landscape and eventually devoured. Text, sound and music are equally important in this sound composition and respond to each other like echoes in this soundscape. Black also uses his "extended enviro guitar" with additional three to 15 metre long strings attached to the landscape and which is played by the wind or the rain.

Collective memory is undergoing a boom in 2014: It is the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the 1st World War.
On March 4th, Oliver Augst and John Birke take the culture of remembrance and anniversaries to the extremes. In a concert at the Berliner Volksbühne, accompanied by eight musicians, they commemorated all the dead of 1914 – from Christian Morgenstern to Bertha von Suttner up to Pope Pius X.
Individual fates were evoked, curious anecdotes unearthed, connections between biographies conjured up from scratch. An acoustic-fantastic satire has arisen from the recording.

A radio dramatization of Ernest Hemingway's short story "Old man at the Bridge" (1938).

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.

Michael Vetter, trained in contemporary composition and Asian sound traditions, turns to European classical music for the first time in his most recent work. In doing this he has selected a reference, which is particularly closely related to his experience as an overtone singer: Johann Sebastian Bach's sonatas for solo violin are a milestone in the history of music when it comes to making sound developments for several voices audible on a single voice instrument. What Bach made possible with elaborate arpeggios, Michael Vetter has been realising for decades through exceptional vocal and instrumental techniques. Vetter is now reverently approaching the great Baroque master in a two voice improvisation with his partner Natascha Nikeprelevic. The musical core from "An Baches Rand" (At the periphery of J.S. Bach) is made up of the Grave from the Sonata for Solo Violin No. 2 in A minor. Michael Vetter interpreted this highly-concentrated movement on the recorder and framed it with two meditations for voice, recorder and piano.

"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).

"Good evening ... we're playing 'Telephone' on air." These words opened a four-hour broadcast on Deutschlandradio Kultur's medium and long wave frequencies on 21 March 2009. On the World Day of Poetry the sound artist Alessandro Bosetti transformed the medium of radio into a gigantic sound poetry generator. Broadcast messages on the edge of intelligibility were received by listeners around the world, transcribed, and returned to the radio station from where they were broadcast once again until this became an abstract, musical, mysterious and humorous sound composition.Arcoparlante is a "speaking arc". An international electromagnetic festival of language games, absurdities, creative transmission errors.

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)

The work “auf’s Glatteis” (on thin ice) by Hanna Hartman shows how you can generate unfamiliar noises and unexpected sounds with only a hot plate and a little ice.

The listener eavesdrops on a strange conversation between two computers asking about each other's "problems" as if they were psychoanalysts.

The media world is becoming ever more brutal and free of taboos. Compared with the range of computer games or cinema and television, the old game of "Schiffe versenken" (Battleships) seems harmless, in which children imitate the "dangerous" combat sounds. Stefano Giannotti has taken the structure of "battleships" as the basis for a composition that tells of real brutality, of chaos, war, relentless destruction: a sound composition on the theme of power. The sounds for this piece come from different genres, from the world of politics - past and present, as well as from our media environment. The imaginary players make their moves eager for victory, yet guessing coordinates at random, and they all lose to Giannotti. ...a hit!

A study of smashes - and maybe some splashes ...

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.

Sphex, in his early 20s, meets Sunshine, a 17-year-old student in a chat room. They flirt, but then Sunshine submerges back into the cybercosmos. Fortunately, there's a lot happening in the party room, Sphex mingles with the distinguished guests... He immerses himself with the listener into the anarchic float of the Internet chat room and encounters an oscillating word-sound-world. In the style of the medieval musical form of the motet, which uses different texts, melodies, languages and rhythms simultaneously, the sum of the different forms of communication in the chat sound space becomes a listening experience. Dialogues, small stories, truths and lies are hidden beneath the chaotic surface. Heiner Grenzland traces these and musically sounds out the transition between anonymity and intimacy.

Hanna Hartman collected material for her "Sounds of the Month" on many journeys. From the finds of the year 1998/99, which come from Sweden, Russia, China and America, a composition has emerged. The short pieces are never determined by the recording's location. Something completely new and geographically unbound comes into being in Hanna Hartman's work.In this way this sound image also leads what are in part familiar elements from the "Sounds of the Month" through landscapes, countries, cities and rooms - and yet still leave a wide area for associative listening.
The Swedish sound composer Hanna Hartman received a commission in 1997 from the radio drama workshop of DeutschlandRadio Berlin to compose every month the so-called "Sound of the Month" - a kind of "musical gap filler" following our radio plays up to the news, an independent, about 5 minute sound composition. To our surprise, this proved to be "all the rage" with the audience - we have never received as many enthusiastic requests for our pieces as we did for these miniatures. This programme idea brought Hanna Hartman the Prix Europa in autumn 1998 in the "Marketplace of Ideas" category. Back then, the idea came about of creating a large, continuous sound composition with the sound material from all of the previous sounds of the month - "Cikoria" was the result.

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.

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.

Isabella Bordoni's artistic work is on the borderline between different disciplines, in the transition from writing to sound, to image, to space. "I'm interested in this technology, which preserves the poetic memory of modern man. I can add something to this, which includes a space of'not knowing' and can view the technical capabilities of the machine as a miracle of nature. In this intersection of different worlds, a new world has been created, a place where all things are at once feeling and logic, poetry and number. Yet this place is also moving (...) and I can only find it, by moving myself. Like an instant and perpetuity it lies in the mystery of the shadow."

A sound artist and a writer dedicate themselves to dance, in order to capture some of its complex aura acoustically. Chantal Dumas accompanied four dancers during rehearsals and at first recorded the clearly physical aspects of dance: Breathing, movement in space, walking, falling, rigidity, and gravity. Into these images she weaves voices which reflect on their own bodies. "Danse" (Dance) is a composition of the elements of body, word and music that oscillates between the presence of the human body and its abstraction in a line, an arc, movement, sound, volume.

Do plants produce sounds? Do they possibly even possess musical potential? On the lookout for talented members of a plant orchestra, Christina Ertl-Shirley trawls through a wide variety of disciplines: from the fields of botany, via biochemistry, esotericism, floristics, interactive electronics right up to musicology.
As with the majority of casting shows, the actual question and at the same time also the most difficult one to answer is: Which candidate remains at the end? And who has to go? To top it all off, the best sounding plants perform a composition together.

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.

Recordings of Snow Music are rare, and even more rarely are they presented to a greater public. The Hamburg artist Gabi Schaffner and the Finnish music anthropologist Sisukas Poronainen spent three years collecting material in Finland and Lapland. In our programme Gabi Schaffner presents some of their finest examples of Finnish "Lumimusikki": Field recordings from North Karelia and Lapland are mixed with modern pieces from Helsinki, Turku and Tampere. For a new generation of musicians has committed itself to the task of reinterpreting the older traditions of ritual tunes and word magic. The impact of Snow Music has grown with the increasing need for a musical identity incorporating the poetic universe of snow.

This radio piece is about the four elements, their nature, their outer and inner sound and their archaic power to transform. Since the pre-Socratics, philosophers have dealt with the doctrine of elements, mostly derived from the "One", the primordial matter, which is differentiated into earth, fire, water, air. Their specific composition accounts for the form of all beings and things. Alchemy in particular took to these teachings. On this basis, the composer Thomas Gerwin has tried to establish an "alchemy of sound": His musical elements arise from a primary matter, which differentiates, spreads, and transforms itself. His goal: "To recognise the sublime in the everyday, the practical in principle and the playful in the important."

The Arcana, the picture cards from the card game Tarot, serve as a source of inspiration and can offer suggestions for lifestyles in a playful way. The "Juggler" stands for inspiration, the "Popess" for knowledge, the "Emperor" for philosophy, the "Empress" for magic, the "Pope" for the idea of divine incarnation in man, the "Lovers" for temptation, the "Chariot" for the triumph over temptation... Each Arcanum in the Tarot counts as a universally valid psychological and spiritual archetype. José Mataloni's composition sketches the path of an "Initiation into Magic". "In this sound piece I adopt the attitude of the Hermetic philosophers, who are open for all ideas and religions, in order to combine them to form a whole." (J. Mataloni)

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is - infinite". The English poet William Blake attempted in his prophetic texts to describe the existential extremes of good and evil as essential antagonisms. The 20th Century is approaching Blake's writings musically, as Allen Ginsberg invokes: "I hope now that the musical articulation of Blake's poetry will be heard from the electronically illuminated democratic place of rock pop music mass media and will set an eternal standard for poetry"

Meister Eckhart is regarded as the most important representative of German mysticism. He spoke of the negation of negation, taught hearing without ears, seeing without eyes, speaking without sound. His spaces were infinitely large and microscopically small, his places silent.

The radio play "The silent desert - Meister Eckhart" resembles a recitative: A child of reading age tries to decipher Eckhart's writings. At the same time, the sound artist Thomas Köner interprets the in places obscure text as a composition strategy: How can tones be differentiated in a panorama, in which everything is shadow and night? What tempi does a flow have without flowing?

Diotima, the female character from Holderlin's "Hyperion", and Eurydice, the wife of the mythical Orpheus, represent the crisis in the relationship between men and women in this piece. In both narratives, the male heroes prefer to mourn their dead wives rather than live with them lovingly. Quotes from Plato, Rilke or Eliot as well as a free adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage" complete the text layer of this piece. Nevertheless the focus is on the music: Flute, electric guitar and lute are the protagonists - like the three human voices. "The instruments, voices and electronic material jointly interpret the sound storyline of an unreal, hallucinatory scenario."

In 1816, following the outbreak of an Indonesian volcano, dry fog obscured the sky over large parts of Europe, screening off the sunlight. The overcast atmosphere also had literary consequences, and inspired Lord Byron to his famous poem 'Darkness'. Today, the experience gained from this 'Year without a summer' serve as an example for representatives of geoengineering, when they are thinking of cooling down the atmosphere with the aid of an artificial volcanic eruption.
'Dry Haze' (Part II of the triptych "The Anthropocene") is the soundtrack to this shaded world.

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.

(Lord Byron)

Players: Rachel Unthank, Becky Unthank, Adrian McNally, Neville Tranter
Electric guitar:  Alf Terje Hana
E-chin:  Werner Cee

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)

Inspired by Martin Buber's anthology of mystical writings, the brothers Marc and Nicolas T. Weiser draw up an acoustic liturgy. Inner states are transmitted to the outside as if through a membrane where they are condensed into associative soundspaces."The concept of mysticism is often explained with a reference to the Greek word 'myein', which means with eyes and ears closed. We are trying to approach the topic of the inaudible, attempting to bring to sound that which strictly speaking cannot be made audible. This has to do with the presence of the absent, with the silence in the sound itself. In the moment a melody is heard, it is has already passed. Every note and every sound has this transitory quality, the property of transition." (Weiser)

How does your Europe sound? Over the last year, Deutschlandradio Kultur, the Goethe Institute in Belgrade and the Institute for Music and Acoustics of the ZKM in Karlsruhe put this question to prospective sound artists from Gibraltar to the Ural mountains. The response was more than 180 contributions from 25 countries. The ten best artists were invited to a workshop at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. There they were able to develop a joint concept of the sound panorama of Europe with the media artist Thomas Köner. The result was premiered in Karlsruhe on 22 October.

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)...

The composer Luc Ferrari undertakes an aleatory trip to the southwest of the United States. Day by day, the route unfolds, day by day, encounters in sound are made, people encountered, day by day life is woven from coincidences."This is neither a documentary nor a soundscape, nor a radio play, nor an electro-acoustic work, nor a portrait, nor an exposé of true-life recording, nor is it... It's a composition! What else can I say? Perhaps that the subtitle could be: Sound poem from life." (Luc Ferrari)

"What is your favourite sound in Prague? And why?" Between March and October 2008 this question was answered by citizens of the Czech capital, from all age groups and classes.Miloš Vojtěchovský and Peter Cusack interviewed suburbanites and city dwellers, schoolchildren and students, children and elderly people, blind and sighted people, workers and politicians. From sounds and interviews arose a polyphonic sound topography of Prague life. The piece was created as part of "Zipp - German-Czech Cultural Projects", an initiative of the German Federal Cultural Foundation.

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)

Nine people walk across Berlin's former Tempelhof Airport. With headset-mikes and an individual audio guide they follow the same route one after the other. At the same time they speak continually. They 'film' their route by speaking, disassembling it into single images. The radio artist Antje Vowinckel assembles a auditory panorama of 'Tempelhof Freedom' from these currents of speech. Different perspectives overlap, a kind of acoustic squint emerges. 
In this way Vowinckel presents a place in upheaval. No longer an airport, not yet a park, the area as a construction of many becomes audible, as a transition between the times. A projection surface for visions.
Contributors: Dave Ball, Clarisse Cossais, Axel Dörner, Fernanda Farah, Shelley Hirsch, Sven-Åke Johansson, Annette Krebs, Chico Mello, Antje Vowinckel

Dishes, windows and doors rattle. Parked cars shake. Unstable objects topple over. Trees sway. Walking becomes difficult. Driving becomes difficult. Fireplaces, factory chimneys, columns, monuments and walls collapse. Houses are pushed off their foundations. Underground pipelines and dams are damaged. Railway tracks are buckled. There are major landslides, the water in lakes, rivers and canals overflows its banks. Bridges are destroyed. The Earth's surface changes significantly, objects are tossed into the air, the earth’s crust moves in waves, enormous rock masses start to slide.

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.

Rupert Huber and Sam Auinger compose music from language, linguistic processes and sounds. Vocal sounds from discussions with and between the composers are assembled to form a polyphonic fictional character, which is the result of the musical, sonic and personal evolution of Sam Auinger and Rupert Huber. The heart beat serves as a basic human rhythm and base reference for any time and musical perceptions. Through the division of the "Herzschlagsonate" (Heartbeat sonata) into five movements, the different stages of life are represented.

"'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".

"During my community service I worked a lot with people with speech impediments. I was fascinated by these voices, their extreme sound and their expressiveness and decided to dedicate a piece to them." (A. Bosetti) In Bosetti's composition, the voices of spastics, aphasia patients and laryngectomees become musical material. From this language, commonly perceived as deformed and ugly, he creates a unique abstract musical aesthetic. Due to the extreme slowness we hear the voices as if through an acoustic magnifying glass and develop a sensitivity for the emotional quality of details that we would otherwise ignore. "Il Fiore della Bocca" is a composition of speech.

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.

Kathryn and Peter are crossing Antarctica is a radio opera. As a conceptional journey it involves the stories of the English-Australian recorder duo Kathryn, Peter and their son Tim, Sir Robert Falcon Scott‘s tragic race for the South Pole, microtonal recorder music, a song cycle, scientific information and a dramatic acusmatic storm. All these elements are interwoven to create a sonic event that places the listener somewhere between facts and fiction, between sound art, music and drama.
with Kathryn Bennetts und Peter Bowman (recorder), Tim Bowman, Claudia Kemmerer (soprano), Lutz Gillmann (piano), Anja Gough, Made in Britain, Chor der Stadtsparkasse Düsseldorf, Moseley Shoals, Oliver Clark, Joachim Datko, Geraldine Dufour, Dr. Kerstin Evert, Boris Michael Gruhl, Keith Homer, Adam Hopkins, Chris Sangwin, Felix Störtzer, Alexandra Taylor, Klaus Thomas, Susannah Wilson wind: Dugal McKinnon music: Michael Wolters Sound Recordist (recorders): Davis Holmes Sound Editor: Peter Batchelor concept, composition, text, realisation: Marcus Droß und Michael Wolters

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.

This acoustical poem confronts us with the fragility and mortality of the body, with the subtle signs which it radiates, as
well as with hidden beauties, which appear unexpectedly.
Audio point of departure is the Theme of the E-flat major Variations by Robert Schumann.  The singer heard the melody through headphones and improvised upon it.
Speaker: David Johnson
Singing voice: Carla Johnson

»... 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.

"Der Duft der Frauen" (The Perfume of Women) is a sound study of the major migratory movements in civilizations and in nature. It correlates the mysterious cyclical movements of the waters of the Atlantic with the emigration of Europeans to America. Part Two is a kind of parody of the longing for "Elsewhere" and the new Part Three deals with crossing and respecting every sort of boundary. This third part was awarded the "EAR 97" at the end of 1997, the Hungarian Radio's Prize for acoustic art. And the entire three-part work received another award in January: Chantal Dumas won the "Palmarès", the most important French radio play prize, awarded annually in Arles, in the Acoustic Art category.

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)

»We transfer a knowledge to something, attribute meaning and importance to it: In this way everything is degraded to carriers of meanings, substances, mere materials and projection surfaces.«(Franz Xaver Baier)

'start listening' is a rejection of the meaning, the importance and of the motivated form. The musician and composer Johannes S. Sistermanns wants neither to mediate nor to relate. He gathered his acoustic starting material together without a specific objective and edited it using an automated procedure. For him it is not nonsense that lies beyond sense, but rather ambiguity. A piece that remains hanging in the balance and it is precisely because of this it can be experienced directly and in all its facets.

"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)

Engines rattle, pile drivers thunder, electric beepsaccompany mechanic, hydraulic and pneumatic sounds. Karl-Heinz's Mauermann's fragments of text mix themselves into Frank Niehusmann's symphonically compacted sound space. Grim machine haters have their say as do emphatic future optimists. The reports are of loud machinery from an almost bygone age, but also of new and different equipment. All of the sounds are original 20th century. Although some are already extinct, the last generation machines scrapped, the spirits of "our" machines continue to haunt us.

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"

3500 European original sound recordings from 1900 to today make up part 1 of the two-hour radio composition by Martin Daske, with which DeutschlandRadio Berlin opened its series of programs for the millennium. The radio play works though the 20th century as a collage of digitised original sound recordings, which were composed throughout according to the strict pattern of a noise-music score. "Sound souvenirs" of the different decades of the past century are created from the multi-layered, complex materials.The 2nd part will be broadcast in one year for the turn of the millennium

EFSF - a string of letters which has dominated European fiscal policy since 2010. The communicability of the ESFS is subjected to a radical review in the radio play "memorandum of understanding" (ger.: "Absichtserklärung")

Serge Baghdassarians and Boris Baltschun have filtered out the letters E, S, and F from the Wikipedia article on the Stability Mechanism. They then had the resulting cloze text spoken by ten synthetic voices. They recruited their speakers from an online translation programme using various pronunciation algorithms.

Baghdassarians and Baltschun have composed a sequence of solo pieces and choral interludes from the voices of the countries participating in the EFSF. They take the incomprehensibility of a highly technocratic language to the extreme, eliciting from it the unexpected potential of sound poetry.

The play traces the path to knowledge of the lonely Metatron from Greek mythology to modern times. Metatron lives in varying incarnations of different historical figures. A vortex of noises leads him to various places where he discovers his respective shape, from Odysseus to Michelangelo to the central computer. Each of the stages of incarnation embodies a principle of life, which attempts to make it possible to ascertain and experience reality.

A peep-hole both narrows and sharpens a view equally. How could an acoustic counterpart to this sound? Alessandro Bosetti set off in search of one and found what he was looking for at the beginnings of radio culture with all its limitations: In the 1930s there were no effects, no cuts and, above all, no stereophony.
In a carefully rehearsed choreography, Alessandro Bosetti lets six members of the 'Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart' group dance around a single microphone: Their goal is to give spaciousness to the mono signal.
The radio as a peep-hole. We are broadcasting the adaptation of an experimental arrangement on the stage.

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.

"Following hours of silence in nature, I came to know a kind of listening, in which all sounds merge into a single noise. I also listen for this noise in the city, in a park, in my backyard."With"Nektarrauschen" (nectar noise), the composer Jürgen Seizew has added an inner level to these soundscapes. He calls the result "Stratascapes"."Stratascapes are sounds which are exclusively developed through the cutting and mixing (in part billionfold stratifications) of noises or series of field recordings. Accents from the original soundscapes play a narrative role in the piece. Conversely the Stratasounds describe an inaudible level of the soundscapes." (Jürgen Seizew)

"Staying alone in a room... and movement interferes, the noise-lessness grows, stays, until the surroundings panic and collapse in your mind."
The poem "New York 48th Floor" tells of loneliness. The voices are locked in a New York skyscraper and look down on the relentless hustle and bustle of city life. This silence transforms itself into an associative space: Sounds of imagination and reality compete with and disturb each other, until painful dissonance comes into being. The protagonists of isolation are voices, noises, texts and instruments such as the double bass or piano: They set the psychic borderline situation of solitariness in music.

In 2004, Martin Daske created a 5-minute noise composition every month for Deutschlandradio Kultur, the "Animal of the Month". Each of these compositions only used animal sounds as source material (crocodiles, fish, boars, koalas, frogs, etc.). This material was then partially electronically strongly distorted, made "playable" and interwoven to form multi-layered music. In the hour-long composition "no barking at any time", all of the animal sounds used in 2004 appear once again as a polyphonic body of sound, the white crocodile, the wolf-killing hyena, the savage electric ray, the diabolical koala, the grazing wild sow, the erudite penguin, the howling larva, the contemptuous elephant, the frog's grandson, the albatross, the trotting hippo-not-amus or the bees and bugs.

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.

The world of music has been meeting in Darmstadt since 1946: In the summer schools at the Music Institute there, everybody who is anybody, whether composer or performer, is present.

For their 70th anniversary, the summer schools took a look back and opened their archive. Under the title "historage", artists of the present day are able to access the treasure chamber of concert recordings, lectures and discussions. One of these is the electronic musician Hanno Leichtmann. For Deutschlandradio Kultur he composed his personal journey through the legacies of Stockhausen, Boulez, Ligeti and Co. His work is a collage, remix and homage at the same time. For this, he primarily used sound editing and composition methods which are heavily influenced by the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne as well as by musique concrète.

Narrators: Jörg Hartmann, David Moss

"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.

"The ancient Romans are my neighbours in Rome. ON THE ROADS (with a wink to Jack Kerouac) is my impossible attempt to capture the illusory presence of ancient Rome. The remains of the old Roman roads are a type of 'score' with everything that goes, rolls or is dragged over these stones. Not far from my house is the Via Appia, and I have started to record horses, tourists, birds, dogs, archaeologists as well as my own instruments, in open countryside, bordered by time-worn tombs and the ruins of ancient country houses. A number of Latin texts greet the travellers, as do ram horns, lyres and zithers, drums and perhaps the sounds of elephants and lions, who were paraded through these streets. This ancient concoction of sounds is transposed into a contemporary language." (A. Curran)

"My organ has many stops. I play the world with its keys. Between choral music and ship's horns, between animal organs and human machines, between toys and gods, my fingers mellotronise and hammondise all the sounds of this earth. The organ as a world - the world as an organ." (Stefano Giannotti)
In his new work, the Italian radio composer Stefano Giannotti records the old dream of a universal sound machine.

"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.

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.

Point of departure for this sailboat trip is Opus 72 by Franz Schubert. By the use of analog and digital electronics we sail
on a sea of fantasy and distance ourselves step by step from the original.  The landing is uncertain..
Speaker: David Johnson
Text: Friedrich Leopold, Count of Stolberg-Stolberg

Six artists, one cinema auditorium, two rules:
1. There is nothing to see. 2. The radio is the screen.

Deutschlandradio Kultur and the Berlinale's Forum Expanded feature a joint carte blanche for sound art in film. Six actors from the fields of audio, video and media art are given free rein for an experimental sound projection in the ether.

The compositions comprise:

1 Natascha Sadr Haghighian: Cutting Barbed Wire in Four Settings - 1 (2'01)

2 Dani Gal / Achim Lengerer: CORD (9'26)

3 Natascha Sadr Haghighian: Cutting Barbed Wire in Four Settings - 2 (2'15)

4 Tony Conrad: Permission (10')

5 Natascha Sadr Haghighian: Cutting Barbed Wire in Four Settings - 3 (2'09)

6 Keren Cytter: Der Prozess / The Trial (9'51)

7 Natascha Sadr Haghighian: Cutting Barbed Wire in Four Settings - 4 (2'28)

"A radio play that tells of the sounding world of my childhood in Upper Austria, how sounds led me through the day, accompanied my waking and made me happy or afraid. At that time the sound of the bells of the St. Florian collegiate church still organized the social life of the farming community; the seasons, the holidays, the people and the work on the farm each had a different sound. For this piece I am remembering that time and tracing the sounds of a vanished world, seeking and inventing what has been lost." (Sam Auinger)

Short wave broadcasting is one of the primary rocks of global media culture. For decades it was the only way to receive signals from other parts of the world. This is why you can still find propaganda broadcasters and encrypted secret communications bustling about until today alongside free radio stations and underground information in its spectrum.
Short wave almost behaves like a living being in its proliferation: Depending on time of day, temperature and wind, it changes its zigzag paths between the earth’s surface and the ionosphere.
The Emptyset Duo made use of this early radio technology for a live performance on 1 February 2015 at the CTM Festival Berlin: they played a radiophonic game of ping-pong between the oldest active radio station in the world in Nauen (Brandenburg) and the French broadcaster Issoudun. From the atmospherically enriched sound a composition was created for and about radio.

The composition "Sleppet" was developed as part of the eponymous sound art project, in which six leading international sound artists recorded sounds during a ten-day tour of the Vestlandet region of Norway, and used the experiences of nature as inspiration for a series of sound installations and pieces of music. "Sleppet" refers to the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, for whom the influence of nature observation on artistic creation was of great importance.The composition has four movements: 1) Seagulls and cattle 2) Avalanches, Water and Stones 3) Glacier 4) Sheep and Industry.

"Sleppet" has also been published on CD: Crónica (http://www.cronicaelectronica.org).

"MaerzMusik" (MarchMusic), the International Festival of Contemporary Music under the umbrella of the Berlin Festspiele, turned its speakers up once again this year from 19th to 28th March to make the diversity of trends and approaches in contemporary music audible. And Deutschlandradio Berlin once again participated live, as a partner of the festival and organiser of the SONIC ARTS LOUNGE, which presented projects from sound art to club culture in night-time performances. This year, the SAL presented itself with the "Nordischen Nacht" (Nordic Night): Sound artists from the Scandinavian countries presented the latest developments in sound art. You could hear the percussionist, author and sound virtuoso Sven Åke Johansson, who was born in Sweden in 1943 and has lived in Berlin for many years. It was also possible to listen to sound artist Hanna Hartman, who was also born in Sweden and now lives in Berlin, and the ProTon-Group (Pekka Siren and Agnieszka Waligórska) from Finland. DeutschlandRadio Berlin Radio is broadcasting the "Nordic Night" today, a recording of the Sonic Arts Lounge in the Berlin Festival House, or Haus der Berliner Festspiele.

How do you write a history of radiophonic sound art? In order to answer this question, radio artist Colin Black spent five years travelling the world. On his journey he interviewed (almost) all of the protagonists of the genre: Artists, editors, theorists. He counterpointed their stories and thoughts with sounds from his journey. The result is a piece of radio art about radio art.

Interlocutors (in this order):

Martin Slawig, Götz Naleppa, Erik Mikael Karlsson, Ed Baxter, Andreas Hagelüken, Philippe Langlois, Alessandro Bosetti, Gregory Whitehead, Douglas Kahn, Andrew McLennan, Jean-Philippe Renoult, Dinah Bird, Virginia Madsen, Marie Wennersten, Marcus Gammel, Kaye Mortley, Armeno Alberts, Andrea Cohen, Tom Roe, Andreas Bick, Anna Friz, Hildegard Westerkamp, Elisabeth Zimmermann, Heidi Grundmann, Atau Tanaka, Teri Rueb, Galen Joseph-Hunter and John Jacobs

Narrators: Elke Utermöhlen & Martin Slawig

Francisco López is a master of contrasts. In his compositions, gracefully constructed sound patterns are located immediately adjacent to powerful noise cascades. This possibly also has a lot to do with López' multifaceted interests: The doctor in biology studies the acoustic ecology of the Amazon jungle as well as the sound worlds of machinery.

Francisco López collected the recordings of international cities for more than 20 years for his composition 'Sonopolis'. From of this material, he has composed a journey through an imaginary world metropolis – a virtual conglomerate of Montreal and Ushuaia, Lisbon and Moscow, Dakar and Cape Town, Taipei and Melbourne.

Arsenije Jovanovič has already created a series of "acoustic books" that record in sound the personal impressions and feelings collected on his journeys. Jovanovič, who seeks the independence of language and designation, "writes" using sounds, creating in this way acoustic territories for himself and the listener that offer a broad, almost border-free space for their own images in their heads. Thus the space inside a cathedral is remembered or the vastness the author experienced on Mount Athos.

Esperienza Italia', Italy is celebrating its 150th anniversary under this motto in 2011. Reason enough for sound artist Alessandro Bosetti to undertake a journey into the past of his home country. His 'Experience Italy' does not however find Bosetti in Rome, Turin or Milan, but rather in Eritrea.
 The former East African colony appears to him like a preserved pre-war Italy. The language and culture of the now-disappeared invaders lie across the country like a dense fog. With the help of the bystander optician Benedetto Spinoza, Bosetti's microphone becomes a lens for time.
 "Italy is at a standstill. Eritrea is at a standstill. They are circling around each other. They are reflecting each other." (Bosetti)

Hölderlin spent his last 36 years in a tower room between phases of having presence of mind and "derangement" before he died at the age of 73. Whether he was really insane, is irrelevant for this work. Poetry as song was the mother tongue of the human race for Hölderlin. And he regarded sound as the "truest picture of the pure soul".Ulrich Land is the author and narrator of a libretto of text fragments as well as letters that Hölderlin wrote to his mother from the tower. Rilo Chmielorz and Pedro Lopez have constructed a sound structure around this: an outer tower, which seems to gradually dissolve and transform itself into an inner tower. Holderlin's language is gently and slowly transformed and turned into music.

For her composition "Studio in forma di rosa" Lucia Ronchetti has thought of a picture: the complex spiral shape of a rose. The inside of the closed young rose inspired her to a special compositional structure: she combines Italian vocal music from the 13th and 14th century with a mansur ney flute in the Sufi tradition and takes these motifs through cyclic variations. The sounds develop themselves in a spiral motion and thus reproduce the process of blooming musically. "Night, secret, dark, blood, invisible" are some of the words which different voices in Spanish, Turkish, Italian and Persian speak aloud and accumulate in their spiral motion into the shape of a rose. "The landscape around the single rose can be the darkness, as a still life on a black background." (Lucia Ronchetti).
Stereophonic radio piece over a text by Andrea Fortina (2006)

For more than 32 years, the International Festival for Electroacoustic Music "Synthèse" has taken place annually in the French city of Bourges, organized by the "Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges (Imeb)". A full program is presented: the spectrum ranges from purely musical pieces, to radio art, sound installations and performances right up to audiovisual works. The annual competition had already served as a springboard into the professional world for new talent. In the meantime, "Synthèse" has become an important forum for international exchange. Alongside the competition pieces in 2001, there was also sound art from Korea, England, Italy, Portugal, Chile, Canada, Mexico, Norway and Brazil on the program. Nathan Singer attended the festival in Bourges in June 2001 and selected a number of radiophonic pieces, which she will present in the radio drama workshop.

Peaceful and hotly contested at the same time, untouched and yet surveyed with millimetre precision: the Antarctic is a focal point of conflicting developments. 50 years after the Antarctic Treaty, which opened up the continent for scientific purposes, the New York composer DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller) went to visit on site. He set up his studio amid the ice masses, in order to sketch the landscape musically. From the perspective of the culture of sampling, he describes an open, untameable world, a precarious utopia and projection surface. "Terra nullius is the acoustic portrait of an abstract landscape: Ice, water, land, climate change and mankind's relationship to it. The Antarctic as a document of collective memory and as a meditation on a future without property. A post-colonial composition." (DJ Spooky)

The German sound artist Felix Kubin and his Polish counterpart Wojtek Kucharczyk are involved in a sound battle in no man's land. To do this, they plundered the acoustic cultural trash from their own countries sending it in the form of MP3 files against the other side – German noise and Polish counter-noise: a singing traffic light sent against Slavic dogs barking against the national anthem without a bottom bracket... "Scream first, then regret nothing" – under this premise a piece was created that lets all the German-Polish prejudices sink into the noise yet at the same time without hurting your ears.Felix Kubin, born 1969, graduate psychotronician. He explores the effects of noise phenomena, specializing in Dadatronic and Sci-Fi Pop for his own label "Gagarin Records". Radio plays include "Syndikat für Gegenlärm" (Syndicate of Counter-Noise, DLR Berlin 2001).Wojtek Kucharczyk, born in Poland in 1969, is an all-round artist who is in the vanguard of Polish Electronic Pop with his record label "mik.musik".

Have you ever heard of Xenofeminism? The manifesto from the Laboria Cubonics authors’ collective advocates receptiveness to everything foreign, new and different - and translates this into sound.

Alienation as an opportunity - this is a central message of the Xenofeminist Manifesto published by the Laboria Cubonics authors' collective in 2015: "Instead of [...] dreaming of a return to an idealized natural authenticity, Xenofeminism understands alienation as a creative impetus. We are all alienated." Xenofeminism strives for maximum openness and mobility, for the receptiveness of everything foreign, new, and different.

Everything is subject to radical change through technology: Nature, material conditions, identities, and social forms. The determinism of the natural order producing injustice should be overcome in favour of a radical diversity of genders and freedom of identities. Everyone has the right to "speak as no one in particular".

The Polish sound artist Marcin Pietruszewski searches for a sonic equivalent of these ideas in his piece. Based on a libretto by Helen Hester and Katrina Burch from Laboria Cubonics and Virginia Barratt, a member of the VNS Matrix collective, he uses computer music, psychoacoustics and speech synthesis to form a series of abstract sound articulations that interconnect poetic and technological vectors in a complex manner. A search for new sonic, conceptual, social, and political spaces.

"To glitch, sound space forks discontinuously in overlapping tendencies (matter). Our memory functions through discontinuity, by necessity fragmentation makes navigation conceivable as an act of trust, a rolling game. As pigment particularity. As thinking (as) no one in particular. Living as erratum, reconstituting as the glitch. Xenopoetic breakdown. The dissolving bestiary; the beasts have been freed from their pages.” – Excerpt from the libretto.

Composition and production: Marcin Pietruszewski
Libretto: Virginia Barratt, Katrina Burch (aka yonneda.lemma) and Helen Hester
Articulatory synthesis: Paul Boersma and David Weenink
Speech synthesis design: Marcin Pietruszewski in collaboration with the Centre for Speech Technology Design (University of Edinburgh)

11.11.11, shortly after midnight. The carnival of the century is warming up. Costumes are rustling, commentators are murmuring in their microphones, glasses are being filled and emptied. An unheard-of sound procession begins to pass by the audience. Surreal acoustic beings turn into and against one other, pianos spray their entrails, dead carousels awaken to life, and listeners become increasingly ecstatic.

The sound material for this composition are underwater recordings from the sea, lakes and rivers, which the authors see as "resonating collectors of dreams and memories". "Bodies of water form a luminous boundary between the human and the non-human, between different scales of time, and of being".
The piece combines electroacoustically transformed sounds with multilingual text fragments such as the inner monologues of a murdered revolutionary, a young swimmer and an unborn child.
"that world is the other the other night the one we never pass the one underwater"

The division of Germany begins and ends in the ether. Immediately after the Second World War, the Allies took over broadcasting sovereignty in their respective spheres of influence. But radio waves know no borders!
To mark the 25th anniversary of the reunification of Germany, the British Electronica producer Matthew Herbert recalls the last day of the division on the radio. Broadcasts from 2 October 1990 from both sides of the border form the foundation of a choral composition for two key institutions of German-German musical life: the RIAS Kammerchor and Rundfunkchor Berlin. These two bodies, established during the time of division, are today united under the roof of the ROC Berlin. They interpret a two-part composition, which was simultaneously broadcast on Deutschlandradio Kultur and Deutschlandfunk.
A stereo version is available for audio on demand, repetitions and acquisitions.

"Twice around the World – There and Back Again" is the title of a composition that has emerged from a project for the London experimental station "Resonance FM". Cutler had called for recordings to be made at any point on Earth, in the time window from 23.30 and midnight, Greenwich Mean Time, it is to be noted. Anyone with a microphone and a recorder at hand could participate, but had to take the respective time difference into consideration. 247 entries reached Cutler, who presented them unedited in his programme "Out Of The Blue Radio". Between summer 2002 and summer 2003, London listeners could listen to a different place in the world between half twelve and midnight every day.Chris Cutler has already released a remix of this acoustic world tour for ORF Kunstradio. Chris Cutler has now put together a new 50-minute remix for Deutschlandradio Kultur. He did not base his selection on the quality of the individual recordings, but rather on the geographic origin. The sequence of sounds takes us twice around the Earth and back again. On the outward journey, all the stations are strung together systematically. On the way back however, Cutler works with overlaps and displacements, as they arise in memory when recalling a long journey.

Thomas Kling's text TIROLTYROL, created 1987-1990 in Dusseldorf, Innsbruck, Kitzbühel, Schruns and Cologne, was published in 1991 (in Thomas Kling "brennstabm", Suhrkamp). Their sound implementation by Jörg Ritzenhoff was carried out in the same year. Thomas Kling first spoke his text, which was then cut in the process of the sound implementation, and (with the aid of synthesizers, samplers) mounted as a computer animation. The sound recordings on this piece originated in Mittenwald. The composer tried to "adapt to and sound out and illuminate" the text as far as possible.

From the splashing of its sources to the crashing of waves: Water is music to our ears. But what would it sound like if this precious liquid were to run dry?
 Hanna Hartman has visited places, which have long been suffering from acute water shortages. With her microphones, she has plunged into water pipes, wells and irrigation systems. Instead of bubbling and rushing sounds, you can now hear whistling, hissing and rattling. Hanna Hartman's acoustic search for something drinkable has brought forth a disturbing sound world.

Canadian electro-acoustics are regarded throughout the world as outstanding. Their origins can be traced back to the 1940s, when Hugh LaCaine developed a forerunner of the modern synthesizer in Ottawa. The studios at the Universities of Toronto and Montreal were established in the 1950s. The scene is alive and creative like hardly any other. There was a big meeting at the ZKM "trans_canada" Festival in Karlsruhe in February 2005.

"Vol d’arondes" by Francis Dhomont, the master of acousmatics, whose "Schwalbenflug" (flight of swallows) achieves extremely poetic effects with playful jauntiness.

Canadian electro-acoustics are regarded throughout the world as outstanding. Their origins can be traced back to the 1940s, when Hugh LaCaine developed a forerunner of the modern synthesizer in Ottawa. The studios at the Universities of Toronto and Montreal were established in the 1950s. The scene is alive and creative like hardly any other. There was a big meeting at the ZKM "trans_canada" Festival in Karlsruhe in February 2005.

"Hi Res" by Louis Dufort from Montreal, who is one of the latest generation of "Art Acousmatique" which is seeking its own sound language.A recording from the "trans_canada" festival at the Karlsruhe Centre for Art and Media Technology.

The title "Tunnelvision" describes both the attitude of the Japanese poet Takuboku Ishikawa, from whose volume of poetry "Trauriges Spielzeug" (Sad Toy) some passages are quoted, and the perspective of the recording medium. Musicalized original sound recordings serve as a basis. The recordings were all made in cavities and various tubes which act as a filter through which the outside world can be heard. A second element is the text by Ishikawa spoken by a young man. A third level arises from the filtering and the digital processing of the text recording. The words are distorted and mutate to a technical song.

"11 clock in the morning on 15th August, Ferragosto, a wonderful, gentle morning breeze is blowing across the countryside – I'm just listening to a three-dimensional sound installation, imperceptibly controlled by the voices of insects and winds, I feel like a drunk sound editor and very comfortable too..."That's exactly what I want to hear in a sound piece from you", the radio drama editor replied by return post.Ferragosto, a public holiday in Italy, introduced by the Emperor Augustus, the hottest day of the year, a day that is shimmers, paralyses and is energetic at the same time. Alvin Curran captured his Ferragosto in this sound piece.

Two poems by the futuristic Russian poet Chlebnikov (1885-1922) – written in a psychiatric hospital – gave the impetus for this "musical radio piece for sound singers, sound speakers and other sound sources". For Chlebnikov, who worked on translating the language of birds, spirits and gods, language was material for games and sounds, a fantastic grab bag of freely selectable phonemes. The radio piece is a continuation of Khlebnikov's principle with digital means.

Today you will hear a rather unusual form, which can be described as a sound essay or sound philosophy. The Berlin sound engineer and filmmaker Uli Aumüller has done what far too few do: he has been considering the fundamentals of hearing."Even if it sounds almost too banal and simple: A noise is never just simply a noise – a noise is part of a communicative act. Noises only exist in relation to the ear of the listener. Two listeners under the same cherry tree may hear something similar to each other but never exactly the same thing. And if a microphone and speakers are connected into this act of listening, it becomes yet more complicated."Uli Aumüller takes the listener in his acoustic essay on a journey into his personal listeners' life. The road leads through imagined experiences of nature and personal anecdotes and also into philosophical territory.

This unique interpretation of old folk songs is like a continuation of the way in which they are passed on, the continual change through oral transmission, even if it does break with the traditional methods of reception. "A key concern of the audio work 'VOLKSLIED' (Folk song) was the point at which the actual speech of the folk song, which is expressed in the form of a song, the sound and the simplicity of the text, turns into a much more abstract narrative of memory." (Chr. Korn). "Volkslied" is a continuation of the work that began with "Volksliedmaschine" ('Folk song machine' HR 2002).