I open the window of my room. Suddenly the city rushes up to the twenty-second floor. Up here, above the streets, the urban sounds bundle into a large and pulsating structure. Somehow there is no center of sound expansion. There are many simultaneous centers without any particular direction and also without identification. All sounds come from below, from this one direction, like a big acoustic cloud rising up - at least this is how I hear the city in my room. I lie on the bed and listen. My window is the opening. Like an ear, an opening to the world, from inside to outside.

There is always a siren somewhere. Like a seemingly linear movement in space, the volume decreases or increases in the depth of the room. Physically completely passive and motionless, my ears follow every change in the sound image. After a while I experience the sounds that I initially perceived as almost constant as permanently changing acoustic elements in the structure, only much slower and they seem to be impulses and currents composed of many noises. This composition is so diffuse that new and foreign hearing impressions are formed. The individual components, if they can be heard at all, are those of all urban noises in the nocturnal subsidence, when the shrill aggressiveness of the hearing impressions existing at daytime subsides. This special nocturnal transparency sets in in the aural image of the sounds.

New York, October 1992