The trunks are completely smooth and stand densely down the slope. A small, curvy road leads down through the middle. We slowly walk up the hill. The sounds of the city, which were clearly identifiable before, are suddenly noticeably muffled. The leaves become sound absorbers, like a padded curtain, a grown and very dense vault. I stand under a protective roof. The underwood-free ground makes the bamboo grove look like the architecture of an audible interior. I imagine how the trunks move in strong winds, banging against each other and producing arrhythmic, percussive sounds. It is completely windless, but when I look at these smooth and slightly bent trunks, I think of movement like a storm, and try to transfer the extreme elasticity of these tall plants into an audible image. I imagine hearing the hollow trunks colliding, making rubbing and beating noises and bending in all directions under the force of the gusts of wind, like drumsticks in a vortex.

Kyoto, September 1994

In my youth, when I was about 19 years old, I visited the Kunsthalle in Kiel. Since I grew up on the edge of Europe (i.e. in Dithmarschen) and therefore almost exactly on the opposite side of Schleswig-Holstein -geographically, at least from the perspective of Kielers- and since the Kunsthalle was the most extraordinary place for contemporary art in Schleswig-Holstein, I hoped that a visit would broaden my irrationally remote, rural perspective. My goal was to see a comprehensive presentation of curated individual Pop Art positions, but it could also have been an Andy Warhol exhibition - if I remember correctly. Immediately after entering the exhibition and in great expectation of seeing originals, however, all my attention culminated in an arrangement of different buckets loosely distributed on the floor of the large exhibition space. They were placed in this arrangement to catch the rainwater dripping through the ceiling, but I only realized this later. Initially, the scenario in my perception was by no means determined by a damaged roof and the intervention of a janitor, but by the auratic moment of the museum context and the sound. For me, this was an extraordinary situation that captivated me, and the accidental diversity of the buckets in their designs was further proof of the acceptance of an artistic intervention. In addition, there was the extremely entertaining acoustic event of the dripping ceiling, the play of falling drops from a great height. It was raining cats and dogs outside and the kind of audible permeability of the roof produced a concert of acoustic impulses of different speeds and a wide range of resonating buckets in various pitches and rhythms, which was enchanting to my ears. Never before had I experienced such a concertante moment, so close to reality in the substance of a building. I understood the whole thing as an ingenious staging of architectural material sounds, here determined by the situation under the conditions of the architecture, the museum space and the life of the liquid, and the water, with its acoustic aggregate states. My enthusiasm was great. However, when I asked the supervisory staff who emptied the full buckets whether the whole thing was based on a composed sequence of events, it quickly and clearly became obvious that only the roof of the Kunsthalle was defective and that the buckets limited the water damage.

Today, almost 40 years later, I have students who make art with this strategy - and for that I am greatly reassured.

Norderheistedt, February 2011

The somewhat cumbersome title aims at the context of what happens on a stage of any kind from the audience's point of view. And what is always already there, with the exception of pantomime. The fact that a spokesman speaks, a choir sings or an orchestra plays and that tones, sounds and noises are used as effect intensifiers in the sense of an action, has been beyond question since the introduction of music theater. However, when we speak of sound in a scenic context, not only does the concept of music expand. But it ultimately elevates everything audible to the status of design material.

Most of the time I listen when I am either curious about what comes next, (-i.e. how it will continue, or whether it will continue as I think it will) or because I hear something so extraordinary. These situations open a new associative window in me and I either want to experience what it is or where it comes from, because it suddenly exists as if it comes from nowhere hitting my perception unprepared.  

It is revealing to investigate the question of why one is actually listening at all. If, for example, it is not an exchange of linguistic information, then the ear must be stimulated by something else in order to stay with it. Perhaps our receptive senses always react according to the scheme of reality analysis and the interrogation of meaning, and, derived from this, according to the principle of listening away when something is recognized and identified. Perhaps it is only through this ability to fade out that urban life becomes bearable, listening away as a strategy. This, however, is currently only a secondary consideration.

Rather, a scene often consists of an audiovisual offering, a highly complex relationship of gestures, announcements and content. How something can be "meant" is often the result of an immediate comparison of similar experiences and a precise perception of nuances - in any case, a continuous and immediate analysis with the help of our extensive repertoire of experiences. Here at this predetermined breaking point, peculiar tensions arise from the contrast between reflection and emotion. Anything that does not seem to fit our analysis perfectly, suddenly arouses our interest. For the musicalization process in the scenic presentation, this is a possibility of choreographing a latent hunger for associatively occupable moments. For it is precisely these open meanings that transport themselves, causing a seemingly purposeless noise to become the actual impulse carrier of another form of audiovisual staging.

It is this kind of purposelessness which is also the goal of sound art, especially in its installative and performative forms, using electroacoustic sound productions and electronically generated sound worlds. Here in the spectrum of computer music, the periodic oscillation (tone) and the harmonizing periodic oscillations (sound) exist only as special cases in the cosmos of sounds. With this acoustic tool, auditory impressions can be staged, which can be used as sound material itself in a completely abstract way.

In addition, there is the possibility of freeing the sound production as a theatrical form. The audio-visual does not take an image as its theme, but focuses on the moment of hearing and the visualization of the sounds and noises as a motive for action and is brought to the center stage to be performed. Embedded in an operational framework, in which audibility determines the dramatic action, sound or noise, becomes a new explanatory approach for this behaviour. Interesting at this point are those dramaturgically designed manipulations as acoustic experiments that evoke and disappoint, or sublimate a concrete expectation, or offer unrealistic and completely exaggerated phenomena as a solution.

Norderheistedt, February 2009

I found the hotel quite late, almost as a last resort. I was glad to have found a halfway acceptable place for the last night in Spain.

The building was located next to the main road leading to the next city. Next to it, an open field, almost as big as a soccer field, with parked scattered trucks. Looking at the seemingly lost vehicles in the huge open space I thought for a short moment about how many of these giants would fit in there.

In the cantina, the catering room, there was a counter where I got the keys for the room and paid immediately. This procedure went very smoothly and in daily routine. The older man across from me was apparently all roles wrapped up into one: receptionist, bartender, waiter, janitor and maybe even the owner of this hostel. He spoke to me only as much as absolutely necessary, without wasting a word.

The building had two floors, which looked exactly the same: a long corridor with doors to the rooms leading off left and right.

My room was on the upper floor. When I entered, I found two beds that almost filled the room, and no window. Instead I found an iron door to the roof terrace,a closet and a tiny bathroom.

To air the room, I opened the heavy door and entered the square in front of the room. In the meantime it had become dark. It was still warm. The air hardly got cooler.

I stood in front of the open door on a large, free, concrete surface, on which boxes with empty bottles were piled up in a corner. The area was apparently used to put things that were in the way elsewhere and, above all, to dry the laundry. Lines and wires were stretched all over the terrace, and on some of them hung white sheets that had been drying for a long time. They fell limply from the lines. There was no wind. I wondered if I could leave the door open overnight.

But then there were the sounds of the running engines. I was on the side of the building facing away from the parking lot and the street, but in the silence of the evening the noise came over to me: the standing ones with running engines from the opposite parking lot and the passing people from the main road. The evening traffic sounded like a never-ending, drawn band of varying degrees of engine noise, getting louder and quieter. They came intermittently from both directions, became louder and louder the closer they got. They roared past and got lost in the ever increasing distance to the ear. When they met directly and closely from both directions, there was a kind of crescendo, a short loud climax. Sometimes it became less. I hoped that maybe the traffic would abate and went back into the room. At first I left the door open. I was sure that during the night there would be less and less traffic. Then I turned off the light because of the insects and lay down on the bed just behind the open iron door and tried to sleep.

After a few short moments, my thoughts wandered away and the tiredness began to take effect, but I did not fall asleep because a loud disturbance brought me back. Someone was working on the other side of the terrace, handling glass bottles in the indirect light of an open door. Empty containers were put back. It made this typical noise when the bottle slipped into its position in the crate and then fell after being released. The person was nimble and accurate. In a short time, a large number of bottles were stored and the fast and almost rhythmic process broke off abruptly. From my bed I could see how the light disappeared again. A door clicked and it was as dark as before.

After this experience I was no longer sure whether the door should be open all night, especially since the room temperature hardly changed at all despite this measure. So I turned on the light and locked the steel door. But after a short time it became noticeably stuffy in the small room so I decided to switch on the air conditioner.

It was a big box that hung above my head under the ceiling. I chose the maximum setting and the box buzzed and rattled off. Then I turned off the light. The room was dark again like a closed box. I lay on the bed and listened to the humming generator, which actually blew out cool air. Involuntarily, I listened to all the nuances of this sound machine. There was no way to listen away and I observed the noises and commented every change for a while in my imagination until I fell asleep.

When I woke up again, I was cold. I had forgotten to cover myself. It was noticeably cooler in the room now. I groped for my cell phone. It wasn't late, but I felt the need to go back to sleep quickly, as I was leaving very early in the morning.

So I turned off the air conditioner. When I turned the knob in the dark, I noticed that the device had not been screwed to the wall properly or might have been shaken loosely during its surely long operating time. The thought haunted me as I lay in bed again, and I imagined the machine coming off the wall at some point during the night, falling directly onto my head. The longer I thought about it, the more probable this possibility seemed to me. Finally, I switched to the other bed and fell asleep again.

Some time later, I felt like I had slept for several hours, a loud bang outside my room woke me up. It was just before midnight. Other guests had entered the floor and slammed the front door. The draught in the hallway also made the door of my room vibrate so strongly that I first assumed that someone had rattled it. It wobbled violently in the door frame. Still drunk asleep, I heard people talking and passing my room, noisily walking down the hallway and unlocking some other room and entering it.

I was wide awake now, lying on my bed in the tiny room and listening into the darkness. What reached my ears were many simultaneous events. I didn't want to hear anything, and I wanted to block everything out, listen away and sleep on, but my attention was fixed and focused on every new detail. I felt trapped in this compulsion to perceive the many acoustic processes that were strange and unknown to me. The outside noises were now almost silent except for those from the street, but I could hear every movement of the other guests in the building. I felt like a listener and inmate in a permeable resonating body. Something seemed to be happening everywhere in the rooms. I could hear the flushing of toilets, the constant noise of the air-conditioning, children's screams, the TV programs and the folding of the doors and every opening and closing of the windows. Sometimes there were clear voices from somewhere.

The hotel was like a large transparent membrane that seemed to amplify all acoustic events. It was impossible to escape and not listen. Every announcement forced itself upon me and I listened, again and again my ears got lost in this surprising variety and in the different distances of its causes: Further away, somewhere at the end of the corridor, downstairs or outside and then, suddenly and completely unexpectedly very close, right behind my head. It was as if I was electrified. There was a quiet, scraping, scratching coming from the wall, and indeed, it could be heard again. I had no idea what might have caused it. I waited anxiously to see if it would happen again. I put my ear very close to the wall and listened. I remained in this position for some time, but nothing happened. Disappointed, I lay down on my bed again and tried to think of nothing more. As my tiredness slowly returned, I realized that it was quiet. I only noticed it now. I had not heard the sudden silence. Neither the sound that had just happened nor any other acute noise in the wall or anywhere else nearby, in the hallway or anywhere else in the building, could be heard.

It was eerie and I had an instant vision in the darkness of my room: I thought that all the sounds were staged for me, performed that night and for my ears only, here in this Spanish hotel.

To calm myself down, I turned on the air conditioning again. The sonorous and calculable sound seemed like a part of my known and so far experienced world. I felt relieved and looked at the clock of my cell phone. It was almost three o'clock in the morning and I still had an hour before I had to get up.

Norderheistedt, October 2011

During the preparations for the installation of a floor sculpture with circular steel plates, my assembly assistants and I transported these elements vertically, rolling like big wheels across the floor. At some point at the end of a long day, we lost track and probably also lost our caution. One of these disks with a diameter of at least 2.5m slipped out of our hands in the described vertical rolling position.

Once let go, the disc started to move on its own, unlike a rectangular object like a cupboard or a door that falls over. The mass did not follow the earth's gravity in one movement, but in a dynamic rotating motion, as choreographed in ever faster up and down movements towards the floor. In the process, a loud and rapidly rising steel sound developed abruptly in the impulse of the ever faster rotation, like a dynamically evolving whirl of a drummer on the concrete floor. The closer the metal circle came to the floor, the faster the moving surface with its acutely increasing resonance sound became. The movement of the form, striving for a climax, reached an enormous crescendo in its volume right before the moment of flat rest: a state without visible transition, but with an incredible acoustic roar; abruptly into a moment of silence, with a lingering moment of full-surface touch, like a brief sigh of the material. The reverb of the museum space reacted to the event in multiple repetitions.

Berlin, February 2000

The Italian village in Liguria consists of a main road and a small square that everyone passes. Here, near the church, are all the stores, bars and restaurants with their tables and chairs outside. On warm summer evenings it is especially inviting here. Then, everyone is outside, eating and drinking and enlivening this little street in many ways.

In order to get rid of the tiresome problem of parked cars, the inhabitants have found a solution that is extremely innovative for this rural region. They have invested in a truly original measure. It is a fully automatic roadblock that extends a massive steel beam from right to left across the entire width of the road at 5 p.m. sharp. It closes off the area of the bars to exclude disturbing road traffic. This planning idea is ingenious, because when this piece of road is particularly frequented by foot traffic, towards the evening until the night, there is no more annoying car traffic within this narrow area.

Unfortunately, however, it happens on occasion that the traffic sign indicating this temporary closure is overlooked because it is hidden by delivery traffic during the day or because it is simply not big enough to be noticed. Then there are cars parked in the small street. Parked over the day, without the owners having any idea that at 5:00 p.m. the street will be closed with an insurmountable steel beam for the next twelve hours. Visitors who want to continue their journey with their vehicle at 5:05 p.m. have a problem.

Probably it is a situation that recurs in summer. The surprise of strangers to the place turns into early frustration, when it remains completely unclear how one could escape this trap with one's car without having to look for a hotel room for the night. Unfortunately, the police do not react in any way; there is no station at the location and there is no one else who has a key or a numerical code. The lock, however, makes an exception: it reacts automatically to the frequency of the ambulance and police siren in case of an emergency. It initiates an acoustic sensor to deactivate the mechanism and retracts the steel beam. Residents are already familiar with the situation when random, helpless people approach them in the stores or on the street to ask how they could get away. Despite the recurring situation, which has certainly become a nuisance to many by now, the people here are very helpful and extremely resourceful.

The host of the bar always helps. He knows the options that work. It must be either a Vespa Primavera 125 or a Honda Hornet, but often his friends who drive these scooters don't have time or are not around at the moment. Then someone goes into the cellar and gets his chainsaw: "Motorsäga from Stihl always works," he says and takes it to the barrier, pulls the pulling belt of the starter two or three times until the engine starts. The chainsaw howls directly in front of the barrier, again and again in short and longer intervals until the frequency and volume is right.

Suddenly a warning tone sounds and the barrier moves. Slowly the steel beam disappears in its device. The road is clear.

Dolcedo, July 2015

After crossing the street, I suddenly and immediately find myself in a crowd of people. Just now an evening film screening under the open sky, here in the park in front of the Vienna City Hall, has come to an end and everyone is turning to the many stands with drinks and culinary delights. The people stand very close together. There are a lot of people in a small space and everybody is talking to each other. A few more steps and I enter an acoustic speech cloud: overlays of word fragments, laughter and half sentences. The narrowness is so extreme that I move very close to the words and audible gestures of the others. I can barely move forward. I get trapped, pushed on until the next gap appears. Sometimes I understand whole sentences, but mostly just fragments. The words are very close to my ear and it's as if they were all the words in this place. All the words and at the same time; those, right next to me, those a bit further away and the sum of all the words of a moment in this place. A wonderful and impenetrable density of human pronouncements, like a carpet that rises up to a listening room of speech and communication. Behind me, in front of me and around me in every direction, this density exists. This uninterrupted variety of addition. An incomparable state is created when sliding over into this auditory phenomenon, far from any kind of content-related handholds. The concrete words echo permanently in a cloud of linguistic din. From a distance, when the direct contact to comprehensibility fades away, the entire square with all its people becomes a great auditory movement in the space of the city, far away from the acuteness of the whispering that was just close by when trying to cross it.

Vienna, August 2004

At the end of my studies I experimented with automatic scripting. What probably interested me was not primarily the production of images but the sounds produced by these movement and writing processes. However, this I didn't know that at the time. Writing here means a process of motor function, performed with hand and arm not with the whole body. I experimented with different rhythmic patterns, different carrier materials and various chalks. I supplemented the resonance ability of a sheet of paper by the nature of its substructure - from a simple table top to special resonance amplifiers. Later I extended this approach in the sense of frottage technique: for example, to forms of orchestral percussion and many variations of percussion instruments. Audio-visual drawings were created, never neglecting the observation of the image creation. With the next step, a transfer of this process to concrete spaces and architectural situations such as walls and floors, I developed an installative drawing approach that made the partially hidden sounds of a room audible and visible. For example, I discovered hollow spaces under the plaster, which, when tapped, were quite different in pitch and timbre. These events happened either coram publicum as a performance, in which the emergence became transparent (I already called these events concerts at that time), or as an installative result in the sense of designed spaces for an exhibition project. For me, working with sound in the context of a concrete architectural reference was the first conscious experimental attempt in dealing with resonance phenomena of spaces. This insight into the physical self-sound of things brought about a completely new approach to what had previously corresponded to my understanding of music: now it was not only the instruments that were the starting point for playability, but everything that sounds. Self-resonances, feedback, the audible excitability of material vibrations and the rather open way of self-regulation were exactly the processes that made it possible to think about sound in completely different time structures. Through this practice of sound production and material research, new and surprising transformations were constantly being created, as well as the idea of an acoustic plasticity. A kind of physicality of sound. A sound in a four-dimensional state as an extension of the concept of sculpture through time.

Berlin, December 1998

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

In my youth I lived free and unattached. Of course there were the structural cuts of the school, which I also perceived with interest, but other things were much more important for me. For example, I spent a lot of time in nature and not only during the day, but also at night. I remember very clearly the eerie moments, alone in the dark and the sound perception coming over me in the noise of the nocturnal forest. With these experiences and a growing ability to listen, I experienced already as a child the ever - developing interpretation of the urgent, up to the point of knowing. In the nocturnal forest there is no unheard-of phenomenon, everything is present: present and oppressive. In contrast to hearing by day, there is no optical distraction in the darkness. Very quickly and progressively the ability of subtlety and interpretation develops.

In the installative artistic discourse with sound I encounter this early realization of hearing again and again. Like an ineradicable dramaturgy, the directors of the acoustic reception always hope for an instantaneous concentration on the unheard-of, using the same trick. This is: lights off - sound on! Simplifications have an astonishingly long breath and are repeated especially where specific expectations are dealt with. Theater and music stages are apparently the ideal place to achieve an immediate, focused perception and concentration, or at least to ritualize it.

In the urban noise environment of the city, this simplified way of acoustic reception does not work. Here, listening in real time is like a kaleidoscope of unexpected contexts and instantaneously changing conditions. Loud and quiet, near and far and ever changing acoustic perspectives shape the listening process and compete with a wealth of visual impressions. We are always in the center of a more or less changeable density of sound, depending on where we are, sometimes close to an acoustic state of emergency. Mostly we do not listen in the sense of listening. However, if our ear finds an interesting sound in the mostly exuberant simultaneity, the entire listening process involuntarily becomes a context of acoustic events. It becomes active listening for a few moments.

Karlsruhe, April 2015

Somewhere, I sit in one of the many Zen gardens. My interest is first and foremost in the place. I just want to look at it. But what I find is an island of silence, in the middle of Kyoto.

I sit and rest and listen to the sounds of traffic at lunchtime. No one else is staying here. I am geographically in the middle of the city. But here it is deserted. I hear many variations of urban sounds, but it is also strangely quiet. My self-forgetfulness does not go as far as to confuse the sounds of traffic with the sound of the sea, but otherwise my reception corresponds exactly to this sound of nature. The multi-lane roads seem to be quite a distance away. Because they reach my ear as if over a long distance. It is very pleasant to hear this stretching and sometimes more dominant sound line from a distance. Like a beat, the sound fills the garden. A sound passing by over a long distance, simultaneously in motion and yet constant. A process that is moving away, but which can be heard at any time as if it were coming from one place.

My eyes wander the place, but do not get stuck anywhere. My ears concentrate on the expansion of the sound. Again and again I hear myself into the last remnant of volume when the sound seems to come to a standstill. This abandoned Zen garden, an island of silence, in the middle of the city, seems to be at the outermost edge of an acoustic expansion. A plate comes to my mind, many plates. Transparently overlapping each other. One of these plate edges is where my ears are probably at right now.

Kyoto, October 1994  

Sometimes my sounds just disappear. The daily cloud of noise carries them away, covering them, as it were, in order to integrate them and make them inaudible as part of themselves. But suddenly, a few moments later, they reappear, filling a free space conditioned by the randomness of the moment - a moment that they suddenly have for themselves in the context of all auditory events, as if released, without a before and after, right now.

These are the most interesting moments for me, because this process happens completely unexpectedly and then the ears open wide from one second to the next. Then the hearing is completely there, eagerly waiting to have a similar experience with another acoustic implant in another part of the street.

Kyoto, September 1994

Above all, the sounds opened up a new perspective of the picture for me, for example, the sound of writing, or the hatching sound of a hard wax crayon on paper. When the attention suddenly shifts from the visual to the acoustic in the process of doing and the hand seems to rhythmize itself.

If we call listening a cultural practice, then this usually happens at selected locations with a corresponding program. Here, listening becomes a musicalization practice under adjusted conditions. Everything is geared to this form of listening practice. The acoustics of the architecture, the seated posture, the stage presence of the action up to the well-temperedness of the performance with its aesthetic consequences for the social ritual.

However, to attempt to listen under the conditions of a desire for musicalization disturbed by distractions is a challenge. A loud room always awaits us, whereby "being loud" can be interpreted as broadly as "being quiet". What is meant is rather the competition of many parallel acoustic events, which force us to listen and listen again at the same time, i.e. demand permanent decisions as to where the ear consciously orientates itself in the next moment. In the diversity of perceivable things and audiovisual offerings, hearing happens in simultaneity. Simultaneity here means the conscious decision between listening and not listening. For example, to perceive the listen into a separated body sound, or random additions of acoustic events as an ensemble.

Another strategy is to listen away. The acoustic phenomena reach the ear as sound waves, but are probed, filtered and faded out by the consciousness. As a consequence of this observation, listening away seems to mean the same as not listening. Fortunately, however, it behaves quite differently.

The motive of not listening as a listening technique is more like allowing everything that is audible at that moment to happen. Concentrating on something other than what is audible means that what is currently acoustically present exists without being evaluated by consciousness and appears to be synonymous with each other. Only in this way does everything become really perceptible and I hear things that would otherwise remain unheard. Of course, in this state I no longer listen in the sense of communication. I am completely with myself and I listen away, far away and completely elsewhere and deep inside.

I understand this special disposition of simultaneous hearing and seeing as an independent artistic field of research. I create works that deal precisely with the specifically audiovisual.

Norderheistedt, May 2010

The old man always came unexpectedly into the subway compartment, stood in the middle of the car and started his job. He sold Asian souvenirs that made a sound. From one station to the next, he underwent small performances in which he demonstrated his objects. He reached into a large shoulder bag, pulled out an object, demonstrated it in action and at the end he commented on his act by announcing the price: one fifty. Always one fifty. The variety of offers was even more convincing due to the single price, as there was no qualitative reading out between different prices and objects. It was possible to concentrate on the ritual of the presentation completely unaffected by price-performance comparisons and to get involved in the surprising variety of objects conjured out of the sack and their sounds.

The result was something like a spoken basic rhythm and a tonally very surprising contrast through the sounding objects. He presented them relatively unambitiously and not out to demonstrate them soloistic. This apparent distance to the objects and his sonorous and emotionless announcement of the ever-constant price made the performance something very special. After a few moments something unusually different emerged. The acoustic utterances of his objects were at times quite funny and unpredictable (i.e. the sounds were not readable from the visual appearance), but despite this subliminal humorous tone, a great seriousness in his action, a deep poetry of the moment was created. The rattling of the driving noises and the squealing of the brakes on the New York subway resulted in a new synchronization with a different rhythm beyond the everyday and at the same time in the middle of its center.

New York, October 1992

In a pub I met someone from the music scene. Some pianist, not a friend, just an acquaintance. Someone with whom I once recorded something at some point. In contrast to him, I actually gave up my instrument, the guitar, a long time ago and do all kinds of other things now. I have sold all but one of my guitars. At the moment I was without a job and unfortunately without any idea how this situation could have changed. But my counterpart didn't know anything about that and after a few drinks he told me about a very well paid gig in an extremely weird environment. He was quite keen to describe this job to me. Unfortunately I was already drunk and not attentive anymore, but I noticed that they were looking for a special act: a kind of artistic routine on a musical instrument - no normal songs, and that the fee was supposed to be enormous for what he had delivered. Sometime later and after some back and forth he gave me the contact, a phone number, on a beer mat.

I hadn't touched a guitar for about five years. Actually, I was back to the state I was in when I started playing in bands. I still have exactly one guitar and one amplifier, just like in the beginning, and my playing practice was heading towards zero. This exchange and euphoria of making music together with others had simply lost its appeal for me at some point and for some reason. Now there was a huge distance and I suddenly found it just absurd to let an audience personally take part in my musical emotions. Nevertheless I called the number. The head physician of a hospital answered. At least that was what I thought. I asked my questions and we made a short-term appointment.

The next day I went there. The building, which I quickly found at the given address, was new and something between hospital, residence and laboratory complex. The person I had an appointment with was the director of this institution and was also a white coat, a doctor or scientist, or both.

He was extremely pleased with my appearance and immediately offered me a chance to perform in his joint. When I asked him what exactly he had in mind, he described something like a clownish conversation. Something like a humorous artistry on the instrument. Something totally surprising for the ears, beyond melody and rhythm and as unconventional as possible. I thought I understood him roughly, but I didn't ask for more information, also because of the enormous fee for a manageable performance. We quickly came to an agreement. I was told the day of the show, we said goodbye and I left the place.

At home, I was no longer sure if I shouldn't undo the whole thing, as I was completely unsure if I could get anything done. I have had an extremely long break and didn't touch a guitar at all during this time. I really needed to come up with something quickly. Fortunately, it wasn't about virtuosity in the sense of a musical performance, but rather about an experimental sound event on a guitar. This did not mean less intensity in musical expression, but much more individual freedom. I could certainly come up with something there.

When the day arrived, I went back, together with my equipment. My setup was done quickly and I played on a small stage in a room for about 150 audience members.

It was the most extraordinary concert I have ever done. The audience, all of whom were pushed into the hall on vehicles whose construction I had never seen before, were somehow not human. Some of them had a head and arms where humans have them, but most of them were somehow a body mass with eyes and ears. Some were less deformed so that they still resembled a human anatomy, others looked like biomass bodies with sensory organs and strange extremities or they were missing completely. The movable constructions on small wheels, which functioned like chairs or seats, served to keep the bodies stable, to fix them in a position.

Close together, the helpers pushed my audience in front of the stage until the room was fully occupied. Not a sound came from them, they were simply present. Then I began with my number. I quickly had the necessary concentration for my musical sequence. I demonstrated my instrument and what you can do with an electric guitar, playing between sound and noise, with and without aids like stones or sand or the materials I have always worked with.

I had a pretty good flow despite my lack of routine and was so deep in the matter that I almost forgot the environment. Obeying the inner logic of the lecture, I eventually came to an end. When the last note had faded away, it became quiet again, until after what felt like an eternity, a soft buzzing started and my audience started to make more and more strange, noisy sounds. They were strange sounds of life, similar to panting, hissing or smacking, and the bodies hardly moved at all, but the soundscape swelled incessantly, only to suddenly and abruptly break off. Shortly afterwards, the helpers began to push my audience out of the hall with a calm routine. A little later I was alone again until the director showed up and asked me to come to his office to “take care of the formalities”, as he called them.

He began by asking me if what I had experienced had shocked me. I didn't know exactly how to answer it because I had never heard, seen or even imagined anything like it before and I wanted to know what exactly he meant by his question. He then explained to me why my fee was so high. Besides the fee for the performance, it is also a kind of compensation for the sight and the nightmares that will haunt me for some time to come. I will have the same fate as all the others before me. Even before I could ask him, he beat me to it and spoke of the beings that were my audience. He described them as an unfortunately still occurring flawed result of his research. Despite the legal framework, an official prohibition to experiment with the genome and to protect created life unconditionally, no matter at what stage of development, he and his collaborators are researching the genome of humans and other creatures in any form. His laboratories were a research project that had been financed exclusively by the state for years, which, despite the social vote by law to protect life and to leave the genetic material untouched, was conducted secretly and in silence. Unfortunately, he also had to treat his failures like people and couldn’t simply dispose of them as failed attempts. He then asked me to briefly sign the contract and the declaration of secrecy before paying my fee and also to read the appendix. I did not receive a copy.

Cape Cod, August 2019

Basically, reality - or what we think it is - cannot be reproduced. How often do I experience an enthusiastic recapitulation of a stirring impression when another voice classifies the same thing as not very memorable. As if both were at a different event or saw or heard different things. It is similar with the claim and expectation of a comprehensive truth, or rather the loss of truth of the remembered object.

When attempting a media translation of the original, this loss is inevitable, since the original event presents itself as an unrepeatable moment of perception and is composed of a sensory impression consisting of an unquantifiable amount of details, observations and evaluations. Even in the case of a subject that is unchangeable as an object, a painting for example, we always see things differently according to our current mood and constitution, without the object under observation being different.

To compensate for this sensory impression is then incumbent on our ability to read the new medium, i.e. to recognize and interpret the systemically immanent non-representational possibilities. Dealing with these surrogates is an everyday occurrence and usually receives no special attention. However, a significant deficiency appears in the aesthetic context, i.e. in the sensual reproduction as an image or as an acoustic reproduction.

In this context, the painter complains about the impossibility to imagine the effect of his wall-sized painting when looking at a reproduction of this work in a catalog. The photographic representation of the complex three-dimensional object of a sculpture or sculpture in space appears even more abstract. Interestingly enough, we know most works of art through illustrations, and we can guess that the reality conveyed by the media in books and magazines only reveals its information content through the ability to read these illustrations. In this sense, there are of course better and worse photographs that can be questioned especially with regard to the interpretation of spatial aspects. In other words, there are illustrations, or better, there are captured glances that already represent self-interpreted perspectives. Thus, the aestheticized world of goods is certainly the largest field of experimentation for dramaturgical image effects in the sense of diversely optimized sales strategies. Also, the reference of photography described by Roland Barthes, composed of reality, the past and the assumption that the object was there, is only a partial aspect of the knowledge of decoding pictorial effects. The workability of digital image worlds and the ability to read out information after almost two hundred years of dealing with this medium. But what do we actually see? Or to extend the problem directly to the reproduction of audio-visual processes, or to pure listening: What do we actually hear?

Art forms that can be characterized by visual and acoustic practices, such as a site-specific sound installation or kinetic sound objects with repetitive loop structures or randomly dependent interaction sequences. They are usually filmed as video with sound in their documentary post-processing, in order to enrich an artist's website as a work example.

This widespread practice illustrates on the one hand the self-evident use and exploitation of digital storage procedures, especially for time-based forms of artistic expression, but also shows on the other hand the helpless handling of the loss through media. Anyone who has ever had the opportunity to experience a sound work in public space, in nature or as an architecture-specific intervention on site knows this experience of the abundance of unique moments and listening moments, the short-lived nature of a particular perception of sounds/images and the dependence of such events on a myriad of influencing, simultaneous other factors. That which is conveyed and solidified as an impression then corresponds more to a dynamic experience content and a special concentration on very fast passing observations than to a static sequence of events. The challenges of the sensory impressions that arise remain untransferable, the human ear hears differently than a microphone, and the human eye sees differently than a camera lens.

Sometimes, however, documentary moments are created in images or sounds that come very close to one's own experience, for example through photographs in which a remembered experience has culminated and been captured in a special way, or through a sound recording that seems so real in its authenticity that the listener immediately feels transported to another time or place. But these examples remain exceptions to the fundamental question of the depictability of an art form, in which the receptive conditions become an important aspect of the artistic concept. The moving image document then relates to reality in the same way as any section of a story line, in which the props remain recognizable, but whose textual context becomes unrecognizable or mutates into something entirely new. Heiko Wommelsdorf's attempt to document an exhaust air shaft is a good example of the special nature of the problem:

In the assembly hall, an exhibition room of the HBK Braunschweig with enormous size and ceiling height, he installed an exhaust air shaft, within the wall panelling as a contribution to an exhibition above head, at a height of four meters. This unit corresponds exactly to the range of commercially available ventilation technology as found in wet rooms and bathrooms. Only the occasion of an exhibition and the danger of confusion with a picture, which seems to have jumped out of the presented hanging height of the neighboring positions, suggests that this is an artistic strategy. What else would an object of this kind be doing at this place? Every now and then the front grille moves, stimulated by a ventilated wind draft, producing subtle rattling noises. The object thus fulfills all the characteristics that correspond to the everyday perception in other places and uses of such an aggregate, only to be overlooked or overheard there as a rule. Here, the exact opposite occurs, and even more so: not only does the presentation of the object in this exposed manner transpose it in its function and reinvention to a perceptual occasion of a special kind, but an extraordinary constellation of events is created. Making this exhaust shaft the starting point for a rarely intensive listening experience.

The active fan behind the grating produces not only a wind movement and a random rattling noise, but also a permanent resonance hum of the entire wall covering. Only now does the unusual placement on the large surface become obvious. Here, at this point of the drywall construction, there is apparently a transmission point that sets the entire wall in vibration and creates a sound that seems to be out of proportion to its cause in terms of its size and volume. Interestingly, however, the acoustic event remains in a conclusive relationship to the optical object. The exhaust air shaft, which is small in proportion to the total wall extension, remains the optical point of origin from which everything seems to emanate, although it is perceived in an almost surreal proportion to the acoustic extension. In addition, the situation experiences a special dramaturgy in that the volume ratio to the size of the room is perceived as rather quiet and permanent and is thus quickly overlaid by the background noise of the visitors talking to each other. Only sometimes it appears and then suddenly, in the spatial unfolding of its context, it becomes an extremely intense audiovisual challenge for the senses.

Wanting to document such an artistic statement in its entire experiential content seems impossible. What a moving image sequence can capture as video, for example, would not even begin to be a viable piece of information about the location and its specific situation without commentary. A selective sound recording may be helpful to enable (or to let arise) an idea of the size of a room, but already the differentiation of the resonance sound of the wall to its spatial expansion and distribution as spatial sound shows the limits of acoustic representability. Certainly, in these grey areas of documentability, other strategies are more appropriate. Perhaps it might be helpful not to rely on the moving image medium's apparent and, under other circumstances, superior action proximity, but to abandon the principle of real representation in favor of an associative approach. This could consist, for example, in stimulating the imagination of the recipient rather than operating with actual set pieces of a media here- and now-reality. Of course, this would create apparent inaccuracies in conventional understanding. But isn't it much more intensive and also more revealing for every reader of a text and viewer of photographs to associate their own idea of the causal relationships? Then the description of a vibrating exhaust air shaft becomes the individual questioning of an animated recollection of all auditory phenomena similar in memory and certainly some are very close to this resonance.

Norderheistedt, Mai 2013

I love poplars. Poplars roar loudly. Poplars exaggerate when they reproduce the wind. They are by far the noisiest trees. That is why they have always found my unreserved admiration as acoustic amplifiers of leaf movement. This imagination of a sound space, an acoustic expansion of many individual sounds and the idea of something extremely large from a human size perspective. The largest poplars I have ever seen (and I have followed them) are located on the Lower Rhine. Huge trees as high as churches and incredibly audible from afar.

The expansion of a draft, immaterial and invisible, becomes very noisily perceptible. And this is exactly how I approached the phenomenon of these trees. The rustling of the leaves as an image of wind and movement. Stronger or weaker and composed of an seemingly infinite number of individual sounds. As a summation and polyphony of thousands of moving leaves on a tree and as its listening field carried by the movement of the air. In the moment of musicalization, the possibility of listening to the constantly changing sound opens up - never static, always in constant modulation. It is like entering a space made up of many individual sounds and their presence as a cloud that carries itself independently and ever further in its acoustic addition.

Norderheistedt, May 2011

The sudden obtrusiveness of the sound gave way and turned into an unexpected listening experience.

I thought it was due to some external circumstance that might have triggered this change. But the fence was still being repaired. Someone started again, far away, nailing the slats together, and the bird outside my window continued to make noises. Throaty, voluminous, short noises.

Apparently something was settling in my head. Was it the short-term agreement among all the other announcements, as if a secret score was at the bottom of it all, or perhaps the timbres that were meant for each other?

Then I thought it must have been the distance that set my ears on their way. I concentrated on the distances, very close, far away, somewhere in between:

The distant dry clicking of a hammer on the heads of nails and the voice of the animal, very close, almost without distance. In the moment of simultaneity I became wide awake. I listened. The pauses were filled with my expectation of the next sound. Their immediately created rhythmic patterns dissolved again as soon as they were created. There was no structure. I listened into the pauses, as into time itself.

Berlin, October 1994

With enormous speed over the city. Over the roofs of the houses, between the buildings, into the streets and into the smallest corners. Every wall projection, every gap, everything that affects the unleashed storms of the wind becomes audible. An enormous humming, howling and vibrating fills the moving air, is carried up, forwarded and changed again and again. Every roof tile, every gutter, every parked car (sometimes they jump up briefly at the side of the road), every body of any kind resonates, contributes its individual sound to this roaring, whose singing overtones come from the improvised electrification of the city. This tangle of freely suspended wires. This singing, in the frequency spectrum far above the deep resonances of the urban interspaces. Fascinated by the indescribable speed of events, my ears are lost in this gigantic concert.

(The typhoon passed by smoothly. There was no significant damage in the city of Kyoto)

 Kyoto, October 1994