Original work by Burnt Friedman et Theo Altenberg

Mutter Mund Vater Land

This is an extract. The full piece is 33'44".

The artists behind this highly ambitious radio-phonic work of sounds and word-play have been collaborating for 20 years, developing an extremely personal improvisational framework they describe as a 'dream state'. It was first performed in 2014 in Volksbühne Berlin with a visual backdrop, but they decided to make it an audio-only piece and spent five years reworking it over many sessions.

Voices appear and dissipate from all angles, dramatically rising and falling from the noise and music whence they are effectively born and then borne. There is a togetherness of consciousness and then an singular aloneness in the composition that define the condition of man in sound. Aden Evens could have been describing this intuitive piece in Sound Ideas Music, Machines, and Experience:

"Sound is a modulation of difference, a difference of difference. Noise is the uncontracted, the depth from which these contractions of perception are drawn, and, though sense-less and insensible [in itself],it makes sense or gives sense to sound, by providing sound with its direction and focusing it to a point of clarity."

Percussion, interference, celestial music and the power of electronic sound carry voices that test out words, name noises, and explore forms of narration that emanate from language - uttered, whispered, hummed and sung. Snapshots of biography, utopias, dreams and trauma form a 'composed narrative' in which the artists will "lead us across impassable and possibly inaccessible markers into the strangest perceptual spaces, to archetypal images and their hiding places, dissolving certainties and welcoming new landscapes."

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