Intakt CD 074

What is the Word and how does it relate to reality? What is the meaning of sound and how does it affect the human mind and body? Such existential questions are raised by the production on this CD. Even more: it penetrates the perception of word and music to its very depth.

Christian Uetz's texts are inspired and moved by the sound and the meaning of words. With concentration and utter alertness he follows the tracks of meaning as well as the traces of sound, a procedure which juxtaposes and assembles contents seemingly by chance. His often fast and daring associative leaps and his breathtaking speed of reading recall the storms of thought - and at the same time, the impossibility of verbalizing those thoughts - as experienced in psychedelic states.

The texts which are created in this way imply an inner logic: the sometimes eager, sometimes desperate search provokes the listener to expect (or else to create) meaning. Uetz, however, does not fulfill this expectation. As soon as meaning begins to take shape, he cuts the thread, evades and deprives the listener of the security and the comfort of understanding. Linguistic capers, word-transformations and resulting neologisms put his texts on yet a different level of meaning. The listener is forced to have thoughts and feelings of his own. He will approve or disapprove, will follow or refuse to go along, and will thus take part in the process of creation.

Koch-Schütz-Studer support this process with their highly sensitive sound-machinery. They react to the spoken word like seismographs, sometimes in agreement with the speaker and sometimes not. The musical answer stands for itself. It is not simply a translation or a sound-mirror of the texts. Radiating from their inner selves the speaker "sings" and the musicians "speak", thus opening a new dimension to the listener's experience: language is turned into music and music becomes eloquent language.

The instrumentalits amplify the "supra-level" of comprehension with their flow of sound and noise. Hardly audible, still undetermined vibrations become condensed into cosmic "joyful noise", sound-waves of submerged haziness suddenly become focussed into crystal-clear tone-cascades. Ecstasy is the ultimate goal of all the shocks and eruptions. Numbing and painful loudness leads the listener to his innermost self, according to Zen: to his inner breath. The arising emptiness makes consciousness implode. The intensity of sound originates from the intensity of silence. The silence, loaded with tension and boundless energy, bursts out into sound and then falls back into silence again. The path is full of risks, there are moments which are dangerous and frightening, and others which are of overwhelming magnitude and beauty.

Koch-Schütz-Studer and Christian Uetz are unified by the intensity of their expression: the absolute concentration of their "being-within-themselves" as well as by the strength of their "getting-out-of-themselves" keeps them intimately bound together.

The listener is forced to participate whether he wants to or not. Being exposed to the texts and to the music he will generate images and thoughts of his own. Light-, colour- and space-transformations will ultimately complete the experience into a "Gesamtkunstwerk".
Liner notes by Beny von Moos