Helmut Lachenmann

Helmut Lachenmann does not simply “take” noises and utilise them as exciting sound stimuli, he rather takes the essence of sound seriously, takes it “literally”. He dissects the sound, looks at it with his ear and puts it back together again; this with the attention of early childhood play and the anamnesis of a scientist.

Lachenmann’s simultaneously wondering and meticulous examination – the astonishment and the incision, as well as the remodeling of the sonic phenomena back to their existence out of matter – leads to an instrumental musique concrète that is unique to him in this form. A music of concrete sounds, but with instruments, for it is our history that produces sound here as a concrete object. The classical instruments of our musical history, now brought into the present, which through Lachenmann’s refraction work receives one of the few real legitimisations to still be present today in such an unbroken form…