This recording stems from a concert with holders of scholarships from the Frankfurter Künstlerhilfe. It’s an electronic composition with inserted concrete sounds. The work is dedicated to the physicist Werner Heisenberg (Würzburg 1901 – Munich 1976). Heisenberg did important work in the fields of quantum mechanics as well as nuclear physics. Heisenberg is perhaps best known for the Uncertainty Principle, discovered in 1927, which states that determining the position and momentum of a particle necessarily contains errors the product of which cannot be less than the quantum constant h. These errors are negligible in general but become critical when studying the very small such as the atom. Study Heisenberg at:
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Heisenberg.html

I really have no way of telling whether K. G. Brunotte has applied any aspects of the Uncertainty Principle in his composition, but I’d suspect that he’s done something to that effect, knowing how intense and detailed his intellectual reasoning is verbally, and how much joy he takes in discussions and in proving points that one arrives at only after a great deal of analysis. I’d suspect that a full-fledged composer could point to some properties of Nachruf that would show imprints of Heisenberg’s scientific discoveries. The title itself – Nachruf [Obituary] für Werner Heisenberg perhaps even indicates a hidden (for the layman) account of Heisenberg’s science, and if so, for sure of the Uncertainty Principle, which in Brian Greene’s excellent book of popular science – The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for The Ultimate Theory (ISBN 91-7643-896-1) – is described as the frustrating fact that we cannot get an accurate determination of both a particle’s position and it’s velocity. We get either or. We can determine the position of a particle, but then we don’t know its velocity, or we can find out its velocity, but then we don’t know – exactly – its position.

A slow friction of surfaces can be distinguished at right, in a feeling of grinding motion, in crude, low-keyed sounds. This solid motion across metallic or rocky surfaces, in lithophonics out of Brunotte’s electronic machinery, almost have you smell the acrid fragrance of hot rock dust rising from the heavy friction. I actually do get a sense of the inner properties of matter here, in this forceful violence of forced motion; the enormous torque and pull; the fantastic strength of the strong force that keeps the quarks inside the protons… but had I though about this without Brunotte’s choice of title? Perhaps not exactly this, but I would have gotten the basic feeling of matter and friction and pull, for sure. The question that arises is what force might be causing this tormenting lithophonic grinding, but the reply is obvious; Professor Brunotte’s free compositional thinking!

Slowly the sounds change their character, with new layers of sound added to the initial ones, resulting in a whining, more high-pitched audio, and simultaneously the soundspace is fully utilized, as rumbling events emerge at left and up front, making two clearly definable visions appear in my mind; that of a person dragging heavy furniture across a wooden floor (like in La Monte Young’s eclectic work Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches etc., [1960] or in Akos Rozmann’s Crypt With Table and Chairs, premiered at the 13th Electronic Music Festival in Stockholm 1990) and that of rocks and ice calving off of a glacier, like I’ve seen and heard up at the Tarfala mountain hut, near the Tarfala Scientific Field Station right behind Sweden’s highest peak, Kebnekaise, in northern Lapland, Sweden. Trying to merge these two visions is easy. Just picture a hiker pulling furniture across the floor in that mountain hut, the glacier outside calving into the green lake!

A soaring, kind of spacey atmosphere is introduced, rendering the music a slightly alien character, and the shuffling sounds – lower now – as from someone trying to find his clothes in a chest of drawers in a murky corner, irresistibly draws my analogies to a section of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, when Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect have just ended up in the cleaning closet of a labor spacecraft as the Earth was demolished to make way for an interstellar highway… yeah, you know…

The sense of circular or spiraling motion keeps up, as if from a mill of sorts, rendering the music also some temporal depth, swinging my sensitive analogical gaze back in time towards medieval Europe, the flour being grinded in those times of flesh and spirit and mud through the small, smelly villages… and I get a short glimpse of this in Brunotte’s music. If you’ve heard Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Sirius, you may hear a likeness to these circling sounds in the landing and then departing of space ships in Stockhausen’s work, though Brunotte’s sounds here do not reach that threatening intensity; they’re more of a peaceful milling under the eye of God.
Not to forget the clues Brunotte’s title may give, the milling could also be that of atomic jitter at the heart of matter, who knows. It’s a complex sound world that Brunotte presents, anyway, exciting to travel.

Later some slow, tintinnabulative percussion appears, incisive, like gleaming clarities through the gray and black and brown of the noise of matter, letting light seep in and illuminate the vicinity.
The grinding sounds get more fierce, rising into shrieks, and for the first time I also discover some bubbling, fading shortwave static, or possibly encoded messages reaching us in torn shreds of morphemes from existences in other temporal layers, other realms of reality. One of the shreds that rise out of the radio hum is a short, intact piece of some kind of street band from the German 1920s, picturing in my mind the son of Alois Schicklgruber and Klara Pölzl on his way to a Vienna hostel after having stilled his hunger at a soup tureen on a street corner.

Some more blurry remembrances of times past sail by inside the murky sounds, like drifting thoughts just before you fall asleep. The music turns quite enchanted here, mixing dreams and visions with hardcore audio and matter music, and dark percussive frenzies seem to be derivations of Morse codes on the shortwave, transposed quite a few octaves down into the shadowy pitches of Poltergeists and the 1960s’ ghost reel-to-reels of Friedrich Jürgenson.

Long telegraph lines of audio extend across the plains in the music, widening the spacious sense under overcast skies; messages hurrying to thirsty ears through the persistent electrical hum.
Some deeper bass interferences, reminding me of the intermittent disturbances often heard as rock bands start up their gear and connect their guitars to amps, have me almost anticipate some fat rock n’ rollers hitting the set, like ancient Jackie Fountains from Gnesta (a small, rural Swedish town), but this, of course, can only happen in the most remote corners of my own old mind…

Many of the sounds indeed seem to stem from pre-concert preparations, staff getting the gear together, and from these residual leftovers of audio, Brunotte weaves exciting patterns all across our faces, sometimes tapping our tympanic membranes in ticklish sounds straight out of the Heisenberg core of matter, and towards the conclusion even spreading dimmed remembrances of metallic sounds from the high elevation temple yards of a forlorn Tibet, the prayer fliers emitting their prayers in the mountain passes as icy winds blow…