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Album Info
Release Date: 2024-02-01Label: Availabel
“Nachtsprache” (“Night Tongue”, 2021) is a radio piece with and about dreams in German language. The title is borrowed from the lecture “Der Traum ist die Sprache des universalen Menschen” (1971) by the psychoanalyst, sociologist and philosopher Erich Fromm. Parts of the piece were actually conceived in dream and hypnagogic states.Since 1987 I have been keeping dream diaries sporadically, then systematically from 2018 to the beginning of 2021. From April 2020 onwards, the diaries consist of recordings of my voice in half-sleep, and in a language that is just beginning to awaken from its dream state. With its mistakes, gaps, awkward repetitions and colloquial, halting style, it is left as it is. The erratic, disruptive, the non-linear and repetitive appear as important choreographic and musical ideas and principles in the audio piece “Nachtsprache” – so do the multiple and merging personae in dreams. These recordings, together with audio documents of two sleep laboratory situations from 2010 and 2021 as well as other sounds that can generate theta waves in the listeners, form the basis for “Nachtsprache”. In German language.
Marc Behrens
“Nachtsprache” was created in 2021 as a commissioned work for the Hessian Broadcasting Company (Radio Frankfurt) and was first broadcast on 6 March 2021 in hr2-kultur. Producer: Stefan Fricke (Editorial office Contemporary Music | Jazz | Sound Art).
Acknowledgements / Danksagungen: Alma Toaspern, Rocio Marano, Susanne Grau.
References / Referenzen: Leonora Carrington, Stephen LaBerge, Meret Oppenheim, Georges Perec, Arno Schmidt.