Description
This CD is a stereophonic version of a multi-channel piece made by Claus for the german WDR radio-station (Studio für Akustische Kunst) in 1993. A brutal & very disturbing piece composed with 32 individual Voice-Operations. Comes with 40-page booklet. Highest possible recommendations!
“Between the early 1950s and his death in 1998, Carlfriedrich Claus (b.1930) produced a corpus of work that occupies terrain somewhere between philosophy, art, linguistics and acoustic literature. Both visually with his language sheets and acoustically with his language operations, he plumbed and explored the depths of human consciousness, making a wholly individual contribution to the art of the 20th century in doing so. These sound processes and language operations have a consistency and radicalism unacknowledged hitherto.
Starting with an open mind, he delved into the history of ideas and religion with a view to examining their practical relevance today. In the 1950s, Claus acquired a thorough background in the dialectical materialism of Ernst Bloch, but alongside that he systematically worked his way through a wide range of philosophical and religious schools of thought from antiquity onwards – and indeed even earlier – and established a basis for his creative output from a synthesis of all his studies.
Both this universal frame of thought and his artistic output, which did not – and indeed refused to – fit in with the approved subject matter and aesthetic criteria of Socialist Realism in a narrower sense, drove the artist into existential isolation during the East German years. He was uncompromising in measuring the reality of socialism against the ideals of a fundamental humanism, democratic freedoms and general social responsibility. It was only long after numerous exhibitions and publications in Western Europe and America had brought him public recognition abroad to that a first comprehensive exhibition of his work was put on at the Kunstsammlungen in Chemnitz in the midst of the upheaval of political change in 1990. Subsequently, this exhibition went on tour to Münster, Frankfurt, Bielefeld, Munich and Hamburg in West Germany. In 1995, his good contacts with the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz culminated in the showing of Claus’s Sound Process Room, and ultimately prompted the artist to designate the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz as a permanent home for his fragile and complex cross-media work after his death.
