liner notes:

[1] Plint (10.04) was intended as a sixtieth birthday present for Konrad Boehmer, and is a studio piece derived entirely from piano-duo improvisations by FURT recorded in Berlin in December 2001.

[2] Gute Nacht (4.56) was originally the first part of the
performance Failed Experiment, given at the ICA in London in November 1997 by FURT together with vocalist Ute Wassermann and cellist Friedrich Gauwerky, and using seven songs from Schubert’s Winterreise as its point of departure. This opening, however, involves no “live” activity apart from a single vocal event. It was produced at Walter Fabeck’s studio in Watford, October 1997.

[3] Volksmusik (15.28) was produced in Amsterdam for a performance in the Sammlung Essl (in Klosterneuburg, near Vienna) as part of the November 2000 Wien Modern festival. The ascendancy during that year of the fascist FPÖ and its leading demagogue, Jörg Haider, had prompted many musicians to cancel engagements in Austria in protest; our response was to assert our freedom to make “entartete Musik”, while making a gesture of solidarity with the opposition movement by including an item whose political nature could not be mistaken. Volksmusik features the voice of Charlie Chaplin.

[4] Ultimtaum (45.00) was performed live several times during 1999 and 2000. This final recording is of a slightly edited studio performance made in Amsterdam on 29 February 2000. It is the third part of a tetralogy entitled Out of Time (itself extracted from the longer, incomplete Day and Night cycles), which begins with Johannes- Passion (1993), continues with Angel (1995, released on CD by JdK Productions) and concludes with problem (2001). Ultimatum is dedicated to Karlheinz Stockhausen.

FURT would like to thank Frank Baldé and STEIM, DAAD, Karlheinz Essl, Walter Fabeck, Kersten Glandien, the Instituut voor Sonologie, and Eddie Prévost. For more on FURT see the interview at http://www.noisy.org/stories/furt_story.html (3 pages).

“That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”
Bertrand Russell

“…if the spectator thinks this is pessimistic that is because he has not learned to clutch at straws. Clutching at straws is the only realistic thing to do. The alternative, apart from the self-indulgence of pessimism, is a fatuous optimism based on superficiality of both feeling and observation.”
Edward Bond