"In the halls of the brain city"

A duo of double basses, starting in the depths and gradually spreading out over the course of the evening across a number of sound and noise registers, as two such excellent improvisers as Daniel Studer and Peter K Frey are capable of. The first sprinkles of a dreamlike, half-sleepy text by the poet Kurt Aebli are soon added via the loudspeakers - and soon noises too. From where? Is it important to know? The program booklet tells us: from a Zurich streetcar workshop. Would we have found out? What does this place of idle urban traffic and maintenance tell us? Are we moving somnambulistically through an imaginary city? Later, the first individual images will appear on the monitor, images of a landscape, an urban environment.

Finally, a cut: the singer Jeannine Hirzel appears, she plays no role, she sits down, sings the first meaningless sounds, then recites texts in a chanting voice, they are the ones we have already heard, which now occasionally sound back antiphonally from the loudspeakers. The individual images come together to form a film of stops - a film with a blurred, somewhat dreamlike patina. It comes from Super 8 recordings made by the architect Ernst Studer when he was developing utopian cities with wax figures at the ETH from 1975 to 1977.

Music, text, sound, song and film come together, and the music-theatrical piece that Peter Schweiger has staged slowly grows out of this. In the halls of the brain cityThe title is based on a passage by Aebli: "I was obsessed with the idea of words moving through the halls of my brain city a stream of strange people I let them have their lives their ugly shape rather groupings of letters and syllables that my hearing gave me that my eyes gave me that my heart my soul my body strictly took" ...
Grouping letters, syllables and words - and giving them meaning through the senses and the soul - is a simple way of paraphrasing what happened in this piece. For only perception soon created connections from the multimedia constellations. Pareidolically, it formed grammars and structures, established relationships and at the same time asked itself self-reflexively: Are there any relationships at all in the heterogeneity of these events? Is it not also about the self-perception of the perceiver? As in Aebli's text - and on stage. Suddenly we see the singer's face on the screen - via the camera. Later, we observe the two bassists as they play. This is how the piece looks at itself. Well, why this self-reflection, which always has a moment of embarrassment in it? Hasn't such magnifying and doubling self-reflection become blind? A nice accessory from the age of reflexivity - perhaps a little too much and unnecessary. But it was probably part of this "attempt to make the constantly reflected desire for perfection and its momentary failure or success tangible in the visually powerful design of a city of the future". According to the program text.

Was that it? The formulated intention was not clear enough to me personally. Overall, however, the half-awake tranquillity of the constellation was impressive, the intended "unsmooth" intensity, a great seriousness. The result was a coherent piece, even if it was hardly fulminant or lively; indeed, one might ask oneself whether it wasn't a little satisfied with its confused, cerebral coherence. In any case, it didn't jump up, didn't do any somersaults, certainly not mortali - maybe it didn't have to, maybe it didn't want to ...

If it wasn't blatant, it was perhaps groundbreaking. The key to this is provided by the inconspicuous subtitle: "Eine Spielanordnung". The "arrangement" indicates that something is pre-arranged here - as is not usually the case with freely improvised music. It is, however, in the sense of an arrangement to enable a dramaturgy and still give room for free interpretation. This doesn't seem to be particularly new, but it is central when it comes to incorporating vocals and lyrics: Because this is still not a matter of course in this genre, but a challenge that presupposes a linear fixation. Some earlier projects, such as those of the improv trio Karl ein Karl, of which Peter K Frey is also a member, have already led in this direction. With the music-theatrical arrangement and the free improvisation or their interplay, something peculiar emerges, a constellation that I would almost describe as essayistic music theater making.