AN DEN DEUTSCHEN MOND

Unobtrusive yet very much present, the two voices advance cautiously. The woman's voice represents the child in her arms and the transformation of the thorns, while the man's represents the hunter, the dark cloud, and the time endured. "Vibrating intensity": then hesitation and sudden noise. Then a soothing keyboard chord and the two voices take off again as in flight. The sound changes, techno rhythms come into play with the feedback of electric guitars, distorted voices, and fuzzy radio transmission. The sound takes on meaning as it breaks the silence and speaks - nonverbally - of the unspoken.
Oliver Augst, Christoph Korn and Marcel Daemgen from Frankfurt am Main are not concerned with the nurture and revival of German folk songs, but rather with collective experience preserved in the genre and the value of its personal-utopian message. Their approach is unsystematic; subjective interest has determined the selection of the titles, and the heart of their effort is the personal adaptation. Constant variation, the original means of creation and transmission of the folk song, offers the legitimation for this. For the three arrangers the present practice of "variation" takes the form of "remix", which welds together the historical material and modern media experience.
This artistic approach stems from a social-critical attitude and from their heterogeneous musical backgrounds. Christoph Korn studied political science, sociology and philosophy. In addition to his concert work, he has written numerous compositions for various groups, audio artworks, productions for spoken word, hermeneutic performances, film music and texts. The vocalist Oliver Augst sees himself as a performer, composer and set designer. And Marcel Daemgen has a classical musical education in piano and studio technique and is a composer, producer and live-performer of electronic, pop and noise music.
In a consciously unacademic approach all of this goes together aesthetically. Collages, surprising tempi, pauses, interferences, bulky forms resist arbitrariness and rescue the music from nostalgia. A song from the Thirty Years' War and a song from Eisler form the historical poles. Unknown, almost forgotten titles alternate with hits, the message of which - in a new form - may stir and even disturb the emotions.
The German Folk Song Project has two important predecessors in the work of the performance collective Augst/Daemgen/Korn. One is the conceptual album "Reiseradio"(Travel Radio) which appeared in 1999 on their own TEXTxnd label. The other is their Brecht-Eisler project in 1998. (Now available here on CCn’C) "Reiseradio" set out to be an artistic documentation of a media-critical art radio project, that was carried out by performers from different artistic disciplines in several European cities. The experience of disturbed frequencies and media dumping, which is also used occasionally as an artistic form on the present album, was developed there as a new aesthetic form. The attempt to free Brecht and Eisler from historically outdated performance styles can be seen in various aspects as a successful test run for the German Folk Song Project. For from here begins the border between advanced pop and acoustic art, here began the idea of preserving earlier music by changing it in accordance with the contemporary position.
These projects were documented in the form of a stage performance, a TV production, a radio performance and a conceptual CD. The German Folk Song Project has likewise been produced in various forms which include the "electronic music theatre 'heimat'" as well as the "Volksliedmaschine", which is to be understood as a self-generating radio play, an audio work commissioned by Hessian Radio and the media art festival "intermedium 2" of ZKM in Karlsruhe. The present audio-CD "An den deutschen Mond" was also developed as a radio project. The vocal and instrumental parts were recorded in August 2000 in co-production with DeutschlandRadio in their studios in Cologne. The editing and mixing was carried out in several stages in the studios and computers of Augst/Daemgen/Korn.
(Translation: Mary Behm-Taxis)