1
Erlkönig (op 1) (5:18)
Music: Franz Schubert; Marcel Daemgen
Text: Johann Wolfgang v. Goethe
Verlag: GEMA/copyright control
Arrangement, soundedit, programming: Marcel Daemgen
Vocals: Oliver Augst
Backing Vocals: Alexandra Maxeiner
Korg MS 10, Access Virus TI, Electronics: Marcel Daemgen
Piano: Thomas Dézsy
2
Im Treibhaus (5:15)
(aus Studies for "Tristan und Isolde")
Music: Richard Wagner; Marcel Daemgen
Text: Mathilde Wesendonck
Verlag: GEMA/copyright control
Arrangement, soundedit: Marcel Daemgen
Vocals: Oliver Augst
Piano: Thomas Dézsy
Drums: Chris Cutler
Double bass: Georg Wolf
3
Tod und Schlaf (3:01)
Music: Joseph Haydn; Christoph Korn
Text: Friedrich von Logau
Verlag: GEMA/copyright control
Vocals: Alexandra Maxeiner
Drums: Chris Cutler
Electronics: Christoph Korn
4
Lied der Mignon (Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt) (3:16)
(aus "Wilhelm Meister")
Music: Franz Schubert; Marcel Daemgen
Text: Johann Wolfgang v. Goethe
Verlag: GEMA/copyright control
Arrangement, soundedit, programming: Marcel Daemgen
Vocals: Oliver Augst
Synthesizer: Marcel Daemgen
Piano: Thomas Dézsy
Drums: Chris Cutler
Backing Vocals: Alexandra Maxeiner
Double bass: Georg Wolf
5
Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (6:21)
Music: Gustav Mahler; Christoph Korn
Text: Friedrich Rückert; Christoph Korn
Verlag: GEMA/copyright control
Words: Christoph Korn after Paul Celan´s "Todesfuge"
Vocals: Oliver Augst
Spoken Words: Michaela Ehinger
Drums: Chris Cutler
Guitar and electronics: Christoph Korn
6
Oft denk ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen (3:10)
(aus "Kindertotenlieder")
Music: Gustav Mahler; Marcel Daemgen
Text: Friedrich Rückert
Verlag: GEMA/copyright control
Arrangement, soundedit: Marcel Daemgen
Vocals: Alexandra Maxeiner
Piano: Thomas Dézsy
Drums: Chris Cutler
7
Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht (2:53)
Music: Johannes Brahms; Marcel Daemgen
Text: Heinrich Heine
Verlag: GEMA/copyright control
Arrangement, soundedit: Marcel Daemgen
Vocals: Oliver Augst
Piano: Thomas Dézsy
Drums: Chris Cutler
Backing Vocals: Alexandra Maxeiner
Double bass: Georg Wolf
8
Mondnacht (3:04)
Music: Robert Schumann; Oliver Augst; Marcel Daemgen
Text: Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff
Verlag: GEMA/copyright control
Vocals: Oliver Augst
Electronics: Oliver Augst and Marcel Daemgen
9
Illusionen (4:35)
Music: Udo Jürgens
Text: Alexandra Doris Nefedov
Verlag: MONTANA MUSIKVERLAG GMBH & CO.KG
Arrangement, soundedit, programming: Marcel Daemgen
Vocals: Oliver Augst
Synthesizer, Backing Vocals: Marcel Daemgen
Piano: Thomas Dézsy
Drums: Chris Cutler
Double bass: Georg Wolf
10
Heimkehr (6:45)
Music: Johannes Brahms; Christoph Korn
Text: Johann Ludwig Uhland
Verlag: GEMA/copyright control
Vocals: Oliver Augst / Alexandra Maxeiner
Accordeon: Rüdiger Carl
11
Verborgenheit (3:13)
Music: Hugo Wolf; Marcel Daemgen
Text: Eduard Möricke
Verlag: GEMA/copyright control
Arrangement, soundedit, programming: Marcel Daemgen
Vocals: Alexandra Maxeiner
Synthesizer: Marcel Daemgen
Piano: Thomas Dézsy
Drums: Chris Cutler
12
Und es sind die finstern Zeiten (3:19)
Music: Hans Eisler; Oliver Augst; Rüdiger Carl; Chris Cutler; Georg Wolf
Text: Bertolt Brecht
Verlag: Deutscher Verlag für Musik Leipzig
Arrangement :Christoph Korn
Vocals: Oliver Augst
Accordeon: Rüdiger Carl
Drums: Chris Cutler
Double bass: Georg Wolf
13
Feldeinsamkeit
Music: Johannes Brahms; Marcel Daemgen
Text: Hermann Allmers
Verlag: GEMA/copyright control
Arrangement, soundedit: Marcel Daemgen
Vocals: Alexandra Maxeiner
Piano: Thomas Dézsy
Double bass: Georg Wolf
Produced by Oliver Augst, Marcel Daemgen, Christoph Korn
TEXTxtnd/DeutschlandRadio 2006
www.textxtnd.de
Sound-Mastering and final master mix: Marcel Daemgen
Sound engineering by Deutschlandfunk
Co-producer, Deutschlandfunk: Frank Kämpfer
Live recording sessions took place at the Sendesaal, Deutschlandfunk Cologne, January/February 2005, all other recordings and sound editing were done in the studios of Augst/Daemgen/Korn
Romantic dis-illusion
The tormented boy, shouting unheard with a breaking voice. The adolescent who experiences his yearning as silent pain. The abandoned girl who, when she dreams, no longer believes herself amongst the living. The lost boy who, for reasons unknown, can no longer communicate. Lonely beings to whom the nightingale sings of safety, but not real people. Couples who sing alone one after the other, not together. Without a doubt, one imagines something different under the title ‘Youth’. At least in most cases the term is associated with a completely different vocabulary: with excess, potential, with the future. In no way is it associated with pain, escapism, and lack of prospects. Or is it? What is reality, and for whom? And who is speaking?
Schumann and Eichendorff, Schubert, Brahms, Uhland, Mörike, Wolf, Wagner, Rückert and Mahler. At first glance it is the ‘big names’ of German Romanticism that Oliver Augst, Marcel Daemgen and Christoph Korn – the artists’ collective ARBEIT from Frankfurt am Main - have interpreted along with fellow musicians. But how strange it sounds. What emerges from these texts and songs we thought we knew is largely free from sentimentality, gloss and romanticisation of any kind. It is, rather, an experience of self and of the world which has little comfort. Those who speak here seem raw, and draw close. The filters, buffers and protection mechanisms normal to us are completely foreign to them, it seems. They seem to register unrelenting pain and disappointment and the contradiction between reality and the freedom of ideals.
An association comes briefly to mind :The suffering of a generation under the putative opportunities of their times. Born in ’89, children of a time of violent, change and upheaval, growing up aware of the uproar around them, witnesses of avoidable wars, delivered into an age of perpetual restoration. This occasionally becomes obvious to those German intellectuals whose small scattered utopian circles are based on the title ‘German early romantics’ ,a group Anna Seghers –forgotten today-reports, around 1800, as having ‘rubbed their brows raw on the wall of society’ What did they see coming? What was it that they, in contrast to us, could not keep quiet about?
For the Frankfurt artists, the collected highlights of classical romantic songs, loved by every concert-goer, are the result of a filtering process. Every new project the group undertakes begins with the sifting through of as much and as varied material as possible. In this project this means the use of concrete sounds, instruments and contemporary technologies to enable visualisation. What emerges is a foundation. Daemgen and Korn, the two fundamental editors/arrangers/composers of the disc, have musically dissected the body of songs, leaving the melodies close to the original but reorganising the instrumental foundations. Some songs are products and documents of electronic means and media, others are the result of a shift to another genre. Schumann’s Mondnacht (Moonlit night), Brahms’s Heimkehr (Homecoming), Haydn’s Tod und Schlaf (Death and Sleep) can even be seen as miniatures of the art of sound ; they are created on a background of sound : whistling frequencies, the beat of electronic drums. Other titles have in the background a trio arrangement of double bass, drums, and piano ; not that the results are like jazz, but Hugo Wolf, Brahms or Wagner do move away a little from the introverted classical song to the tighter, more sophisticated chanson.
Whatever method is used, distancing has as its goal clarification. It is always the aim to listen with new ears to what is already known and accepted as art, and to relate it to the present. It is irrelevant whether it was created by Udo Jürgens, Hanns Eisler, Joseph Haydn or originated in the 19th century.
The project Jugend creates a stark sound-image, as you can hear. Lost, perhaps unconscious, but also contemporary connotations come to the fore. In Goethe / Schubert’s Erlkönig it is the theme of child abuse, In Wolf’s Verborgenheit (Seclusion) we hear youth’s yearning for death. Being lost to the world is suddenly no longer only the experience of the romantic artist, but also of the many unexpected abductees and internees; for this reason the song is at this point structurally intertwined with a poem by Paul Celan.
A key piece of the recording proves to be the miniature from Mahler’s Kindertotenliedern (Songs on the death of children). I often think these tell not only of the individual experience of the writer, but also of the fate of an entire (young) generation. A Jewish, but not exclusively Jewish experience of the century seems to be highlighted in a tormented way.
Comfort and hope :possible counterstatements, are scarce on this CD, which is, similar to earlier productions An den deutschen Mond or Marx, a concept album. What is striven for here is not a naïve, prettified sound which uses popular hits and sounds at climactic moments. It is not about a new deadening of the pain ; it is utopian enough today to shine a light in the fog in order to see reality again.
The disc Jugend is the result of several years’ work and trusted co-operation. The stage version was performed in March 2005 at the Deutschlandfunk-Kammermusiksaal under the title Jugend volume 1: Freud. It was a project in stark contrast to its predecessors. For the CD the instruments and voices of the two singers were recorded at the same time in Cologne. Augst, Daemgen und Korn took this raw material with them to Frankfurt and sifted through it on their PCs, adding background, detail and structure. In the collective as in the individual work phases the signatures can be heard which give individual titles their colour. We hear them with their diverse voices: irascible and almost only as a whisper through the megaphone, introverted and almost in a state of euphoria. What will the youth of today appropriate for themselves from the title, sounds and subtexts?
Frank Kämpfer, translated by Norma Stewart
