Pistol shots in the piano’s resonating chamber, passing cars, short quotations from Haydn; light music from the adjoining room, contrabass clarinet sounds recorded with microphones extremely far from the instrument and confronted with ambient noise from the environment: Hannes Seidl’s “Music for Above the Mantelpiece” is firmly rooted in the “mundane” here and now. Meant for home-listening, art music is interwoven with everyday noises; the pieces are quoting themselves, sounds are devaluated. This CD claims autonomy; it does not simulate a concert, it is not an image. The CD’s technical possibilities such as repetitions, jerky leaps in loudness, quotes, change of microphones etc. are used to broach the issue of the home-listening situation with its underlaying of urban noises such as yelling, cars, and pop music – in short: the intrusion of reality.In this sense, Seidl’s compositional approach responds to the ongoing changes in the way we perceive music, and seeks to re-establish contact with reality. The result is music that declines to draw its legitimacy from some externally defined form of sublimity or to wrest hidden “truths“ from its materials. Instead, it tries to make headway in our cultural discourse as a living, reality-based form of art.