The Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa describes his music as calligraphy with notes in space and time, notes that come from the world of silence and also return to it. He understands his composition "In die Tiefe der Zeit" [Into the Depths of Time] as a mythic soundscape. To the traditional Japanese "paths" of discovering the self, Toshio Hosokawa adds another one: the "path of music". John Cage, too, decided early on to take the "path of music", and he thoroughly explored non-Western systems of thought and ways of life.

“To me the composer’s role is to comment on the things that surround us in the here and now,” says composer Martin Schuttler (b. 1974) who lives in Berlin. What surrounds us in the here and now is the reality of the street, normal life, things outside the box of our private universe, things we stumble across every day.Dirt, garbage, trash, grunge, low-tech, junk, kitsch, scrap: all of this, the profanest of the profane, finds room in and provides material for Schuttler’s music, his steely, angular compositions, which are not without their gentle, mild, dulcet, almost suave moments. Puzzlement. Disruption. An attempt to explain and enlighten. “Pelze & Restposten” (“Furs and Remainders”) is the title Schuttler chose to give to his first portrait CD. It’s a dialectical word-game on luxury items and mass commodities, on value and worthlessness, on quality and quantity, not without a touch of self-deflation. His CD presents compositions from 1998 to 2009.

Experimental music, like Thomas Stiegler's, invites the listener to find his way through unfamiliar acoustical environments. It is as if we were to arrive in a strange city and forced to find completely new bearings. Earlier experiences with other cities may be helpful, but they alone will not allow us to come to grips with the new city in all its uniqueness. Recognition (“that’s just like ...”) immediately leads to distinctions (“but it’s different somehow”).We have to yield to the new city, to let it guide and move us. The cheerfulness in Stiegler's music helps us, herewith.

The dramaturgy of her pieces, which grows out of the sensuality and subtlety of tightly filled single tones and the sound of mergers, must be brought out of the liberation of the notes from the paper and the very conscious completed assumption of responsibility on the part of the musicians on the effect. What does this show the pieces on this CD Portrait. A characteristic stress arises from Juliane Klein's fascination with the on-the-tip-bustle of the uniqueness of each performance. Her works refuse the routine. The possibility of repeated listening to the CD deepens the perception of a Klanggebilds that develops both horizontal and vertical views by more and more from the observation of a three-dimensional space object to a person belonging Shaping. The resistant, linked to the moment of inspiration, waking consciousness, the open eye for the inexhaustible inventiveness are Juliane Klein freedom to engage with their composition commissions on seemingly impossible, high-risk situations, without losing yourself.

Composing means for Markus Hechtle, the sounds - beyond all knockouts - to put more new, re-hear and understand new. In his plays he tries to tear down all the technical and intellectual barriers, and sweep to pass. Thinking and imagination he would impose any restrictions. He draws inspiration from the sensual qualities of sound, from it's "aura", he says. Markus Hechtle is not afraid of sounds that seem familiar. He does not believe in the consumption of material by tradition. It is the task of the composer to bring sounds again and again to speak. There it depends on the content of music, which can get caught in the sonic struts of musical structure.

Born in 1962 in Berlin, studied composition, general music education and classical saxophone in Berlin, L�beck and Stuttgart. He was a fellow of the Heinrich Strobel Foundation of the SWR, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the City of Hamburg. His music theater works and multimedia concert installations "Lancelot's Spiegel", "Imitation of Life", "Galaxy Hotel", and "Citt� Utopica" found at festivals in Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna and Bregenz much attention, his musical theater "no significant change" celebrated in April 2011 in the Opera stable the Hamburg State Opera Premiere. Together with the experimental pop musician Felix Kubin, he realized the surround sound project "Echo House" and published by the label 'Dekorder'. Burkhard Friedrich has been honored for his compositions and interpretations of contemporary music international awards, concerts and performances of his works have taken him throughout Europe, Asia and the USA. Many composers have been inspired by Burkhard Friedrich exceptional style of interpretation to create new works. By Burkhard Friedrich CDs with WERGO, 'Maple Fields', 'Dekorder' and the Net-Label 'plakatif. Net', as well as a CD of his chamber opera "Lancelot's Spiegel" (sound debuts KUG) appeared. He founded together with violinist Barbara L�neburg 1993, the internationally renowned ensemble Integrales. Burkhard Friedrich is the artistic director of the project "Klangradar 3000 - New music, electronics and composition at general schools" and holds workshops and seminars on the subject of "composing / music education in general education schools" in international music universities.

The wellsprings of Christoph Staude’s music are many and varied. His interest in a large number of languages (including those of the Far East) and their systems of symbols has given rise to a wide-ranging nexus of references, as has the backdrop formed by his studies of world literature, cognitive systems, and the sister arts. The works on our CD may serve to shed light on aspects that constitute the defining features of his music. They reveal the emergence of distinctive new traits deriving from Staude’s solid understanding and conscious transformation of currently valid and historically based material, whether of musical or extra-musical origin.

The CD with compositions by the young German composer Charlotte Seither concentrates on eight chamber-music works in different ways of instrumentation, ranging from a duet for voice, a piano and a string trio to a mixed-ensemble piece. Seither's compositions were premiered and recorded by top-class interpreters!

John Cage’s occupation with the sound possibilities of the prepared piano became the dominant tonal feature of his music after he moved to New York in 1942, and for many years it remained his preferred form of expression. Works for Piano and Prepared Piano, Vol. II, is an exquisite collection of dynamic pieces that John Cage wrote before he developed an interest in the I Ching, the ancient Chinese “book of changes,” or in atonality.

The German composer Ernst August Kl�tzke admits to "post-serial leanings" in the sense that compositions must be rationally structured in their various dimensions and that their design must not be left to chance. Yet the validity of any system is, for Kl�tzke, relative at best. The pieces on this CD combine approaches which, like serialism and the music of John Cage and Mauricio Kagel, are often more closely related than current clich�s might lead one to believe. They pay candid tribute to Kl�tzke's musical exemplars, above all to Luigi Nono.

One striking feature of Sebastian Stier's music is its almost exhilarating physicality. Explosions of power and heft metamorphose into a buoyant lilt, into graceful stretching and expansion, or into gossamer surfaces whose pore-like indentations can do no more than gently quiver. Corporeal sounds grow into landscapes; fissured sonorities emerge from clumps of sound, from outcroppings, eruptions, breakdowns, and overlaps, and from an elastic, reflexional distribution of energy.Isolated instrumental pitches or rigorously organized agglomerates of ensemble sounds sprout like appendages into sonic shapes, clogging, interpenetrating, and splitting each other apart. Yet they seem precisely manipulated and controlled at every moment of their rhizome-like existence. The harmonic and melodic forces they release are invariably held in check by precisely articulated rhythms that seize and direct the sprightly complexes of sound with a firm hand.The six pieces on our CD, composed between 1994 and 2004 - "Double", "Fluchtlinien" (Vanishing Lines), "hin her" (To fro), "Zwei Lieder" (Two Songs), "der und die" (He and She), "Windfluchter II" (Wind Bent Trees) -, offer an initial overview of Stier's music over the last ten years.

Making the audible vivid - is the aim of this CD with works by the German composer Fredrik Zeller (b. 1965). Renowned interpreters of new music help the compositions with eminently pictorial titles become "visible".

Bernfried E.G. Prove's music thrives on the adventure of surging forward to new compositional horizons and thereby achieving a highly personal response to the musical currents of our times. With a special fondness for spectral harmonies, Prove gives audible form to multi-layered vistas by adopting techniques that allow him to probe the "deep structure" of music. Whether he applies geometrical formulae from radiation physics as a means of shaping the proportions, density and form of his works, whether he bases their design on rhetorical patterns or the Golden Section, or whether he oversteps and even suspends the bounds of the humanly playable (as in his "Salto" for piano solo), the result is always music of extraordinary expressive power and superbly nuanced color.

Orm Finnendahl is no musical humorist. But his works are often based on punchline-like expressions which take the listener by surprise whenever he believed himself safe. "Fallstudien" is not the first piece in which Finnendahl works consistently with procedures derived from mathematics and the natural sciences. Especially important to him are recursions, patterns of growth and diversification generated by the repeated application of one and the same rule to pre-existing material and to the results thereby obtained. One of the most celebrated examples of recursive patterns are fractals, which can be used, say, to describe the abstract formation of a snowflake using a single rule. In "Rekurs," sections of the work are recorded on tape and fed into the next section via loudspeakers. The tape recorder embodies the contradiction between technological progress and the fixed immutability of the recording - a contradiction that Finnendahl expounds and subsumes in his art, most notably in "Rekurs." Rules and pre-existing material must first be transformed before they can produce connections - poetic or dramatic, for example - that catch the composer's interest. To quote Finnendahl himself, "Interpretation is made visible as contingent action on the part of the composer."

Detlef Heusinger was born in Frankfurt-on-Main and studied guitar, lute, conducting, musicology and composition in Bremen, Cologne and Freiburg. His most important teachers for composition were Hans Werner Henze and Klaus Huber. Among the grants and fellowships he has received are those of the Heinrich Strobel Foundation, the Internationale Ferienkurse Darmstadt, the Worpswede Art Studio, and the Cit� des Arts.