Bewusstseinstätigkeit im Schlaf (1987)

Ti­tle of the com­pi­la­ti­on: Lautpoesie. Eine Anthologie
Ti­tle: Carlfriedrich Claus: Bewusstseinstätigkeit im Schlaf (Track 03)
Publisher: Christian Scholz
La­bel: Gertraud Scholz Verlag, Obermichelbach
Da­te: 1981
Me­di­um: re­cord 30 cm

Bewusstseinstätigkeit im Schlaf is one of Carlfriedrich Claus' acoustic works. His sound processes are unique in their radicality. They are pre-linguistic articulations that no longer or not yet bind hearing and speaking to intelligible communication and yet communicate something. This kind of speaking is no longer based on an already existing 'language' but on an articulatory expansion of consciousness. The sound poetic experiments recorded with a tape recorder, his snapping, moaning, breathing, squeaking and the articulation of indefinable sounds, as well as the testing of the acoustic possibilities of the human voice, have made Carlfriedrich Claus one of the main representatives of sound poetry.

The sound composition Bewusstseinstätigkeit im Schlaf was written in 1981 and spoken by Carlfriedrich Claus himself. Several speech levels recorded with a tape recorder were composed into a sound process.

The piece is integrated into his treatises on the activity of consciousness while awake and on the visualisation of the activity of consciousness during sleep from the 1970s and early 1980s. This complex of themes is the subject of both his visual and acoustic work. In self-experiments, he tried to bring the two completely different activities of consciousness into connection with each other. One result of these experiments is the sound process Bewusstseinstätigkeit im Schlaf, which is characterised by adverbial articulation possibilities that are no longer related to conventional language and sense-oriented speech. This state is located between waking and sleeping, between consciousness and unconsciousness.

_ATJ