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SÜNDE. FALL. BEIL.
In my royal opera Sünde. Fall. Beil., music tries to move skulls - similar to procedures in some of Jean Tinguely's bizarre machines - supported by montage techniques and the creation of semantic relations guaranteeing a coherence. Musical structure is based on short, but decisive terms that have been transferred into (Morse-)rhythms and in this way, determine the musical course ( Semantik-Kreis). Indeed, this does not happen in a one-dimensional way. Smaller units are used as germ cells for bigger structural complexes that become units themselves. These bigger units are structures referring to the future or to the past, always creating contexts, even though this is not heard or felt in the first moment. But on the other hand, I also use structures negating the action on stage. Many rhythmic, dynamic and sound- or frequency structures are developed out of words or chains of words, which are contradicted by the contents expressed by the singers on stage. 
[In: Sünde. Fall. Beil. (1992)]

DEN MÜLLFAHRERN VON SAN FRANCISCO
...Once, garbage men in San Francisco awakened me. In the first moment, I was angry about their noises, which became cramped in my brain after they had gone through my ears. But after 15 minutes, I observed a loosening of my cramp because I discovered quite fascinating sounds. These were clearly shaped and characterized by special durations caused by diverse hatches. In the moment these hatches were opened, I could hear an astonishing pure third that suddenly broke down in regions of very low frequencies. Well, I remembered all these sounds, wrote them down and afterwards, I used them as a basis for my composition Den Müllfahrern von San Francisco, which I dedicated to the trashmen that I heard. The subtitle, "an acronym out of acoustical memories from a journey", refers to the literal meaning of acronym. This is a word formed out of letters used in other contexts. I transferred this principle into music so that Den Müllfahrern von San Francisco became secretly characterized by non-directly perceptible structures. For example, I used longer parts of the poem America by Allen Ginsberg, a poet who had lived in San Francisco for several years, and the poem became coded - it was transferred into rhythms of Morse signals. Letter for letter, word for word, line for line, I used these internal rhythms, first in a gradual, and later in an overlapping way, so that it becomes denser. 
[In: Call a Spade Spider a Spade. Rückstahlungen von Reisen (1992)]

TWILIGHTS - PROTOCOLS FOR TAPE 
I composed Twilights - protocols for tape (1983) at the center for computer music at Stanford University and in the electronic studio of the Folkwanghochschule Essen. I had used Morse codes before, but here the act of Morse coding is a layer of its own. (Based on a text by Karl Marx that maybe can be deciphered by revolutionary radio operators.) Special message codes have effects on other materials, but this is not relevant to the composition at all.
[In: Call a Spade Spider a Spade. Rückstahlungen von Reisen (1992)]

CASSANDRACOMPLEX - MUSIC THEATRE WORK BASED ON THE NOVEL "KASSANDRA" BY CHRISTA WOLF
I have been fascinated by the figure of Cassandra for all my life, because it showed parallels to the situations that I lived in. In the '60s, or especially in 1968, I realized that there were special developments in society, but I also observed that these were not really accepted. Instead, there were only attempts to influence some of the visible symptoms. I think that this procedure is still valid nowadays and will be so maybe even in the future. Well, in the beginning of the '80s, there was a novel dealing with these antique materials. I was really captured by Christa Wolf's book, because it presented new perspectives in dealing with mythology and offered possibilities to renew the old Cassandra myth. A very important point that has changed since Greek mythology is that of the view of women - Apollo created light, installing patriarchies and negating matriarchies. Christa Wolf discovered Cassandra as a figure starting to find a balance between the dark, associated with feminism, and the light; Apollo gets his power from her, and he too has been made. In fact, that is the disaster, which has driven us into catastrophic states for the last 2000 years: it is the imbalance between male and female.
[In: ... auf dem St.-Andreas-Graben sitzen (1997)]

Preparing for the opera CassandraComplex, I used a fixed row of numbers in order to compose complex processes. In aleatory ways, different Cassandra studies are defined, and later I used their structures to mark divergent columns of the opera as every study deals with special situations of the novel. In this way, I created the basis of CassandraComplex. 
[In: ...yes, No-no... (1997)]

INTERNET-CYCLE
For an artist, it is really very attractive dealing with the structure of the Internet. It works like a composition, connecting all things with each other, but allowing the choice of direct or non-direct ways to reach one's destination. Apart from that, in a way the Internet offers chance operations, because the net means discovering things only by clicking around, with more or less no intention at all. Sure, the Internet only supplies things in fragments, but these are presented in a multicolored way. It is also the other way around: things, which have been thought and researched or designed, are also only presented as fragments. Well, these Internet structures have had their effects on various pieces nearly automatically. The entire INTERNET-project beginning on a trip to Barcelona in November 1995 and then realized a few months later in INTERNET 3.2 for mezzo-soprano, piano and percussion is based on the idea of transferring Internet mechanisms to the inner structures of composition. Four pieces, …strike the ear… (1987/88), Nachbeben und davor (1988/89), Den Müllfahrern von San Francisco (1989/90), and Zeitsprünge (1990) offer the material with which I used to "surf". I used a row of numbers out of BAB(ylon) because I needed material to trigger the selection of special chords. In this way, I reached inner connections between pieces that all have their own history, special content and structure. 
[In: Gefahr und Chancen (1997)]

WARNUNG MIT LIEBESLIED
After the death of a close friend I dealt with the problem aids in my trio Warnung mit Liebeslied (1986). On one hand aids causes a slow, first invisible incorporation of an infected body. But the subject also offers the possibility to break the taboo "death", the chance to defend personal feelings against demands of public power. For this reason I collected melodies, that have been sung and played by Beggars in Lisboa. I combined them with sounds of a samba, which have their origins African dance ceremonies - the Bantus danced on broken glass and between fire and were accompagnied by percussion. The instrumentation with accordion, harp and glass-percussion is influenced by these sounds. Then a secret frame consisting of combinations from the numbers 11, 13, 17 and their multiples is also influenced by the preexisting sounds I collected. The composition of all the materials is mainly going back to the subjects I deal with - two structures, one rhythmic elegiac, the other "mechanic" regular, are increasingly dissociating. At the end the mechanic gestus dominates, nearly unplayable its getting so fast that its "unhuman" character is getting lost: the accordion begins to "breath" because the noises of the bellow become successively louder. 
[In: heterotopien zahlen (2001)]