In his foreword Dirk Reith attributes the growth in complexity to the expansion of the studio at the end of the 1970s, which enabled it to join the ranks of the world’s leading studios, and to the degree course in electronic composition, unique in Germany. Works from the classes of Wolfgang Hufschmidt, Nicolaus A. Huber and Reith won prizes at international competitions. In a project funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, a machine for digital sound generation and processing was built together with the young computer firm micro control, with Helmut Zander, Gerhard Kimmel, Markus Lepper and Thomas Neuhaus.
In Nic Jemming’s “Angélique, mais sans dieu” (1985) for four-track tape, a four-part floating glissando, used as an ostinato in the shape of a forward-creeping caterpillar, becomes the formal principle: an “eclipse” phase between two “relax” phases, whose electronic colours often come close to those of the orchestra. “The Bad Boys Were Prodding the Bear Through the Bars of the Cage” (1985) by Thomas Neuhaus describes a single process: a surface of soft sounds and glissandi turns into a noisy, repetitive rhythmic texture which, through densification, passes into a completely different surface. Claudius Brüse relates “Kapitel 80” (1987) to the decade of technological, social and military upheaval and to the 80th chapter of the Tao Te Ching, in which Lao-tse sketches a peaceful state; the dialectic between this state and the neighbouring country, where the “dogs of war” can still be heard, extends to the oppositions of vowel and consonant, digital and analogue synthesis.
Markus Lepper’s “FM Suite” (1987) belongs to a series of small studies, each of which works through exactly one technique; its material is the circuit, three frequency-modulated generators, some of whose modulation signals are filtered through a sample-and-hold. At the same time the piece describes a consciousness searching the dial of a radio in a lightless night for messages of human origin. Ludger Brümmer synthesised “TroTropf OrT” (1988) with the Synlab at the ICEM: random patterns of frequency modulation sound like falling drops of water and are stretched and layered into as many as 100,000 voices; where the basic form and its transposition meet at the golden section, the piano–forte contrast arises which the title marks with “pf”.
Dirk Reith realised “nested loops I” (1980), the first part of a three-part cycle, at the EMS studio in Stockholm with Gottfried Michael Koenig’s composition programme Projekt 1 and at the Folkwang studio with the SYNLAB system; from the first to the last of its seven “variants” the path leads from the greatest sonority to total noise. Vladimir Dshambazov, horn player with the Sofia Philharmonic, began “No contact III” (1989) as a DAAD fellow at the ICEM just as the Berlin Wall fell; he finished the final mix with Reith in the night before Christmas. Alongside frequency-modulated sounds, the conclusion of the trilogy “Nach innen, zum Menschen” uses sampled sounds of his own heartbeat and pulse.