Johannes Fritsch and Rolf Gehlhaar were members of the Stockhausen Ensemble until 1970; like David Johnson, both took part in the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka. In the same year the three founded the Feedback Studio Köln, and in 1971 the Feedback Studio Verlag, according to the booklet the first German publishing house run by composers. The Feedback composers played in museums, galleries and at festivals, with sound installations, compositions and improvisations, most of them documented in the Feedback Papers; Fritsch also organised the Hinterhausmusiken concerts. All the composers on the sampler are published by the Feedback Studio Verlag. Premastering and design were in the hands of Fritsch and Herbert A. Mitschke of the Cologne Studio HerMit; the excerpts mostly come from considerably longer works.
The beginnings are documented by an improvisation of the three founders, recorded in 1972 without an audience for a self-portrait broadcast on Radio Zürich: Johnson plays flute and synthesiser, Fritsch viola with contact microphone, Gehlhaar superstring and percussion. Michael von Biel, who later studied with Joseph Beuys and has since worked mainly as a visual artist, recorded his own “Cello Concerto” (1971) at the Feedback Studio in March 1971. Peter Eötvös worked with hurdy-gurdy sounds in “Feuermusik” (1972), Silvio Foretic wrote “Interludium” (1971) as a synthesiser composition in baroque technique, and David Johnson’s “Ton – Antiton” (1968) bears witness to electronic music opening up to “foreign” and historical materials. In “Pulse Music I” (1975-76) John McGuire applied his minimalist technique to electronic sounds for the first time: voltage-controlled synthesisers render precisely the patterns that in earlier works still had to be played by musicians.
Johannes Fritsch’s “Violectra” (1971) for viola d’amore and synthesiser is heard in its second version, which he recorded with Johnson at the Feedback Studio after the premiere at the Saarländischer Rundfunk; from 1973 Fritsch performed the piece again and again as a solo work, in Western Europe, the USSR, Japan and the USA. “Hochtöner” (1974), a commission from Radio Bremen, comes from a Hinterhausmusik concert with the three founders. After Johnson and Gehlhaar had left, Fritsch worked with many musicians of the Cologne scene; the “Trio” (1977) for viola, trombone and piano with ring modulator, with Jon English and Kevin Volans, was recorded by the Hessischer Rundfunk at a guest concert in the Orangerie in Darmstadt.
Rolf Gehlhaar’s “Swallowtails” (1992) is the middle section of a performance with amplified cymbals in the KLANG=RAUM, the interactive, computer-controlled environment he developed in 1984. The “Trio” (1993) for steel string, tree trunk and motor sirens was played by Volker Staub and Fritsch at the opening of a Francis Bacon exhibition at the Kunststation St. Peter in Cologne. Clarence Barlow’s “Pandora” (1989) for piano, originally the final movement of an orchestral piece, leads from a “simplistic” opening via tango rhythms into a core shaped by contrasts; Michael Manion realised it with a sampler. Siegfried Koepf’s “Untitled” (1992) for organ is the recording of its premiere at the Cologne Musikhochschule, Manion’s “Music for Cello and Electronic Sound” (1991) a concert recording with Stephen Harrison. In “Vaterkomm” (1991) Herbert A. Mitschke turns Ernst Jandl’s poem “vater komm” into chamber theatre; for “Pendulum” (1996), with Sabine Kallhammer (soprano) and Bruno Tendera (speaker), he recorded breaking glass and transformed the sounds by computer.