In the process of cleaning up the sound archive, the fog of silencing is lifted. Not only do sound recordings become audible again, the materiality of storage also becomes visible. Audio tapes, DAT cassettes, music cassettes, records, CDs, memory cards, hard drives. Plus all the equipment needed for recording and making it audible again, including computers, mixing consoles, power amplifiers, loudspeakers and all the cabling in between.

The sounds that are brought back into hearing give form to the series of thoughts that make up this radio play. From the materiality of storage, which is unfriendly to living spaces, arises the general questions about the meaningfulness of keeping all these sounds as a sound archive in this radio play.

In the first field, which becomes audible when the mists clear, the unwound tapes only swoosh, having become part of the otherwise audible degradation of the space. These problems of the silent collateral damage of our desire to hold on to things and to keep them available burn as urgent tasks to be done.

The second field tells the concrete experience from sound recordings for film productions. An unbearable wear and tear of material for a little illusory world. Of the recorded sounds, a maximum of 20 percent reaches the editing room; in the film itself, 3-5% of the recorded sounds still occur. The same goes for the recorded footage. The rest just became garbage.

This form of production has become obsolete in its waste of resources long ago.

In the third field, the focus is on what lies behind the constructed worlds for film, television, streaming, social networks, deposited and moved on server farms, networked via satellites and digital cables and radio networks, maintained with a lot of electrical energy: Devastation. The abandoned saltpetre town of Humberstone in the Atacama Desert provides an impressive auditory image of this, further underscored by the fighter jet that thundered through my recordings.

In the fourth field, a different perspective on materiality opens up: exploring sound recording technology and sound processing techniques to expand speech, narrative forms, and vocal sound - sonic poetry, sound poetry, and poésie sonore shape this field.

The fifth field, after leaving the sound archive, is a leaf through the audio book of audio geographies. In the form of listening maps. Listening as orientation. A reference to the First Listening as a direct connection with the places. With the desire that the degradation of the places in which we live be ended. In favor of this First Listening, listening here as an essential part of our connectedness with our environments.

And between these fields: the elements of connections: one: the mushroom threads, the mycelium that exists subterranean as connective tissue, here realized as flute trialogues based on the songs of African mushroom pickers; two: the life energies and rhythms, here played on the snare drum, twice solo, twice connected to the sound of a potter's wasp from the Southern Carpathians; three: the real sound archive as a place of overdubbing and as a place of de-muting, as the starting point of this narrative; four: the spoken digitizing, this reference to the pressure exerted by the decay of sound carriers and recording technology to always have to copy everything into new formats in order to keep it available; five: and the poems, which form the level of reflection, of pondering as we move on;

The music of the string orchestra opens, sets the center and concludes this reflection on the Second Listening.

• Text, composition, voice, flutes, recording, mixing: Bruno Pisek
• Drum: Rudi Wachet
• String orchestra: Vl: Joanna Lewis, Phoebe Violet Iordanov, Maria Patera, Teresa Machul, Va: Judith Reiter, Christiane Hörlein, Martina Reiter Vc: Maria Frodl, Kb Thomas Stempkowski, recorded at Amannstudios, Christoph Amann
• Narrator, drawings: Denisa Angheluţă
• Format: Stereo
• Duration: 48‘43“