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Based in Styria, author Gertrude Grossegger has explored the depths of self-consciousness in "befinde mich nun bei den fischen". At the fishes thoughts flow in the form of concrete images, ideas, insights and hunches. Phantasms are provided. Permanently the self is talking out of itself.
In a retarding rhythm, the text, which is marked by its litany character of musical intensity, circles the theme "befinde mich nun bei den fischen" and returns again and again in modified versions. The speaking self, describing a fragile and shaky existence, takes up existential themes by which the self is touched at the fishes.
The text, aimed at immediacy, establishes a direct relationship with the recipient audience.
There is one world and there is the other one. The sending self oscillates between several worlds communicating its perceptions to a receiving audience, it "is now with the fishes." In a remote location, the receiving audience - dear ladies and gentlemen - is directly connected when the speaking self, the self that announces itself through thought bubbles, speaks up in order to let the listeners participate in how it is just now in the process of transferring into the other world, how what is perceived translates directly into Speech Music.
The sound basis for the music of the Austrian pianist and composer Elisabeth Harnik were arrangements of piano, speech and underwater recordings. The electronic processing of natural and prepared piano sounds blurs the usual boundaries of the instrument. Amplified by the fading in of processed speech sounds from the text and the artist's own hydrophone recordings, a liquid sound image emerges that threatens to spill out at its edges. This fully composed layer of sound was fed to the live recording by means of a transducer attached to the piano's soundboard and supplemented by live sound textures. The music envelops the voice of the speaker, text and acoustic space interact, sometimes moving into the foreground, sometimes into the background, condensing, and offering the listeners at the terminals both a constant change of perspective and a persistent circling around oneself.
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