The electro-acoustic composition and multi-channel sound installation Hinaus:: In den, Wald. is based on the work of Swiss art brut artist and schizophrenic mental patient Adolf Wölfli. In Hinaus:: In den, Wald. (which translates into: ‘Out:: Into the, forest.’, deliberately written with ‘Wölfliesque’ punctuation) I transfer Wölfli's written transformations, abstractions and creations into my own sound language. Points of reference are Adolf Wölfli's idiosyncratic punctuation and orthography, the rhythmic-repetitive character of his listings and testaments and Wölfli's biography and megalomania in general. I tried to express his permanent creative urge through an additional recording, which is based on my own walking, running and breathing "out there in the woods".

Different text passages are interwoven on several layers - from totally untreated phrases to modified elements. Language always oscillates between functional clearness and sonic abstraction, but also between conscious and unconscious perception. As a listener you enter Adolf Wölflis mind, hearing voices whispering inside your (his?) head, running through the woods, breathing. All texts were spoken by myself or by Stella Kao, a Taiwanese girl who didn’t understand German at all. Stella’s voice can be seen as a cross reference to a) the voice of young Wölfli himself or b) the voice of one of his victims.

As a sound installation ‘Hinaus:: In den, Wald.’ was presented in a completely dark environment, the resulting perceptual situation (to be listening to close-up voices in a quite intimate - even claustrophobic - setting without any visual cues) made some visitors feel quite uncomfortable and might be regarded as a spatialization of Wölfli's subconscious. For Aspect Magazine I created a 5.1 surround mix in an attempt to re-establish the spatiality of the original installation version.

A full-length CD-version of this piece was released by the Austrian label Klanggalerie in early 2004.

Director:   Bernhard Gal  (their other films)
Producer:	Genre:
Country:  Austria	Copyright Year:  2004
Original Format:	Color Type:  Color
Sound Type:  Magnetic Stereo	Length:  00:00:00
Original Language:	Subtitle Language:
Label:   Aspect Magazine
Other Info: Audio commentary by Howard Stelzer: I have been active as a composer and performer of electronic music since 1992. My music utilizes the qualities inherent to cassette tape and tape players; namely hiss, the roll of tape across play heads, the crackle of dirt caught inside old players, play speed altered manually by pressure from my fingers on the tape's reels. My improvisations tend to employ space and silence as well as gritty low-fidelity noise, and are almost always centered on the physicality of live performance, with an instrumental (rather than the classical 'concrete') approach to the tapes. I have two real CDs to my name, two pieces of vinyl, and several cassettes, CDRs, and compilation tracks scattered here and there. Over the years, I've performed with folks such as Kevin Drumm, Otomo Yoshihide, Le Quan Ninh, Haco, Martin Tetreault, Gert-Jan Prins, nmperign, Roel Meelkop, Axel Doerner, Andrea Neumann, Jason Lescalleet, Lionel Marchetti, Jerome Noetinger, Brent Gutzeit, Frans De Waard, Phil Durrant, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Alessandro Bosetti, and many other avant-garde types and characters of that persuasion. I find that collaboration is a great strategy for discovering new facets of my own work, and for taking my music to places that I couldn't get to on my own. I also have a few ongoing projects. In addition to performing, I operate the Intransitive Recordings label and mail-order catalog for electro-acoustic and improvised music. I regularly host sound-art, electronic and improvised music concerts by visiting and regional artists in the greater Boston area, where I live.

This film has never been screened

Microcinema Interview/Article:

Compilations containing this film
	Commercial DVD Aspect - The Chronicle of New Media, Volume IV (MC-315) Text and Language	2004	Available from the Microcinema DVD Store