They should have brought us all together, but what happened was the opposite: On old language courses on tape or vinyl perfect native speakers made long pauses so that the listeners could imitate them. Most of us did this a couple of times, then gave up, but kept listening highly concentrated to the vinyl crackles in the pauses. And didn’t they seem to become longer and longer? Time transformed into space. Seconds turned into lightyears, vinyl grooves turned into orbits while the speakers seemed to withdraw from eachother more and more. Deep in the universe you still hear a gentle „Hallo“ but nobody answers.

This image is also a metaphor for the general effect of the old courses. They wanted to bring all nations together, but in real life and in real countries we felt inhibited and didn’t even dare to open our mouths. Nevertheless there is another to approach an international understanding in these courses - based on music. A music full of peculiar melodies and rhythm, that no one intended, a music that only arose as a side effect of the didactic pathos and the effort of to speak clearly and perfectly. – The additional text parts build a counterpart to the exercises. They deal with the poetry of misunderstanding and repeating as a meta form of communication.

Antje Vowinckel is an internationally awarded Berlin-based sound artist and radio artist. She has been commissioned to do radio plays, radio documentaries and sound composition for a variety of public radio stations such as (WDR, DRadio, SWR,) as well as performances for foreign venues and festivals. Her piece Call me yesterday has been presented in 16 countries. Her focus is on the musicality of the spoken word; for example in her project on melodies in European dialects. A number of her works employ fragments of documentary speech, or language improvisation (automatic speaking) which are then transposed into a musical structure.

Olaf Hochherz is a sound artist and researcher mostly performing with self build electronic instruments and computer programs. He develops installations and performance installations. His interest is in the conjunction of the instability, self-generation, and associative capacity of sounds.