condition (record/cover): NM / EX+ Gatefold sleeve with bookled stapled in, numbered (nr.564) and signed. Two landmark works of musique concrète instrumentale - a style focused on the physical mechanics and "energetic conditions" of sound production. Gran Torso (1971): Written for string quartet, this piece deconstructs traditional technique to find "unusual sounds" through friction, pressure, and percussive use of the instruments. Salut für Caudwell (1977): A 25-minute composition for two guitarists who play and speak. It is dedicated to Christopher Caudwell, a British Marxist writer, and explores the intersection of musical structure and experimental "assemblage". Helmut Lachenmann's first string quartet and his guitar duo - the two works that define what "musique concrète instrumentale" means in practice. Gran Torso (1971) turns the string quartet into what Lachenmann called "a sixteen-stringed playing body": strings scratched, bowed with extreme pressure, played behind the bridge, struck, muted, pressed into silence. The starting point is not sound but, in the composer's words, "the mechanical and energetic conditions which determine the production of sound." You hear the bow's friction against the string, the resistance of wood and gut, the physical effort of the player's arm. Traditional playing appears only as one specific variant within a much larger world of possible sound-actions. Lachenmann (b. 1935 Stuttgart) studied piano with Jürgen Uhde, composition with Johann Nepomuk David, then became Luigi Nono's first private student in Venice, 1958-60. Nono's political commitment and Lachenmann's own rigorous materialism converge here: if you change how sound is produced, you change what sound means, and you change how the listener hears - not just this music but all music afterward.

Salut für Caudwell (1977) for two guitarists is one of Lachenmann's most explicitly political works. Christopher Caudwell was the pseudonym of Christopher St John Sprigg (1907-1937), a British Marxist intellectual who wrote Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry and Studies in a Dying Culture at extraordinary speed before leaving for Spain. He was killed at the age of 29, at a machine gun post in the valley of Jarama, covering the retreat of his comrades in the International Brigade - E.P. Thompson called him "an extraordinary shooting-star crossing England's empirical night." In Lachenmann's piece, the two guitarists speak texts by Caudwell and Nietzsche in strictly rhythmicized, syllabically fragmented form while playing - new and traditional techniques, muted plucking that sounds like marching boots, the whole vocabulary of the guitar estranged and made to carry weight. The title is a salute: to an intellectual who chose action, and to the question of what art means when the world demands something other than art.

LP. Berner Streichquartett (Alexander van Wijnkoop, Christine Ragaz, violins; Henrik Craaford, viola; Walter Grimmer, cello) on Gran Torso, recorded at SWF Baden-Baden. Wilhelm Bruck and Walter Ross, guitars, on Salut für Caudwell, recorded at Feedback-Studio, Cologne. Edition of 500 numbered and signed copies, gatefold sleeve with 16-page booklet including liner notes, photos, and score excerpts. Winner of the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik, 1988.