Musik für übers Sofa (Music for Above the Mantelpiece) is a portrait of Hannes Seidl conceived for listening at home rather than as a document of a concert. Art music is woven together with everyday noise: pistol shots in the resonating chamber of a piano, passing cars, short quotations from Haydn, light music drifting in from the next room. The disc claims its own autonomy and does not pretend to be an image of a live event.

Five works are played by the Composers Slide Quartet, ensemble Intégrales, the clarinettist Theo Nabicht, the pianist Sebastian Berweck and the cellist Andreas Lindenbaum. Seidl himself plays electronics, as does Christoph Franke in the cello piece. The Apple Music listing also shows a hidden track after the last work. Seidl was born in Bremen in 1977. He studied composition at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen from 1998 to 2003 with Nicolaus A. Huber and Thomas Neuhaus, then in 2003/04 with Beat Furrer in Graz. He has worked in the electronic studios of IRCAM, the ZKM in Karlsruhe and the IEM in Graz.

Was mich angeht (What Concerns Me) is written for four tenor trombones, and The Art of Home Entertainment for violin, tenor saxophone, piano, percussion and tape. Zimmerrauschen (Room Noise) is described as a radio play for contrabass clarinet: the instrument is recorded with microphones placed extremely far away and confronted with sounds from the surroundings. Die Anderen, Jetzt Neu! (The Others, New and Improved) is for piano and tape, while Leihgabe (On Loan) pairs cello with a mixing desk.

The means of the compact disc become material in their own right. Repetitions, sudden jumps in loudness, quotations and changes of microphone address the home-listening situation, with its background of shouting, traffic and pop music. The label calls this the intrusion of reality. Pieces quote themselves and sounds are deliberately devalued. Seidl's approach responds to changes in how music is perceived, and it declines to draw its legitimacy from an external idea of the sublime. Since 2008 he has worked with the video artist Daniel Kötter, mainly on music theatre. Their Film für übers Sofa won the prize for best experimental film at the Bolzano Short Film Festival in 2010.

CD, Wergo WER 6574 2, released in 2009 in the German Music Council's Edition Zeitgenössische Musik, total time 78:15.