Büro Lunaire: Shipwreck with Spectator

Shipwreck with Spectator is a live audio play that examines catastrophes as images and questions the possibility of an innocent position of spectatorship. Drawing on Hans Blumenberg’s philosophical figure of shipwreck, the work explores the tension between observation and involvement, distance and entanglement. In a performance space that figuratively becomes a ship, narration and sound draw the audience into a structure of repetition and change.

Alexander Bauer | Prologue & Epilogue for voice, flute, trombone, percussion and live electronics (World Premiere 2026) Text: Stefan Schmitzer

When thought takes on a life of its own, it is like watching a room full of flickering screens from the corner of your eye.

In the two pieces that frame the radio play, I place acoustic images drawn from documentary recordings alongside Stefan Schmitzer’s text.

Florian Kindlinger | The Sublime & Finale for voice and live electronics (World Premiere 2026) Text: Stefan Schmitzer

The compositions emerge from a close coupling of text, voice and sonic space. The starting point of the sound work is spoken language as both material and formal source. From it develop temporal, rhythmic and spatial structures that determine the course of the pieces. The semantic and conceptual dimensions of the text are taken up and transformed at a compositional level, so that text and sound enter into a reciprocal relationship. Voice, layered sounds and noise exist in a contrapuntal relationship in which levels of meaning, material and perception mutually influence one another. The compositions thus organize not only musical processes but also listening positions: spatial, medial and temporal displacements cause proximity and distance, orientation and disorientation, observation and involvement to continuously flow into one another. In this way a multi-dimensional arc of tension emerges, in which text, sound and the subjective perception of the audience become experienceable as an integrated compositional process.

Reinhold Schinwald | Verwirbelungen Ib for trombone, tape, live electronics and voice (World Premiere 2026) Text: Stefan Schmitzer

Three voices negotiate Blumenberg’s metaphorical history of the shipwreck in an associative web of text: What does the ship mean? What does the observer mean? Is the spectator cool? A fourth voice, speaking only from the control desk – textstelle, teststelle, weiter (text passage, test passage, continue) – marks the order of the discourse. The voices work their way through Lucretius and Voltaire, through Turner paintings and Leviathan myths, until language itself begins to reel.

Impulseless threshold sounds of the trombone are processed through a feedback-delay network into a spatially extended sound continuum: an immersive sonic band in which the voices initially find their footing. The Verwirbelungen – the sonic vortices of the feedback network – function simultaneously as compositional technique and metaphor: whirlpools that set everything drawn into them in motion, stripping it of controllability.

Germán Toro Pérez | EXIT-Machine for voice and bass flute (World Premiere 2026) Text: Stefan Schmitzer

The EXIT-Machine imagines, through surreal metaphors, the liberating flight of “wordless thought-images” as rescue from certain drowning in the sea of interpreting words. In dialogue with the voice, the flute articulates the transition toward an apparent unity with the world “below.” But in reality we do not lift off. Only an authentic language, if anything, can save us from going under.

Tímea Urban | Flood & doma for voice, flute, trombone, percussion and live electronics (World Premiere 2026) Text: Stefan Schmitzer, Lucretius

In recent months I have been increasingly preoccupied with the concept of hallucination – the merging of a “real” and a “distorted” reality and the inability to distinguish between the two. My pieces are intended to reflect one’s own position in society (and the possible sense of guilt connected to privilege, nationality, wealth, peace – “survivor’s guilt”) through the experience of a (sonic) hallucination, without certainty as to whether these thoughts arise from my own or from a distorted state of mind. These themes feel especially pressing to me in light of the current political situation – not only in my homeland, which lived through several totalitarian regimes in the past century and is now again showing sympathies for autocratic rule – something that feels, right now, strongly like a hallucination.

Stefan Schmitzer | In his book on shipwreck, Hans Blumenberg traces a metaphor through the centuries; he is interested in what it reveals – as a specific example of thinking in images – about human consciousness. Yet the metaphor with which he works concerns precisely the (more or less passive) observation of people drowning at sea – an image that, in the years since Blumenberg’s death, has gained urgency and lost innocence. It strikes too precisely at the scandal at the heart of European normality. A re-engagement with Blumenberg’s shipwreck book no longer concerns “only” thought, but necessarily the nakedness of survival.

Tickets at the entrance
Regular ticket €15
Ö1 subscription €10

Doors open one hour before the concert begins.