The beginning of everything for me was the noisy, incredible space of my childhood. The first real noise that impressed me was bombing, the bombing of the cities. I was born in 1937 and that means I was two at the start of the war. My father worked in Essen so it was a harsh time with lots of bombing. Sometimes we went out after a bombing and the noise was incredible.” He throws both hands straight into the air. “You hear people crying and screaming and all this, and we went out from our basement there and the whole street was in flames. Then you could see straight through these windows. There was light behind them. This is the impression that sticks with me most from my younger years, to see all these high windows with nothing behind them. Especially the sight of the window frames, with all the lights and all the noise behind them. Later, when I was 15 years old, I worked in a textile factory servicing the machines and, once again, there were all these great, inhuman noises, these huge rooms with cranes running along them, moving all this metal stuff from one corner to the other one. There were many different spaces and many ways of listening to the sounds. There were areas where all the sounds crossed over each other and this was what struck me the most, to hear all these sounds together. It was like you were under the influence of a drug, you worked there and it was like being in a trance, you were so inside your work, so inside the sounds, somewhere else completely.
