German Beat writer Jürgen Ploog (born 1935) began experimenting with tape recorders in the 1970s. A friend and literary associate of William S. Burroughs, he is considered a father figure of the German-language literary underground. He was a transcontinental pilot for Lufthansa for 33 years. On various flights between 1971 and 1976 he made these tapes on a portable tape-recorder. The final selection, montage & editing was done in 2014 by Robert Schalinski, with this 40-minute cut-up as the result. Passages of Ploog’s spoken text get mixed with Indian television voices, while sounds of Buddhist rituals are heard through an open hotel window. Radiograms, birds, recordings of airport and street noises, the noise of people and of machinery … assembled, superimposed … scraps pulled out/torn, shifted and copied … questioned and documented … an alchemical experiment, a journey of sounds …

“Cut-up as a drug that leads to a different relationship with language, just as a hallucinogen leads to an altered relation with the so-called reality. The result is a fundamental shift of meaning. ‘Shift linguals’ was the motto in a continuous process with an open end …” (Jürgen Ploog)

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