„Break Eden. Gesänge von Sirenen“ is a joint project by author Lisa Spalt and composer Clemens Gadenstätter. It was premiered live on November 29, 2023 at the Alte Schmiede as part of the Wien Modern festival. "Break Eden. Gesänge von Sirenen" undertakes a revision of the paradise narrative through five songs with interludes.

In his volume "The Art of Action", Michel de Certeau talks about urban structures, among other things: "They are planned and built by higher authorities. However, the population often uses them in quite unexpected ways. For example, the dividing element of the wall is reinterpreted as a place to sit and thus, of all things, a place to meet.

The title "Break Eden" refers to such tactics of appropriation. A building and garden paradise, whose economic viability would have been reached at the "break-even point", is repurposed - more or less back to the actual idea of the ultimate place of longing. In the sense of a bricolage, the text assembles old recipes and orders by recycling quotations from Hölderlin, Shelley, Boccaccio and many others and dragging them through the present-day cuisine like a hot pepper. The music enters, absorbing material from the texts.

In the piece, the audience drags the lonely poet through the mowing machine exhibition, documentary sounds suggested by the text are filtered through the fine weave of the keyboard voice, the boundaries between natural and fake singing are blurred like those between human and product, electronic and vegetation. Time structures are also extracted from language to form the skeleton of the music, which breaks with the very different rhythms of speech, and this invokes naughtily two English housewives as (involuntary) inventors of the photosynthetic human. Finally, as a kind of live intrusion of reality, the voices of the pianist and the author become part of the singer's text arrangement. What time is it? We are in the present. We do what we can to work together in the creation of this paradise, using slapstick humor of those who can only try to maintain a minimum of dignity in a situation they have brought upon themselves. Rupture and fusion cannot be separated as poles of the same.

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