Colonia Dignidad was the settlement of a German evangelical sect. After being prosecuted for child abuse in Germany, the group fled to Chile in 1961. Like similar religious sects, it was characterized by the outward appearance of a unified, godly community with well-tempered cultural activities and social welfare, but inwardly and in its environment by oppression, sexual abuse, and exploitation. In the 1970s, it unquestioningly inserted itself into Pinochet’s regime of terror, aiding in the imprisonment and torture of political prisoners, weapons production, etc. Since the end of the 1980s, there has been a legal reappraisal of the C.D.’s crimes in Chile.
Its successor organization makes a living from tourism.
The C.D. project uses, on the one hand, a series of documentary recordings of contemporary witnesses, and on the other, a set of melodic improvisations (MIDI files), improvised in the spirit of the impressions of terror, tension, claustrophobia and fear associated with the Colonia. CD 2 (Knochenstückchen) directly reflects this atmosphere. CD 1 (Reue?) on the other hand, is characterized by the contradictory breadth of the statements found after the dissolution of the sect: Denial of atrocities to glorification of the C.D. by leaders who returned to Germany against the professed traumas of formerly abused inmates and exploited community workers.
For this purpose, the eyewitness recordings were sound-modified to a considerable extent. The MIDI files were played back with a variety of virtual instruments (piano, guitar, sax, turntable, lung machine, barrel organ, synths, etc.) in a multitude of modifications (speed, pitches, loops, harmonic and tonal variations), so that the 11 pieces from CD 1 and the 16 pieces from CD 2 each represent a closely interwoven overall composition.
Ralf Wehowsky is one of the most respected practitioners of radical music of our day. He was the founding member of the seminal German group P16.D4 and ran the legendary experimental label Selektion whose ground-breaking releases influenced many working in today’s experimental music scene. Previous releases have seen him collaborate with such well known and diverse artists such as Merzbow, Andrew Chalk, Jim O’Rourke, Achim Wollscheid, Lionel Marchetti, Kevin Drumm, Kouhei Matsunaga and Bruce Russell.
Reviews
Cover excerpt Ralf Wehowsky: »C.D.« (Penultimate Press)
With his latest publication, the electronic musician Ralf Wehowsky approaches a dark chapter in German post-war history and foreign policy.
The sheer horror. Where to start? Maybe first to the person: Ralf Wehowsky has been experimenting with sound since the early 1980s, since he appeared as a member of the German post-industrial band P16D4. Especially internationally, this formation enjoys a legendary status, comparable to the English Nurse With Wound or the American L.A. Free Music Society. As a soloist, Wehowsky has also released numerous albums, some of them in collaboration with people like Kevin Drumm or Bruce Russell. We are here in the heavyweight class of the experimental underground. Hermetic sound research, stylistically in no man’s land beyond noise, non-academic music concrète and sound art. »And you can live from that?« No, that’s why Wehowsky is also a prosecutor.
Why is this worth mentioning? Because the album available here for discussion (actually there are two thematically related ones) also has a – if you like – a legal or socio-political background. »C.D.« does not stand for the format of the publication, there is no place for Kalauer at this point, but for »Colonia Dignidad«, the infamous settlement of the criminal German sect in Chile, whose horrible history has not been comprehensively processed to this day. Anyone who wants to get a first overview of the disgusting acts and the silent suffering as well as the decades of mostly undisturbed existence of the criminal religious community and the slow legal investigation and the associated political failure over decades, you will quickly find a large number of sources and information online. If you don’t have a sensitive stomach and good nerves, you can go deeper and deeper into the hair-raising past (and dubious present) of Colonia Dignidad (today Villa Baviera).
Crimes to be recorded, to preserve memory
What does this have to do with the music of Ralf Wehowsky or what do you hear when you push “C.D.” into the player? Two tracks, »Reue« and »Knochenstückchen«, almost 40 resp. 50 minutes of experimental sound collages, which in the title indicate “personal” and “forensic” forms of processing. Edited audio documents such as quotes from witness statements of victims of the sect and the like are incorporated into the recordings to be heard, and the entire background noise of the two sound carriers is correspondingly oppressive. A feeling of simultaneous emptiness or Loss and tightness arises while listening. These unpleasant emotions are provoked by the music, even without knowledge of the historical motifs to which it refers. The sound mixture of noise, industrial and music concrète seems pretty nasty in itself; the opposite of easy-listening. If you then additionally consider the underlying topic, it is completely done with the hitherto good mood.
The question arising in this context about the necessary or verifiable connection between content and form (“that sounds like that because …”) is as obvious as it is complex in the answer. Sound art is not agitprop. Wehowsky does not present protest songs and also the prevailing shock aesthetics in the (post-) industrial (explicit cover artworks for extreme music as an outlet for extreme feelings such as anger, hatred, frustration in dealing with social grievances) is also far from him. He uses subtle and in places frighteningly quiet musical elements that reinforce the ghostly atmosphere of his recordings – and make the eerie historical events audible to a certain extent. To put it paradoxically: the work revolves around a moral vacuum and basically unspeakable misery and suffering, which must not be concealed. In the endue of this aporie, the self-set mission is fulfilled, so to speak. Because the demand or idea of being able to correspond to the adversities and terror of a religious child harasser and his collaborators by means of acoustic-aesthetic processing is naive and presumptuous. That’s not possible. Art literally consists in the abstract innuation, the broken presentation of what has happened and aftereffects, in order to keep it present in the memory and in the consciousness of shaping the future.
Ethics of attention
Just looking at the photographic image of the cover creates a queasy feeling. The insecure smiling young people (pale complexion, red cheeks) do not make a happy impression in themselves or at first glance – the probability of looking into the faces of sexually abused people reinforces the unfortunate consciousness in the reception. At the same time, however, one knows nothing or only suspects what happened to the wounded souls of Colonia Dignidad. In this context, it is remarkable that a self-taught sound artist and lawyer with a doctorate is at work, who, among other things, criticized the relatively mild punishment for Andre E., a supporter of the right-wing extremist terror cell NSU, even if the subsequent revision did not bring about a tightening of the penalty. The attempt to do justice to the wrong done, in the aesthetic and legal sense, is, if not an impossibility, an enormous challenge.
I am neither academically educated in legal philosophy nor in art theory, but with my ears long enough on the road and between them sits a brain whose synapses get into a swing in confrontation with Wehowsky’s work. Therefore, why not!?, another large barrel to conclude: In historical perspective on the ever-long question “What does it mean to deal with the past” (Adorno) and in dealing with “Schindler’s list”, Claude Lanzmann (“Shoa”) criticized Spielberg’s emotional production, which focused less on survival in the face of the murder of millions, and rejected this thematization of the Holocaust as cheesy and thus false. I don’t want to compare Auschwitz with Colonia Dignidad here. However, Lanzmann’s text (“You shall not cry”, published 30 years ago in the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”) deals with a central theme in the aesthetic examination of suffering, misery, (socially sanctioned) injustice and almost unpronounceable horror, which must be carefully reflected in the artistic treatment, the victims should not be repeatedly sorrowed and wrong done. Here, too, there are substantive sewings of criminal proceedings (the testimony of victims as another agonizing – therefore re-traumatizing – experience for them) and processes of aesthetic debate. So how do you meet the horror? A wide field, mined terrain and mental abysses, dark and away from light. With Wehowsky you can set out and try to overcome the monstrous dimensions of human action. – Holger Adam, Skug
RLW – C.D. (2CD by Penultimate Press)
I am sure I haven’t heard all the works by Ralf Wehowsly, also known as RLW, but I have heard a lot. I am racking my brain if I encounter a work of his of political meaning. It may be, but I am no longer aware. On
his latest CD, called ‘C.D.’ there is. In this case, the title doesn’t mean compact disc, nor is it RLW‘s tribute to Oval, but it is the acronym for Colonia Dignidad, the Chilean settlement of a German evangelical sect. They went there in 1961 after being prosecuted in Germany on accounts of child abuse. On the outside, it all looked great, like all sects; on the inside, there was repression, sexual abuse and the support of the Pinochet regime. RLW uses documentary recordings of contemporary witnesses (I am sure I saw the same documentary on Netflix), along with a set of melodic improvisations “improvised in the spirit of the impressions of terror, claustrophobia and fear”. This is on the second CD, and the first is all about the denial of atrocities and the glorification by the former leaders who returned to Germany. As I said, I can’t remember RLW being this outspoken. Last week, I wrote about absolute and programmatic music, that 19th-century notion about music having no meaning or being a story. Here we have a story. Yet the story is on the cover (basically what I wrote above), and then the question arises: what if one doesn’t know this background? What is left? What do we understand? A difficult question, and one I would carefully answer with, ‘I am afraid a lot would be lost’. The music is very much musique concrète-like, with cutting up sounds, pitch shifting, looping, reversing and whatever other techniques are at the disposal of the composer, who uses MIDI to play back various virtual instruments (piano, sax, guitar, turntable, lung machine, barrel organ and synths). Along with cutting up voices (plus all the other musique concrète techniques), this all sounds very much like an excellent RLW release, but at the same time, there is also the question: do we hear anything that is a direct link to Colonia Dignidad,? I am afraid I don’t, but there’s always a possibility I am missing out on something. Granted, by adding voices, there is surely a radiophonic aspect to the music, and as said, this is all classic RLW music. The use of musical instruments, finely chopped into small pieces, re-contextualised into new music. That’s what he does, and that’s what he is great at. (FdW) – Vital Weekly
RLW CD (Penultimate Press, PP62, 2xCD): The red-cheeked young musicians in ethnic costumes on the cover are not a folk band like any other. Even if it is not the girls’ orchestra from Auschwitz, it was still meant to musically disguise a German abomination. Namely Colonia Dignidad, as the sect formed from Free Church members and Pentecostals was called in the newspeak of true abominations. The stinking head was a paedophile wanted for rape who fled to Chile with his flock in 1961, where he ran his kingdom of heaven on earth in the hinterland of Parral for decades until his arrest in 2005. As a ‘pseudo-religious criminal community’ in which boys were systematically raped and abused, in which forced labor, vigilantism and corporal punishment were the new normal. And which served as a torture center for the Pinochet regime from 1973 to 90. The protective hand of the junta and, in this country, the CDU/CSU with prominent apologists such as the ZDF presenter G. Löwenthal and the Würzburg scandal professor and Strauss protégé L. Bossle ensured that the perpetrators were protected on an ongoing basis (with N. Blüm as a praiseworthy counter-voice). Ralf Wehowsky scratches at the scars with an unusually explicit directness, with modified sounds of piano, saxophone, guitar, synths, percussion and, especially on CD 2, also the eyewitness reports that are available through “CD – A Chilean-German Oral History Archive”. A radio play of a different kind, entitled “Repentance?” and “Bits of Bone,” in that the linguistic information, apart from a few key words, is pulverized in an acoustic emetic. In sharp, bubbling, effervescent ipecac syrup, administered with a sweetener that initially sounds like a house music, such as a piano or glockenspiel, then with a bruitistic, finally flavored with a guitar and a jingle. To spit out the idol that has contaminated the brains with phrases like “If God is with us, no one can be against us ,” but grunts like a pig when it comes to RLW. This “normal” was so wrong that anyone who wasn’t already totally “swined” was treated with electric shocks for “possession.” Yes, there is a lot to be sick of: the perversity of the seducers, brainwashers, phobocrats, torturers and rapists. That they die of old age after all too short prison sentences or even manage to evade all charges. The disgrace of ‘Christian’ politicians who were more interested in ‘god-pleasing’ ‘German nationalism’ and Pinochet’s fascist regime than in ‘humanitarian nonsense’ and ‘left-wing germs’. And that none of these assholes ever gets struck by lightning while taking a shit. [BA 126 rbd] Bad Alchemy
RLW is the moniker of Ralf Wehowsky, one of the key figures in contemporary radical music, as well as the founder of the German group P16.D4 and a protagonist with prominent roles in some projects and labels with a strong experimental inspiration.
His latest creation is “C.D.”, named after Colonia Dignidad, a German evangelical sect that settled in Chile after being tried for child abuse in Germany. Colonia Dignidad is sadly known for having also helped the regime of Augusto Pinochet by imprisoning and torturing some political opponents.
The album made by Wehowsky uses a series of documentary elements, such as recordings of eyewitnesses, but also melodic improvisations capable of communicating a strong sense of tension and terror, coherently with the actions of the group. Inevitably, the recordings of eyewitnesses were manipulated to make them less recognizable.
“C.D.”, in fact, includes two albums: “Reue?” intends to represent the contradictions that emerged after the dissolution of the sect, when some of the atrocities were denied and others simply glorified, while the following “Knochenstückhen” is a more atmospheric piece, born from the desire to suggest a sense of oppression and claustrophobia that has so much to do with the history of Colonia Dignidad.
Ralf Wehowsky confirms his sensitivity and his talent with an ambitious work that must be analyzed together with its deepest meanings. (Piergiuseppe Lippolis) Music Map
