Hans-Joachim Hespos

condition (record/cover): NM / EX

Gatefold sleeve. | Hans-Joachim Hespos (1938–2022) was among the most uncompromising figures in post-war European music — a composer who stood entirely outside the institutional structures of the avant-garde, self-taught and self-published, residing in Ganderkesee in Lower Saxony, working in near-total independence from the Darmstadt circuit and the compositional academies, yet recognized throughout Germany and beyond as one of the truly inimitable creative voices of his generation. He won the Gaudeamus Prize in 1967, the Fondation Royaumont Prize in Paris in 1968, the Rome Prize at the Villa Massimo in 1972 — and promptly returned to his own practice with no concession to the expectations of any scene.

His music places extreme demands on performers: extended instrumental techniques pressed beyond comfort, graphic and verbal notation that leaves large zones of action open within tightly defined structural constraints, theatre works calling for welding torches and metal cages on stage. The title of this 2LP — ...Damit Transparenz Sich Ereigne, Frische Hellhörigkeit Neu-Anderen Sinnens — might be rendered as "...So That Transparency Might Occur, The Fresh Acuity of a New and Different Sense" — and it serves as something of a program for everything Hespos sought: the removal of habituation, the confrontation of the ear with the unknown, the moment when the conventionally musical simply fails to account for what is heard. Issued by Ensemble Musikproduktion as a 2LP in a limited edition. Extraordinarily rare.