Heiner Goebbels, Heiner Müller

Der Mann im Fahrstuhl (The Man in the Elevator) is the German composer Heiner Goebbels's setting of a monologue by the playwright Heiner Müller. Released in November 1988, it sits between radio play, song cycle and band record, with a cast drawn from the New York downtown scene and the Berlin stage.

The text comes from Müller's play Der Auftrag (1979). A man rides an old elevator to receive a task from his boss, loses all sense of time, and steps out into an unknown landscape without any task at all. Goebbels first staged it as a concert at the Art Rock Festival in Frankfurt in February 1987. The album was recorded in March 1988 at Sound on Sound in New York, with MIDI work in Frankfurt and the German voices taped at the Schaubühne in Berlin. Arto Lindsay sings and plays guitar, Don Cherry sings and plays trumpet and doussn'gouni, Fred Frith plays guitar and bass and George Lewis plays trombone. The actor Ernst Stötzner is the German voice, and Goebbels plays piano, synthesizer and programming. Goebbels and Manfred Eicher produced, and the mix was made at Rainbow Studio in Oslo with Jan Erik Kongshaug.

The story runs through 21 short pieces, most under three minutes. Their titles follow the man from Fünf Minuten vor der Zeit (Five minutes too early) to Ich verlasse den Fahrstuhl (I step from the elevator). The words move between languages, spoken or sung over rock riffs, free jazz phrases and synthesizer textures. Two Brazilian songs drift in like a record heard between floors, Ary Barroso's No Taboleiro de Bahiana and Cartola's Fita Nos Meus Olhos. The longest piece, Mitleid in Peru, grows out of a Don Cherry theme and gives his trumpet the most room.

In Die Zeit in December 1988, Konrad Heidkamp heard muted free jazz echoes pulling the music close to speech, and English stammered over gentle guitar lines. In the American magazine Rhythm in 1989, Gene Ferriter called it an aural drama, a sophisticated relative of rap. Writing for ECM Reviews in 2012, Tyran Grillo noted that "Lindsay carefully plots every step of this morbid ball with his delicate guitar."

This is the CD edition of ECM 1369, first released in 1988. The cover images come from a video by Anton M. Rey, shot in the elevator of Robert Wilson's staging of Death Destruction & Detroit II at the Schaubühne.