Orlando Harrison - 'Gudrun Ensslin - Proletarische Politik'
Gudrun Ensslin (1940 – 1977), was the daughter of a Protestant pastor. A former girl scout, she was a founding member of the German urban guerilla group Red Army Faction., It has been suggested that Ensslin was the intellectual head of the RAF. She was involved in the bombing of German commercial and security institutions, and a number of assassinations.
The piece is based around a recently discovered recording from the 192 day trial of four leading members of the RAF, the so-called Baader-Meinhoff gang. Proceedings which took part in a specially constructed building at a maximum security prison in Stammheim. Here Ensslin outlines the political position of the RAF, a year and a half before her alleged suicide.
Through digital manipulation, this piece seeks to enhance and interrogate the character of the speaker’s voice, in an attempt to discover and decipher coded messages.
This composition uses Trevor Wishart’s Composer Desktop Project, which is an open- source software suite of tools for sound transformation.