The piano

has probably seen better days. Erwin Stache thumps on the keyboard with his anarchistic improvisations and, at the same time, he starts the machinery with twitching blows on keys and switches. He bounces up and down like a madman landing contortedly on his stool. Now at last, purity lovers of piano music might give a scream of horror and disgust. He's someone who likes doing fiddly things, an eccentric designer of crazy sound-producing machines, a pianist whose unorthodox virtuosity is based on exceptional dexterity Strange "assistants" are standing on the stage and in the auditorium: a bucket, elevator transporting marbles and steel balls upwards and dropping them onto two dulcimers arranged in the form of a V, a moving object made up of rudiments coming from the mechanism of a piano, three rotating strips of wood colliding and changing direction and - the highlight of illusion - a moving box standing upright and covered with a black veil under which a tenor is singing with a rasping voice. Memories of the "intuitive" improvisations in New Music of the late sixties - and occasional moments of silence, a time during which only few sounds and noises intone the lonely swan song of the machines.

Raoul Mörchen - Kölnische Rundschau, slightly shortened