At the suggestion of Andreas Paul, German writer and artist Gregor Kunz and sound collagist Winterberg teamed up to produce a one-hour radio play in 2012. Kunz’s readings of a selection of poems were put to music by Winterberg and consequently broadcast on Dresden’s free ColoRadio station on 30 August that same year. The full radio play, entitled Nach Arkadia. Zoom, has now been released on CD by Moloko Plus.
Gregor Kunz was born in East-Berlin in 1959 and worked odd jobs, such as forestry worker, postman and cinema assistant, to support his practice as a fiercely independent artist and writer in the German Democratic Republic. Kunz contributed to Samizdat magazines in the 1980s and has produced and published poems, collages and artists’ books since the late 1970s. Kunz currently lives in Dresden. Also from East Germany is experimental sound artist Winterberg, a specialist in electronic soundscapes for theatrical settings. For this radio play Winterberg produced a subtle and atmospheric aural backdrop for Kunz’s Arcadian poems. The ambient music pulsates under Kunz’s evocative words and every now and then surges from the cracks in the poet’s fragmentary lines.
Gregor Kunz’s multilayered photomontages and collages of images and papers that he has collected in the course of time, look like fading images, memories on the verge of disappearing. People seem caught in events and landscapes that are slowly slipping into oblivion. One of those photomontages has been printed on the sleeve of this CD and forms a perfect companion to Kunz’s melancholic songs to a lost place and time. To Arcadia. Zoom.