Album Notes

"ASTEN"
by Wolfgang Dorninger

short introduction

Asten - a music piece in eight pictures - was composed by Wolfgang Dorninger for "Resocycling", a project by Caritas social project "Hartlauerhof" and "pro mente" Upper-Austria (div. art & culture) and specifed in the context of the "Festivak of Regions" with the festivals topic "margins" in Upper-Austria (30.6. - 3.7.1999). "Resocycling" is a neologism of Resozialisierung (rehabilitation) and recycling which is the daily work of both organisations who did this festival contribution.

The composers "job": Compose a music piece about Asten and sketch the geographical edge.
Asten offers great raw materials for a sound-researcher and field-recorder. There are main traffic routes on the small cities district like: Westbahn (biggest train tracks in Austria), highway from Vienna to Germany, river Danube and the entry lane of Linz airport. But Linz, the bigger city next to Asten outsourced their waste. So Asten has a purification plant, a garbage depot and a garbage sorting facility within the city-limits. But Asten also has a beautiful swamp, beautiful lakes and untouched nature next to a Danube power station.
10 years ago Asten was a village for 500 people, now its a little city with 10.000 inhabitants, the youngest city of Austria.
Asten sounds good for a field-recorder. 70% of the piece "Asten" comes from the daily output of Asten itself, modulated via digital treatment or just plain as part of a music piece, as a kind of sound-recycling.
Eight pictures:
The beginning is pure nature caturing the time. But the music piece carries also a lot of melancholy of the so called older people from Asten who still see their Asten as a little idyll of cultifated farmland and swamps. With the industrial revolutuion the train came and is still there deviding the city district. In 1938 the Nazi's opened up a big camp for some thousend Zwangsarbeiter (people who where forced to work for them in industrial plants) which destroyed the first time the grown structure. Then the highway came, the purification plant, the garbage depot and garbage sorting facility. With all the jobs in Asten and Linz also people came. Within a timespan of 40 years Asten grew from 500 people up to 10.000.
The piece ends with the people of Asten I learned to know quite well and admire.

Fadi Dorninger is composer, musician and sounddesigner.