Doppelmoppel – Poems by Kurt Schwitters

The story of this record starts in 2011 on Anna Clementi’s balcony in Rome. Her long time musical collaborator Thomas Stern is reading a poetry book by famous German MERZ/DADA-artist Kurt Schwitters (Ur-Sonate, Anna Blume) which belonged to Anna’s father, Italian composer Aldo Clementi (1925-2011). Stern and Clementi are immediately attracted and fascinated by the power of the poetry. The poems in this book ignite the decade-long artistic research of the duo.

Since then, Anna Clementi has been working intensively with Thomas Stern to extract the sound from the poems of Kurt Schwitters.
In doing so, they maintain a fine line between being faithful to the original and radically cutting up the poems and integrating them into into contemporary electronic sounds. From pure poem recital, to walzer tunes, played on pots and pans, cut-up sound poetry eruptions to vintage analogue Space Echo rhythms, loops, synthesizers and even pop quotations, Clementi and Stern put their hands on the poetic foundations of 20th century modern art, extracting the spirit of Kurt Schwitters’ “Merz-Gesamtweltbild” and moulding it into a sound poetry album.