The compositions on this CD are about crashing, decaying and failing. The individual downfalls have very different qualities and consequences: Brian Ferneyhough’s La Chute d'Icare is an allegorical fall: the divine punishment for the exuberant Icarus, who drowns in the sea instead of flying to the sun. Stephan Winkler's composition Von der Gewissensnot der Insekten, by contrast, refers to a fall with a more profane cause: excessive alcohol consumption and an open window lead to a fatal event. Eventually, the background of Oscar Bettison's piece Livre des Sauvages is a fall in a figurative sense, caused by the free fall of a supposedly scientific sensation.

The booklet poster shows Gerhard Richter's Abstraktes Bild from 1983, which artistically comments on the thematic bundling of the programme from the highlights of the series 'Musikfabrik im WDR'. Richter has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Ensemble Musikfabrik since 2009.