Live report or music-theatre production? In the piece Im Bau Michel Roth plays with studio sounds and live recordings and cannot be tied down to a certain genre.

Swiss composer Michel Roth adapted the text for the stage and composed the ca. one-hour monodrama Im Bau (‘In the Burrow: Fifteen Sound Spaces after Franz Kafka’) as a commission from the ensemble æquatuor, the Lucerne Festival, and the Theater Basel.

The work was produced in 2017 as a music-theatrical obstacle course. The fifteen composed sound spaces interacted with a total of fifty-three real space situations, on the one hand in public partial performances, on the other under studio conditions. Likewise explored were the boundaries to reportage with participants moving through the rooms.

For the present radio-opera version of his eponymous music-theatre composition Im Bau, Michel Roth arranged existing recordings from the music theatre with new recordings: a new radiophonic production of the work that consciously also thematized its own genesis.

ensemble æquatuor:
- Anne-May Krüger (mezzo-soprano)
- Matthias Arter (oboe, lupophone)
- Martina Brodbeck (cello, singing saw)
- Ingrid Karlen (piano, melodica)
- Matthias Würsch (singing saw)
- Ueli Würth (live elctronics)