This is a collection of world premiere recordings by Eckart Beinke, Thomas Desi, Matthias Kaul, Robert HP Platz und Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini, commissioned by the Arno Schmidt Foundation. They are sung by the British countertenor Denis Lakey.

Arno Schmidt was a German author and translator. Many composers were inspired by Schmidt’s texts, whether by setting passages from his works or by developing forms and structures in which they saw parallels to Schmidt’s prose constructions. In 2007 the Arno Schmidt Foundation issued a compositional commission: some composers were given a number of sharply pointed statements by Schmidt from which each selected three quotations to set to music.