“99 percent of the day, we are in the thinking mode,” Peter Ablinger tells me across a table in the lobby of our hotel in Bergen. “And in opposition to that, if we decide now to be silent for a few seconds. Just…” His voice drifts off and he raises his eyebrows in anticipation. For a moment, it is as if the outside world comes rushing in. All the odd ambient sounds of the hotel lobby become a sort of composition, much as John Cage heard the wind and the rain and the people walking as a composition at the Maverick Concert Hall in 1952. “It’s immediately a radio play or something,” Ablinger says. “We’re in another space completely. There’s no thought at all, just these footsteps, a car, a clink of cups. It’s just music. Immediately!”
Degrees of Density
An Interview with Peter Ablinger
