“Over the course of a year I promised myself to read at least one speech a day. Doing so, I read more than a thousand speeches that year. I tried not to force speeches to relate to one another but simply put them on stacks hoping that one day they would start communicating with each other. For instance, there were 5 months between the reading of Goebbel’s ‘Totaler Krieg’ speech and the moment I ran into the Patton-speech. I learned that that they were given at about the same time, saying exactly the same thing to exactly the same kind of people in a very different manner. Those speeches were begging to be interweaved with one another and become a massive go-to-war-appeal.

One of the key moments in the development of the show came when I had just memorized the funeral oration of Pericles (around 400BC) and at night watched the television news and saw French President Sarkozy (who had just lost 10 soldiers in Afghanistan) repeating about the same words. A few months later I added King Boudewijn’s abduction speech right after Pericles. The last one talking to the parents of literally thousand killed lying there at his feet. The first one refusing to sign an abortion-law, fighting for even single unborn life.

I knew I wanted the songs between the speeches to be produced only by my live voice to add to the idea what human vocal chords are capable to do. I looked for songs that added up to the speech it accompanied in a historical way to mark the period, sometimes in an ironical way, sometimes even in an emotional way. When I turned my attention away from the speeches I worked on finding the perfect harmonies that could be put live in a loop to support and complement the songs.”