As in previous years, the poster for musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst 2025 is based on a work by an artist involved in the festival.

The design of this year's poster is based on the drawing Störfaktor (ink on paper, 2010) - a title that exemplifies Peter Ablinger's artistic thinking. He consistently scrutinised our perception of music, sound and hearing and opened up radically new perspectives on acoustic experience.

The composer and conceptual artist Peter Ablinger passed away at the beginning of this year. However, his music lives on – including at this year's festival. A few months before his death in April 2025, Peter Ablinger composed his last orchestral work for ORF musikprotokoll: Die Wendel (The Spiral) – as in spiral staircase – electronically doubles the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and focuses on the tension between live and manipulated sounds that slowly spiral away.

The project Komplementäres Rauschen brings together works by Peter Ablinger and Winfried Ritsch, who were connected to each other. At the centre is weiss/weisslich 27d: komplementäres Rauschen, a puzzle with twelve-tone scales: visitors move in a circle of loudspeakers that draw them into an acoustic spiral. Depending on the direction of movement, the seemingly endless scales rise or fall – an acoustic Escher space.

Peter Ablingers piece is dedicated to Winfried Ritsch. There is also a tribute in reverse: Ritsch composed the work Gesang der Orgel 2b (Song of the Organ 2b) for this edition – a counterpart in which the finest changes in the vibration ratios challenge our hearing.

In another work – Movement for Brass (Infringement) – Peter Ablinger creates low-frequency vibration patterns on brass sheet metal. At the boundary between hearing and seeing, he creates music that does not want to be sound: an artificial product of our sensory perception, a disruptive factor in the best sense of the word.