What music can be heard on the meat market today?

What melody?

A deep, warm bass sound overlays the engine noise of the trucks, the industrial whirring, the metal struts of the barriers clanking together in the wind.


You'll find the melody yourself when you drive to the slaughterhouse. You can stand in front of the barrier and watch my short movie, listen to a song, leave a song, sing or dance yourself. Something lively. And then listen carefully to what happens. Can you free the chilled animal pieces?


Can you counter the dead with something alive?


Can you hear the music that nevertheless carries itself defiantly through the wide air and over the city on this terrain of concrete and dead flesh?


It's best to go in the evening or at night, then you can be there almost alone. Just you and the cold rooms. Just you and your own music.

1862

The sound of hundreds of animal feet in the wet mud, crammed together on their way to be sold, to become meat. The grunting, sniffing and shouts of the sellers  blur into a strange fog of sound. An oppressive, narrow and dissonant sound. A smog. Then suddenly another melody swells, a melody that clears the air of carnal odors and gives everyone pause. Not only do the vendors and traders fall silent, the animals also stop scratching and move their fluffy faces up from the mud, all in one direction. 
At the very back, past the smell of milk from the calves and their frightened eyes, a girl sits in the mud and sings. A song that no one knows and yet everyone recognizes. Also the animals.


For a moment, everything else is silent and the animals quietly gather around the girl. Then she gets up and leaves the meat market. One by one, the animals follow her and the sellers and buyers stand motionless in the dark mud.


1933

The meat market became a slaughterhouse. Industrial machines, concrete, metal, echoing sounds and closed buildings. Only the butchers together with the animals on this site. When the mechanical smog died down in the evening and the cries of the animals could only be heard muffled in the cellars, the workers set off under the blood-red sun. Only a few shift workers wandered in darkness around the large site. Then, once a year, they heard a melody.


The voice of a girl, echoing through the tiled rooms, climbing into shafts, through every window and crack. With a terrible groan, the heavy metal doors suddenly burst from their hinges and pigs, cattle and calves rushed out into the soothing air. With an even deeper, more ancient groan, the pig halves rose from the still wet hooks and galloped wildly and freely through the bars and out. All the workers could do was listen to the melody and drop their weapons.

Since then the melody is still heard from time to time. But what happens in these nights is still not entirely clear.