The German word „Federlesen“ is a metaphor for picking up the pieces with much care, but is commonly used in the contrary sense of doing something without too much hesitation or consideration (in German „ohne langes Federlesen“). A literal translation, however, could be either „collecting the feathers“ or „reading the feathers“.
The piece shows the realization of line drawings as filtered noise. The drawings were improvised according to a set of simple rules (e.g. number of strokes, stroke widths, strokes with ruler or freehand, and stroke crossings). Noise with different timbres was generated via subtractive and additive synthesis, to represent different stroke widths. The progression of the drawings from left to right was translated as temporal progression, and the height as the core frequency of the filtering.
Please note that you are listening to a stereo downmix of an ambisonic tape that was originally premiered as a 36-channel version.