Les Sons des Sous, a production by Uli Aumüller and Martin Daske for the SR radio series "Radiotop", tells two stories at the same time, or rather: while one story can be heard in the foreground, a second story that has emerged from the first is running in the background.

The foreground is actually "only" an interview, a conversation with the stock market book author Dr. Bernd Niquet about his latest publication "Der Crash der Theorien". The interview begins with a more in-depth look at the fundamentals of the stock market: why prices rise, why they fall, who benefits from rising prices and why public limited companies have to generate ever higher profits. It then addresses the central questions of the book: Why do theories that attempt to predict the development of stock market prices necessarily crash? And finally: Why can we assume a constant annual average growth rate of at least 7 percent for stock market shares despite all the imponderables?

Dr. Bernd Niquet tries to give plausible answers to all these questions that are comprehensible to the layman, for just under an hour, always on the basis of strict economic-analytical arguments, until he leaves this path of rational virtue for a moment towards the end: To paint a vision, a utopia, of where he thinks our society will develop with this kind of economic activity. And even this vision is not plucked from the clouds, but appears logical and consistent.


In this utopian passage, the authors seemed to confirm a suspicion that a famous sociologist had already developed around 70 years earlier: Max Weber in his famous essay on Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism. So isn't it often enough the case that precisely when rationalism is at its most crystalline (in Bernd Niquet's case it is the dream of a life under glass domes, removed from all nature), the effects of other forces, mythologies, religious structures can be detected? So - loosely based on Max Weber - can rising share prices also be read as divine proof of grace, daily contingency as a sign of human fallibility, the judgment of the market the immanence of transcendence? The stock market and its environment are nothing more than a community that has structured itself in such a way that it can guarantee itself its annual (average) divine grace. Are stock market barometers subcutaneous ladders to heaven? And are stock market players driven by the hope that at some point they will take off from the realms of this world into heavenly - or as in this case: at least glassy - spheres?

There are certainly some plausible reasons for this assumption (which most stock market players would probably reject with a snub), but Uli Aumüller and Martin Daske thought they would entrust their commentary on this conversation about the stock market to a medium other than writing another text about a text. They composed music to accompany the interview from beginning to end. And this music is a kind of ladder to heaven, with a certain humor, as it ascends from underwater sounds to traffic noise to nuns singing and polyphonic canons of birdsong. She uses random programs for everyday turbulence, occasionally allowing complex trains of thought to drown in "clouds of speech". And the music follows the growing euphoria of the stock market expert like a fever curve with occasional crashes until it reaches its climax with the global gluttony of the capitalist economy, and then - yes, and then it stops in a motionless, glaring sound surface, inanimate and crystal clear, in another sphere, a superhuman or inhuman one.