Jürgen Stahl. Episode 1: Height.
Where the bass becomes gravity.
There would be nothing unusual about my brother’s profession if he were welding gates in garages. But Jürgen chose a different path — one where metal is not simply joined, but tamed, like a rebellious force of nature.
His work begins where an ordinary person’s vestibular system reaches its limits. Jürgen is an industrial climber. A man who lives on the edge of the impossible, somewhere between risk and mastery. I’ve always thought that people like him are descendants of the builders of ancient towers: those who climbed to places where no one yet knew how to live, but where they were already trying to leave their mark upon the sky.
For Jürgen, high-altitude welding is not a profession but a form of communication with forces most people prefer not to notice. He does not merely join structures — he builds a bridge between the reliability of engineering and whatever lives in high places. Here, on the boundary between sky and earth, metal becomes something more than material: it carries the memory of past blows, glowing forges, and bell chimes that once shook entire cities.
The scars on his body are not a medical record but a route beyond the possible. Each scar marks a point where risk ceased to be a threat and became a guide. The “Seal of Hephaestus” on his neck is not merely a burn. It is a mark of initiation, the trace of a pact with the very nature of risk. To him, a scar is not a wound but a mark of quality, proof of a hardening beyond the reach of most people. It became his trademark, his brand — alongside his undercut hairstyle.
Sometimes I think there is no blood flowing through Jürgen’s veins at all, but molten metal. Every movement he makes is a dance above the abyss, where ordinary life loses its meaning. There is something in his psychology that belongs to the pioneers of forgotten lands: he does not seek danger — he listens to it. Adrenaline is not a hormone to him, but a state of clarity that allows him to see the world without unnecessary noise.
I would call him a reckless adventurer. The nickname “X” came from X-trim — extreme. There had always been something in Jürgen that drew him toward the edge of things, and I gave him that name because no one who had ever seen him up there could have called him anything else.
The Height.
One day Jürgen asked:
— Still looking for interesting shots for your photojournalism?
I shrugged. Lately, subjects seemed to be hiding from me: the streets looked the same, the faces repetitive, and the city too familiar.
— I’ve got something, — Jürgen continued. — I need shots taken right on the job. For my portfolio. The guys don’t want to climb up there, and professional photographers won’t risk it either. But I know you’re not the kind of person who only looks for convenient angles.
He tilted his head slightly, as though judging how far I was still willing to believe in beautiful stories.
— I promise you’ll get an incredible story. And we’ll listen to some music while we’re at it.
And I, a naive “office nomad without illusions, ” accustomed to looking at the city through the safe armored glass of a skyscraper, agreed.
It was a trap.
The climb took almost forty minutes. First, an elevator to the top floor, where the builders had left their tools and the air still smelled of concrete and formwork. Then a staircase that grew narrower and steeper with every flight, while the walls gradually disappeared, giving way to open sky. Then came the ropes, carabiners, safety systems — and Jürgen, moving across the framework as though he had been walking on it all his life.
Maybe he had.
I climbed after him, teeth clenched, listening to the sound change.
At first, there was the familiar hum of the city: engines, voices, the distant clatter of hammers from the neighboring construction site. Then the hum began to thin, as though the air were diluting it. The voices disappeared first — they simply stopped reaching us. Then the engines. Then there was only the wind, growing denser with every meter until it became a solid wall of sound that I had to physically push my way through.
I still didn’t understand that Jürgen was not simply leading me upward. He was leading me through layers: city noise, wind, silence — and something beyond, something I could not yet hear.
Jürgen never put my safety at risk. He was capturing my attention, my awareness of the surroundings — that rare state in which a person stops resisting the world and begins to hear it.
We climbed to the very top of the building’s steel skeleton.
To where the walls ended and the pure, whistling geometry of the wind began.
The people below had become abstract dots, stripped of meaning, as though the city no longer had anything to do with us.
Secured by five safety lines, I clung to the beam with enough force to leave dents in the metal. My hands dug into the steel, sinking as though it were clay, searching for something to hold on to. My mind screamed danger, refusing to accept what was real.
The wind here was not a meteorological phenomenon but a living, intelligent entity pulsing between the steel structures, testing our fragility. It did not simply blow — it passed judgment, testing how ready we were to acknowledge its absolute will. A sudden gust shook not only the structure itself but my confidence in its reliability.
And what about Jürgen?
He simply sat on the beam, his legs dangling over the void, relaxed and carefree, as though he were sitting on a swing in a park. He lifted his mask, and I saw his face. There was no fear in it. There was peace — the kind of peace that belongs to those who came here before you and stayed, accepting the rules of the place.
He took out a thermos, poured himself some tea, and offered me a snack with a smile.
— Nice view, isn’t it? You don’t get air like this in an office, — he said, taking a sip while the entire world seemed to sway beneath me. — Listen closely, and you’ll understand the beauty of this place.
The wind intensified the sense of inevitable falling. Primitive terror seized my entire being.
“Why did I agree to this insanity? What could there possibly be to listen to?!”
— If you close your eyes, you won’t hear it. Relax — and catch the feeling. It’s simple, — Jürgen said calmly, as though reading my thoughts.
— Simple?! — I actually opened my eyes in outrage. There was an abyss beneath me. — Jürgen, I’m going to slip and fall.
— You won’t, — he said calmly. — Five lines will hold you. You’re already safe. You just don’t know it yet.
And he said nothing more. He simply looked down again at the city, which from up here resembled a blueprint drawn by someone extraordinarily patient.
I closed my eyes. Not because I followed his advice — simply because looking down was unbearable.
At first, nothing. Only whistling, humming, creaking, and the frantic pounding of my heart, which seemed to echo through the beams themselves. My entire body was tense to the limit, every muscle screaming: grab, hold on, don’t let go. I tried to unclench my fingers. They wouldn’t obey.
Then, after thirty seconds, maybe a minute, something shifted. Not outside. Inside.
The panic did not disappear, but it quieted slightly, as though stepping aside to make room for something else. Not calmness — more like exhaustion from fear. The body could not sustain that level of tension forever, and little by little it began to let go.
And then the wind stopped being merely an enemy. It was still pressing against me, still roaring, but through that roar other sounds began to emerge — quiet, low, right at the edge of hearing.
As though someone were playing bass guitar in the next room, behind a wall, and you could catch only the vibration, not the note itself.
I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself and concentrate — if such a state was even possible in the middle of that destructive chaos.
A moment later, I suddenly caught a sound that created an uncanny sense of volume and depth. It was as though some unknown living creature were breathing beside me, responding and calling back to the world around it, capable of creating an entire spectrum of emotions.
The Celestial Guitarist.
It was the sound of a bass guitar, every strike of the string radiating low frequencies. Vibrating through the air and resonating inside my head, they left a unique trace behind. I heard a deep, rich, powerful rhythm penetrating straight into the center of my heart and mind.
“Where is that music coming from?”
And then I understood: the wind was plucking the strings of the taut steel cables, rhythmically and with confidence.
It was the harmony of the storm.
I realized that this rhythm had existed long before us and would continue long after us. We were not listeners — we were accidental witnesses.
And then I relaxed and sank into the velvet blanket of melody wrapping around my body and the space itself, drawing me in like a dream — mesmerizing and dangerous, ready to swallow the listener whole. Those deep sonic vibrations conjured the image of a storm-tossed sea, where the surf rolls in and washes away towers of sand.
And then I understood: Jürgen had not brought me here for spectacular photographs or for the height itself. He knew I would never hear this down below. That between the glass of offices and the steady hum of streets, sound was always domesticated and safe.
Here, it was wild — not meant for humans, not trying to be heard.
The wind was not playing for us, nor because of us. We had simply found ourselves inside its instrument.
And as I sat there, pressed against the cold iron, I felt for the first time that music is not something we create, but something that sometimes allows us to survive.
Jürgen finished his tea, lowered his mask, and said nothing more.
Words were unnecessary here. The sound had already done its work.
The descent was faster, but quieter. We did not speak — and the wind still had not released us, though with every flight it weakened, as though surrendering ground. The city gradually returned: first the distant hum of traffic, then voices, then the clatter and clang of the construction site.
Familiar, safe sounds that did not require us to listen closely.
But something had changed.
I stood below, on solid concrete, and heard that hum differently. Before, it had been background noise — even, flat, convenient.
Now there was no depth in it.
It sounded the way a photograph of a mountain sounds to someone who has actually stood on it: recognizable, but without weight.
I looked up. The building’s skeleton traced a delicate pattern of beams and cables against the sky. The wind still moved among them, but from down here its song was inaudible.
Only a visual hint remained — the faint trembling of the cables, noticeable only if you knew where to look.
Or where to listen.
Musician of the Abyss.
Those waves — heavy, viscous, descending into the depths — suddenly seemed to coincide with who Jürgen had always been.
In our trio, he provides the foundation while I carry the melodic line, and Clara — the voice.
Not because that is how the roles are assigned, but because otherwise everything would fall apart.
His guitar sounds the way he lives.
It is not simply low frequencies — it is reinforcement cast into the concrete of rhythm. His bass binds the sound into a single monolith, preventing it from collapsing under its own weight.
He does not play notes.
He creates gravity.
And sitting there, on the edge of the void, watching him calmly weld a seam above a kilometer-deep abyss, I suddenly understood: our music would not collapse as long as he held the neck.
Not because he was flawless, but because he was not afraid of weight.
The “Extreme Excursion with Jürgen” was not without consequence for me. Up there, almost beneath the sky, I heard the song of steel cables for the first time — and understood that sound can be forged rather than composed.
It had been here long before us, and there was something ancient, indifferent, and majestic in it — like the voice of altitude itself, a voice few ever manage to hear.
(from the notes of Viktor Stahl)