The escalation of Cold War hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union in the early 1980s and the Europe-wide protests in 1983 at the deployment of Cruise, Pershing II and SS-20 missiles were the motivation behind the formation of this ensemble and its music.

Günther Anders, an 84-year-old German philosopher, said about these blockades (on the occasion of accepting the Adorno prize in Frankfurt): "Symbole mögen tief sein.

What we could do – and have done is to abandon the safety of our normal programme, and open it up to the expression of the unsafeness of these times.The "Berlin Programme" performance was based on a structure which had been designed by Alfred Harth and written by Heiner Goebbels using fragments of compositions by Heiner Goebbels/Alfred Harth (Duo Goebbels/Harth), Cutler/Frith (Art Bears) and Bertolt Brecht/Hanns Eisler plus improvisation by all members of the ensemble.

[7] They were unable to alter the mixes but shortened the recording to 28-minutes, omitting the closing Art Bears song, "Freedom".

Cutler remarked that notwithstanding the edits, the LP version "... does, I think, still convey that contradiction we tried to express at the concert: between the distracting and draining pressure of contemporary life ..."[7]