Crisis And Critique: Ecologies Of The Personal

David Wallraf is a non-binary noise artist and musician living in Hamburg. Their work deals with the uncanny and rejected sonic residues of quotidian life in the western metropole, using it as source material for soundtracks of the creeping political and ecological disaster we inhabit. Their works have been released on numerous international tape labels. Besides playing live scores for silent films, including works by Sergei Eisenstein, Maya Deren and Jean Genet, they also wrote extensively on noise, including the PhD thesis Grenzen des Hörens – Noise und die Akustik des Politischen (Limits of Hearing – Noise and the Acoustics Of The Political), published in 2022.

*

Crisis and Critique: Ecologies Of The Personal is influenced by Félix Guattari's concept of three ecologies: the environmental, the social and the individual are inextricably linked, an event in one field has repercussions in the others. The impact of an ecological crisis is only fully grasped when its social and personal aspects are considered. In our times, the ecology of the personal, if connected to social and environmental ecologies, can only ever be one of crisis and critique. Things are falling apart, we fall apart. We go through crisis and rearrange. Crisis and critique both come from the same Greek root: krin?, which can mean distinguish, decide or seperate. In this sense criticising something means to take it apart, to distinguish between its constituting components. A crisis is a corresponding movement in which something that used to be perceived as an undivided whole falls apart, revealing its constituting parts, their seams and faultlines. Criticizing something until it falls apart, being ciritical with a breakdown as backdrop... The songs on this LP follow a similar pattern.

In 2023 David Wallraf started sending sketches of songs to a number of collborators with backgrounds in noise, sound art, jazz and improvised music. In contrast to their other works from the same time period that were mostly recorded with recycled tape loops and electronic instruments, here mechanical and electromechanical sound sources are central to the music: drum machines were put through transducers and various metal objects, electronic instruments played through guitar amplifiers, string and percussion instruments were recorded in a variety of acoustic spaces. Throughout the album simple rhythms connect with minimalistic harmonic and melodic content and merge into an austere but effective soundscape. The songs build up tension without releasing it, the atmosphere morphing from melancholic to uneasy. The songs are in sceletal form, capturing sonic snapshots of moods in extreme detail but without showing the entire picture.

This mood is emphasized and asserted by the contributions of the various guest musicians. Michel Chevalier and Tintin Patrone provide woodwind and brass instruments, Kaj Zeller and monad node play double bass and electric guitar, Elena Pastor and Jena Jang provide vocals and samples. Klaus Frieler contributes micro percussion and Denise Ritter snippets from two of her installations. Simon Roessler plays keyboards and Dong Zhou treated violin. The result is an eerie texture that weaves the organic with the alienated. Music and titles do not complement each other, they collide. Both have their seperate spheres of meaning, in conjunction they grind against each other, creating tension and conflicting synergies (or synergies of conflict).
The album can be heard as a soundtrack to the end of the world in slow motion: the world as a social construct that's falling apart. Fin du mois, fin du mondes (end of the month, end of the world) was a slogan of the French gilets jaunes-protests of 2018: the world ends when a specific way of living, self-reproduction, perceiving, of being-in-the-world ends.