DAVID WALLRAF – The Commune Of Nightmares

Format: tape with download postcard + 8pp booklet / download

Release date: january 26th 2024

https://karlrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-commune-of-nightmares

The new album The Commune Of Nightmares by noise artist David Wallraf is a tapeloopbased musical game of cadavre exquis, a technique developed by surrealist artists.

David Wallraf is a noise artist and theorist living in Hamburg. His artistic work deals with the repressed and uncanny sonic residues of quotidian life, crafting soundtracks for the creeping disaster we inhabit. His works have been released on numerous international tape labels. A recent interest of his is the live scoring of silent films, including works by Luis Buñuel, Maya Deren and Jean Genet. His PhD thesis Grenzen des Hörens. Noise und die Akustik des Politischen (Limits of Hearing. Noise and the Acoustics of the Political) has been published in German, an English translation is in progress.
The Commune of Nightmares stems from the idea that nightmares are the logical reverse of ‘capitalist realism’: an uncanny undercurrent of daily experiences and an algorithmic haunting of dreams that at the same time is a shared – communal – experience of everybody. All songs are based on tapeloops that were cut arbitrarily from a stash of cassettes, some of which found on the street, others from a stockpile of 4 track tapes recorded in the late 90s and early 2000s – a musical game of cadavre exquis played with random strangers and former versions of DW.

Tracklist:
A1 He Bit His Tongue In His Sleep
A2 Where Nothing Happens But The Wallpaper
A3 She Calls In The Airstrike
A4 Behind The Billionaire’s Graveyard
B1 They Sidestep Extinction
B2 Surrounded By The Smell Of Servitude
B3 In Nightmares Screened By Algorithms

Credits:
All music composed and recorded by David Wallraf in Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg, first half of 2023