Words by Sean Victory
These are trying times for any whose hearts are open to the health of our planet. Wildfires run rampant, lives are uprooted by biblical storms, extinct diseases find fresh footing, and the class war is as one-sided as it’s ever been. While humanity is more interconnected than any other time in history, our personal experiences leave us fractured and isolated.
Daniel Brandt’s Without Us manages to fold these details into a fully instrumental record. The album captures the menacing edge of contemporary existence. Combining organic and synthetic aesthetics, the songs build and wring out a flood of tension until bursting, and unwind in a deluge of catharsis. The pieces merge into a cohesive whole, alluding to the cinematic vision Brandt had in mind when collecting moments and memories to use as paint for a world without us.
Off Shelf: The press release for “Without Us” begins by talking about the Doomsday Clock—currently sitting at 90 seconds to midnight, and how we have never been closer to our own extinction. Certainly, there’s an edge and an urgency to the music, but in what ways did you infuse this subject matter into the creative process?
Daniel Brandt: The project was, from the beginning, meant to consist of music, a film, and a show that combines both elements. That’s why, early on in the process, I started composing the music in parallel with writing the script, and both aspects informed each other. I began recording the album in Joshua Tree, where I spent a week alone on my way to Venezuela, where we played a show with my band, Brandt Brauer Frick. The loneliness in the desert had a post-apocalyptic feeling to it and was very inspiring for the process. Time definitely feels different over there. Later in the development of the project, I regularly found moments to spend a week alone in a remote place, avoiding contact with people in order to focus and recreate that atmosphere.
OS: In reading about some of your albums it seems you like to find some isolation and start formulating ideas, percussion first. Can you talk a little bit about how you work and arrive at a final result?
DB: The way I work and arrive at a result is actually always very different. Some songs come to me naturally, and I just try to shape them a bit. Others require hundreds of revisions to get them where I want them to be. One thing I do regularly is record little ideas and sounds—either just with my phone, my PCM recorder, or by putting together a short loop or something that comes to mind, often born from an experiment in Ableton. All of these ideas go into an archive, and whenever I’m in the process of developing a new piece of music, I go through this archive to see what works in the new context.
This could be anything like a drum recording during a sound check in a church or just interesting sounds of someone making repetitive sounds with a metal tool while preparing desserts in a shopping mall. It’s a very diverse pool of sounds, and I cut them up and use them as percussion or atmospheric tools.
OS: In the album notes you mention the “helplessness of the individual in the climate crisis.” This resonated with me, as I’ve been thinking about how even our best intentions are thwarted by inconvenience, scalability, and marketing. Our short term lives depend on certain products and services, but they also cause long term destruction. Is there a type of radical disruption you believe would be effective in facilitating the necessary change?
DB: Indeed. I believe that lobbyism is the true problem. If we just look at plastic: the alternatives—plant-based, biodegradable, etc.—are already available. But the oil lobby keeps plastic legal. The same with fuel, etc. I think that governments need to be more bold and really push for drastic change. The whole idea of “the market regulates itself in the right direction” or “it’s up to the individual” is just not true. Most individuals don’t even have access to a real choice. They just have to get the cheapest available item, be it groceries or means of transport. And even the people who can make that choice need to be constantly aware of every little detail. The only way to change this is regulation, and I believe in governmental regulation. I just don’t know how to get rid of the heavy influence of lobbyism.
OS: Is the climate crisis just a large-scale version, a cumulative effect, of the choices we make as individuals? If you want to eat, something must die—whether it be a plant or an animal. How do you imagine we got here, and how do you view humans in the larger context of the natural world?
DB: I don’t think so. Humans are part of the natural world. We are not removed from or alien to this world. Of course, we can see that through the industrial revolution and later globalization, the worldwide population has exploded—and with that, the amount of available goods and services. This suddenly creates a complicated situation—if everyone wants to eat meat, for example.
This is why the only way to change things is through regulation, as every individual generally doesn’t believe that their impact is very high. And probably it isn’t—but on a larger scale, things need to be more regulated, and people will follow.
Look at CFCs [chlorofluorocarbons], for example. I remember in the 90s there was an ozone hole, and it was mainly because of the use of this gas in hair sprays, etc. Somehow, all governments agreed that this needed to be stopped, and this chemical has never been used again. The ozone layer is now back to normal levels. The companies that produced this chemical would have never stopped making it out of pure goodwill, and people who used certain hair sprays would have continued using them—because they were the cheapest, their favorite, or whatever.
OS: Place seems an important aspect of your process. The concept for the album was sparked by a trip to a London grocery store. You worked in Joshua Tree, and in Berlin. What did these locations contribute to the music, and how did you fold the influence from these disparate locations together? Are there specific moments in the songs that take you back to any locations/experiences in particular?
DB: Place is always very important for me. In this case, it was mainly Joshua Tree and also Athens, as I was writing and shooting the film there. Athens is one of my favorite cities, and I have a strong connection, as part of my family is Greek. But Athens is also a good example of chaos and non-regulation when it comes to garbage and waste management. I feel like, before Trump reintroduced plastic straws, Athens never got rid of them. But I also love the chaos and grittiness of this city, and this is highly inspiring for my music.
In Berlin, I did a recording session with my collaborators Anne Müller on cello, Florian Juncker on trombone, and Pascal Bideau, aka Akusmi, on guitar. We had a week-long recording session of mainly drones on top of loops of elements from early versions of the songs. The recording took place in my band’s studio in Neukölln, and Jan Brauer from the band engineered it with help from Noel Riedel. In this case, it was more about having the right studio and people to record these drones, and we didn’t choose the place for inspiration. This studio is special, though, as it isn’t set up as a traditional recording studio and feels more like a room to freely experiment, which definitely has an impact on the music. I feel like even just going out on the street for lunch in between sessions will eventually have an impact on a session—whether you notice it or not.
OS: “Without Us” was also a film you worked on with Anthony Dickenson, and this premiered along with a live performance of the album at Barbican Hall in London on April 24th. Can you talk a little bit about what inspires you to work beyond the trappings of sound, and how these different facets of the same project speak to one another?
DB: In every music project that I have done so far, there was always a strong visual element to it. Either I would be involved in making the music videos or short films to accompany them, or create an audiovisual installation, as we did for Brandt Brauer Frick’s Multi Faith Prayer Room at Art Basel in 2022. For me, it is inevitable to have visual ideas while making music—or the other way around. Those two forms go so well together, and I feel like this time—with the Barbican show—I have found a new way of bringing this together on stage, which I am very happy about. Not just a live soundtrack to a film, or a concert with visuals, but a whole experience of film and music elements side by side and intertwined, telling a story but also focusing on the live-played music properly. I feel like this will be a format I want to explore more and expand on with the next project.
OS: I know you work with film as well. Could you talk about your own explorations in visual art?
DB: I studied film directing at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Just before I graduated in 2011, we had started the band Brandt Brauer Frick, and one of the university projects I directed together with my schoolmate Julian Schleef was the first music video for the band, called Bop, which went viral on YouTube back then.
Ever since, I have always been very interested in the visualisation of music and have done many projects in this direction, including the audiovisual installation Multi Faith Prayer Room, which was shown during Art Basel Miami in 2022. For this installation, we asked 500 people from around the world the same questions about the future, spirituality, faith, and rituals, and collected voice notes from them, which we then projected into a room using wave field synthesis. Light beams guided the visitors to the respective voices, and all the different opinions became a kind of white noise when you were in the middle, but separate as you got closer to a voice.
For my album Eternal Something, I made a found-footage short film using only footage I found on YouTube, which was kind of a gritty version of Koyaanisqatsi.
OS: You play in the ensemble Brandt Brauer Frick. What do you feel you can accomplish solo that might not be achievable in the context of the group?
DB: Brandt Brauer Frick has now existed for more than 15 years, and throughout this time, we have somehow created a framework that defines where we can go with this project and where we can’t. But mostly, it is also the result of the three of us—Paul Frick, Jan Brauer, and myself—getting together and making something, as opposed to my solo work, where I mostly work without any feedback or input from other people until a certain point. So it naturally becomes something different.
OS: In working on this project were there other pieces of art or media that you felt inspired or informed your own work?
DB: I am constantly listening to a lot of music—old and new—checking out a lot of art and films, and reading a lot, so I guess all of this is inevitably influencing me. For this project in particular, I don’t recall a specific inspiration, though. It was more about feeling and listening to what is around me and trying to shape that into some kind of form.
In terms of the writing for the script, I do recall one major influence, though, which was the documentary Begegnungen im Knast – or Prison Encounters – by Georg Stefan Troller from 1981.
OS: Were there any pieces of gear or equipment you used while working on this record that you felt particularly drawn to?
DB: I used a lot of tape delay on this record—both the Roland Space Echo and the Volante by Strymon. I also rediscovered my Sony PCM recorder, which my dad gifted me when I was a teenager, and really got into field recordings. Also it was the first time I used the PerFOURmer by Vermona and inspired by my friend Ryan, aka Rival Consoles I used the Sequential Prophet on many of the pieces.
OS: What’s next for you this year? Do you have any other projects you are working on?
DB: I am working on another film and music project at the moment which I am very excited about, and we’ve also started recording a new album with Brandt Brauer Frick. I’m also involved in the production of the next Friedberg album, with whom I’ll be touring a bit more this year. I recently played four shows with them at Brixton Academy, supporting LCD Soundsystem, which was so much fun. We’re also going on a China tour with Brandt Brauer Frick, including one orchestra show, and later in the year I’ll start touring the Without Us project a bit more.