David Wallraf - Crisis And Critique: Ecologies of the Personal

 

Released: October 15

Based on the writings of Félix Guattari and his idea of “three ecologies,” David Wallraf’s” latest album features an incredibly long list of collaborators providing everything from prepared guitar pieces to whispers and the sound of burning nail clippings. Just reading the list seems like it would result in overly busy scenes and disjointed noise. However, as you listen through, you’ll find that everything fits together very cohesively as we are given what are essentially stitched together vignettes of the modern world with the systems that support and define it along with the crises that break them. 

The album opens with “End of the World, End of the Month,” a title that suggests no difference between the two and sonically produces a deep sense of foreboding and emptiness, as if either scenario in the title would feel the same. It sets out an airy and strange scene that stays consistent aside from those passing moments of chaos. As we move later into the album with a track such as “The Great Oxidation Event,” this theme comes into even clearer view as twisted synths a soft guitar plucks set a foreboding, but calm tone, to later be interrupted as crunchy distorted guitar comes slamming in to validate that perceived dread. But there are also even stranger moments in the album as well, such as the heavily jazz-inflected “Panic, Subtext And Power Cuts.” It strikes an almost playful tone at times with a saxophone that somehow gives Pink Panther-esque vibes while keeping that sense of tension in the air. 

Crisis and Critique is an album that thoroughly integrates the philosophical with the compositional. It feels chaotic without actually being that chaotic. Indeed, every single track on this album has a sense of illusory stability that inevitably devolves into chaos before sounding one again like some sort of stability. The cycle repeats over and over, both musically and thematically. It’s a fascinating album that is worth dissecting academically and also listening to passively.