Even if you’re unfamiliar with the names Paul Wallfisch and Dana Schechter there’s a very good chance you’ve heard their work over the last few decades. The former lives in New York, and the latter resides in Berlin, and they’ve both spent time touring and recording with SWANS, but each artist has pursued wildly diverse careers, toggling between sounds of ferocious brutality and tones of meditative serenity.
Wallfisch has played in bands like Firewater and Little Annie, while Schechter has logged time with American Music Club, Angels of Light and her own Insect Ark, among others. They’ve been friends since meeting in New York in the 1990s. Years later they forged a stronger connection as bandmates in Botanica.
Over the years Paul Wallfisch has been a prolific composer for film and TV, including Dummy, with Adrien Brody and Milla Jovovich (which the musician also appeared in). After spending years splitting her time between New York and Berlin, Dana Schechter settled in Berlin in 2020 and is currently a fix member of Swans.
They renewed their artistic partnership in 2021, when Paul invited Dana to Vienna to help him develop the music for a multimedia theatrical spectacle called Die Politiker written by Kleist prize winner Wolfram Lotz. The music from the production provides the foundation for the duo’s first album, The Heart of A Whale.
Across its six intense tracks one can detect a subtle homage to storied Berlin musical traditions, as the pair puts a raw, often brutal veneer on songs steeped in Weimar cabaret (a la Tom Waits) but updated with a visceral mixture of noise, post-punk, and industrial elements. Performed on a panoply of instruments from bass, organ and lap steel to SOMA Synths, Guitaret, a variety of electronics and a grand piano hammered with a shoe, the music reflects the New York-Berlin nexus they’ve both been part of for decades. Echoes of Swans, Einstürzende Neubauten and The Birthday Party, but also hints of Throbbing Gristle, Eno and even William Basinski and Michael Gordon. The music can’t be contained by any single tradition, with a decidedly experimental bent that ruptures the fixed rhythm of rock for something more theatrical and emotionally harrowing.
Links: http://danaschechter.com, http://paulwallfisch.com, the heart of a whale
These 2 beautiful exiles travel limbic landscapes and underwater dreams with a map that disintegrates instantly when viewed. Their fractured sounds dissolve and reconfigure endlessly in our cochlea and infest our imaginations with spiked armies of ultra-vivid, sentient and carnivorous coral predators, atavistically intent on devouring the sweet meat hiding deep in the center of the amygdala.
~Michael Gira (SWANS)
Multi-colored prisms of mysterious tones bask in an Americana sunspot storm.
~ Larry Mullins (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds)
Foto: André Hladuschev
