The Heart of a Whale documents the music for the Viennese Volkstheater production of German playwright Wolfram Lotz’s play Die Politiker (The Politicians), directed by Kay Voges, and performed live in the spring of 2022. The music was composed by Swiss, Berlin-based composer Paul Wallfisch (a former member of the experimental rock band Swans, Firewater, and Little Annie), now the musical director of the Viennese Volkstheater, and American, Berlin-based guitarist-bassist-visual artist-animator Dana Schechter (who is now a member of the Swans and founder of the experimental, ambient-noise-metal Insect Arc). Schechter and Wallfisch played together in the alternative rock band Botanica.
Die Politiker was a theatrical spectacle, a playful, ironic nocturnal stream of thought about what politicians can do, must do, may do, should do, shouldn’t do, may not do, and may not do at all. Wallfisch’s music for this play, rearranged for the album The Heart of a Whale, weaves elements of post-punk, doom metal, industrial music, noise, and vocal samples in six surreal, suggestive, and occasionally brutal pieces that pay homage to Berlin musical traditions, steeped in Weimar cabaret with a Tom Waits-tinged twist, and reflecting the New York-Berlin nexus Schechter and Wallfisch have both been part of for decades. It ends with the touching, lyrical «Forgotten Lights».
Lotz himself, who is the topic of three pieces («Wolfram Lotz and Elon Musk Have Heavenly 3 am Discount Sushi and Talk about the Future», «Wolfram Lotz Prepares to Travel», and «Wolfram Lotz Watches a Western Spy Movie and Decides to go Shopping for a Lowrider») loved the music and said «I find it very gratifying thing when something completely different and VERY BEAUTIFUL emerges from something you’ve created yourself». But the most poetic description of this experimental yet genre-defying, theatrical, and emotionally harrowing music comes from Michael Gira, founder of Swans: «heir 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».
Eyal Hareuveni
Dana Schechter (lap steel guitar, bass, electronics), Paul Wallfisch (piano, organ, SOMA pipe, guitaret)
