Daniel Brandt

To help us visualise, Brandt has even made a 20 minute film of the same name with Anthony Dickenson, shot in the searing heat of Athens in 2023, a microcosmic reflection of climate chaos, offering extreme solutions and a large helping of hyperbole. 

 

Brandt, as you might have gathered, isn’t on this mission alone: Anne Müller brings staccato cello bass to ‘Addicted’ and more thorough strokes throughout; French multi-instrumentalist Akusmi aka Pascal Bideau interjects arpeggios that teeter on the edge, and Florian Juncker’s manipulated trombones bring sinister shadows to sprawling soundscapes. 

'Without Us' feels like Brandt’s most focused and expedient offering to date: Bideau and Junker both played on the brighter, Steve Reich-inspired Channels from 2018, while Brandt’s celebrated 2017 debut Eternal Something had started out as “a cymbals album” that developed into something else when he discovered Ryoji Ikeda was making 100 Cymbals at the same time. If he didn’t get to join the niche drum album club alongside artists like Babatunde Olatunji, Tito Puentes, Dave Lombardo and Jim White, then rhythm itself is always front and centre of what he does.

Brandt: “'Without Us' is about the helplessness of the individual in the climate crisis and the apparent need to take radical global action to change the trajectory of the current threat of a climate disaster. It’s about the despair and inability to be able to properly contribute to change as an individual, even though the general idea is that everybody can play their part. But this part that each individual is supposed to take responsibility for is so small compared to the scale of what is needed. The responsibility must not be with the individual when we’re suffering from decisions by global corporations aiming to get rich quick.”