Without Us Daniel Brandt

The Doomsday Clock currently sits at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest the big hand and the little hand have come to signalling our total destruction since the conceptual chronograph was incepted back in 1947. If we’re dancing on the brink then we might as well make sure that the music is great. Step forward Daniel Brandt, of lauded German electroacoustic outfit Brandt Brauer Frick, who leads the apocalyptic rave with his third solo album Without Us. 
 
“The idea for this project began with a small but unsettling experience in South London,” he remembers. “I was looking to buy a single avocado, but every store I went into only seemed to offer them in plastic wrapping, packed in pairs with a little cardboard base. I remember thinking: ‘but the avocado already comes in its own perfect packaging? And I only want one.’ It struck me as absurd that, despite our awareness of the damage plastic causes, unnecessary packaging like this still persists.” 
The scenario turned into a farrago - Brandt went from store to store discovering the same nightmare in every shop where every avocado was wrapped in superfluous packaging: “As a touring musician, maybe I have to admit my own carbon footprint is questionable,” he admits, “but it’s countries and corporations that need to quit with the half measures that avail the planet nothing, usually under pressure from powerful, short-termist lobbying groups.”
 
He continues: “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.”

If South London provided the impetus then it was the Joshua Tree in California where the record began to take shape against a mise-en-scene of staggering vistas and eerie quiet. Brandt spent the week recording mostly percussion with barely anyone around, and that feeling of deserted landscapes and unspoiled natural beauty translated itself throughout the rest of the process back at home in Hackney Wick, London and the studio in Neukölln, Berlin, where he completed the album. 
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. 

Without Us the full project—album, film, and live performance—will premiere as an immersive experience at Barbican Hall in London on April 24th, 2025. The event will combine live music, the film and an “apocalyptic rave” where we’ll be able to explore our collective anxieties in a multi-dimensional way. It’s time to mobilise and hope against hope that the Doomsday Clock knows how to move in an anti-clockwise direction.