NOT EVEN STALIN WIRETAPPED THE DEAD

„Not Even Stalin Wiretapped The Dead“ is the debut album of the Austria-based artist Lukas Moritz Wegscheider. The album has been officially commissioned by the Heart of Noise Festival 2021. Conceptually, the album is based on the texts of Konstantin Ciolkovskij. Konstantin Ciolkovskij was the founder of modern cosmonautics and is one of the most important pioneers of space travel. The main goal of the Russian trans-humanist movement was to overcome death for absolute social equality. Therefore, Konstantin Ciolkovskij developed the idea of ​​“storing“ the dead on other planets until they can be resuscitated. For this album, Lukas Moritz Wegscheider deals artistically with these topics of cryonics, the possible consequences on human memory and identity, and the fictional cosmic journey to revival. The album completes his earlier work with tape loops and introduces a new way of working with audio programming languages. 
The pieces on the album consists of dense & warm tape loop ambient music and cold digital noise passages. These pieces are carried by a combination of field recordings and recordings which were collected from amateur radio messages from the East. These field recordings and radio recordings connect the pieces, sometimes without editing. The D-side of the double LP is almost 90% wrapped in very compact noise, from which at the end a wave-like sound surface breaks out to represent the moment of a signal found in the ether. The cover is from a scan of a piece of roll film that the artist found in a camera built in 1896. Since this film (the age of the film is unfortunately not known) was too old to be developed by photo laboratories, it had to be developed by the artist himself as the film was also undeveloped in the camera for a long time as some light hit the film over the years. This is how the textures that can be seen on the cover have been created. The QR code inside the cover leads to a website on which a virtual room installation can be viewed. This virtual work can either be viewed and explored using a VR headset or a smartphone/computer. Thematically, this virtual work is based on the same topic and is intended to expand and complete the album by an additional level. The copyrights in this work are owned by Lukas Moritz Wegscheider. Under the license of Heart of Noise Edition. 
www.heartofnoise.at

Written and produced by Lukas Moritz Wegscheider 
Mastering by Dino Spiluttini 
Cover and Design by Lukas Moritz Wegscheider 
Executive Producers Chris Koubek and Stefan Meister 
Gefördert durch Mittel des Landes Tirol

With his tape loop performances Lukas Moritz Wegscheider wants to focus on room-atmosphere, collective mood, nostalgia, melancholy and the hauntological phenomenon. The endless repetitions, sharpen the acoustic perception and allow the discovery of new sound events. This image gets distorted and blurred until the focus is placed on the distortion and the blurriness itself. Influences of Minimal Music and Ambient, are combined with the atmosphere of the hauntology theory and lo-fi aesthetics.