You can buy the latest album ‘Versus Time’ on CD / Download here

01. Wider Than Wisdom
02. A Kind Of Family
03. Big Eyes
04. Simple Life
05. Morning Star
06. World Of Creation
07. Aura Of Endless Fear
08. Do What You Do
09. Lucky Lady
10. I Believe
11. Are You Still Waiting For Me?
12. This Is The World
13. You Wait A Long Time

Silent Age Records is proud to present the fifth album from War Against Sleep, the work of songwriter and psychonaut Duncan Fleming. His most accomplished work yet, ‘Versus Time’ presents us with the question ‘if everything is bullshit, what really matters? What happens after meaning has melted down?’. Meditating upon this theme he takes us on a journey through a world where the golden palaces of classical culture have fallen and their crumbling remains have been fashioned into crude totems by idiot savant children, legoman cowboy builders and effete, laudanum addled dandies. We find ourselves trapped in a Choose Your Own Adventure story where everything is possible and all paths lead to death.

We realise we are God, and then feel bewildered when we realise everything else is too. ‘Versus Time’ celebrates that which is liberating about nothingness; ridiculing our own absurd attempts to articulate wisdom and make sense of life, our failed attempts to resist the utter devastation of time, entropy and change. Fleming concludes that the religious instinct is an attempt to leave a breadcrumb trail leading back to sublime states, but there is no substitute for direct experience. The breadcrumbs have all been eaten by creatures of the night and are gone by morning.

Despite the sublime lyrical themes, ‘Versus Time’ makes no demands upon the listener, who can choose to simply enjoy a set of thirteen humorous, moving and brilliantly crafted pop songs. The influence of Alice Coltrane, Barry White and Luke Haines’s Baader Meinhof comfortably occupy the same archetypal status as the Corpus Hermeticum and the Splendor Solis. War Against Sleep lyrics have been filtered through decades of occult fiction and The Pan Book of Horror Stories vols 1-30. Suffice to say Duncan Fleming is a song writer who draws from a broad and pleasingly demented creative palette.

Various Artists – Chamber Music (James Joyce) Fire Records – 2008

This is a 36 track take on the 36 parts to the 1907 James Joyce poem. Includes contributions from War Against Sleep, Gravenhurst, Peter Buck (REM), Steve Shelley, Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth), Mike Watt, Jessica Bailiff, Willy Mason, Bardo Pond, Mary Lorson, Jeff Kelly. Double CD, Double Vinyl.

shall surely be remembered a hundred years hence – Culture
should be heralded as one of the great interpretative works – PLAYLOUDER

Chamber Music (album cover)

“The Casio-psychosis of a moral dyslexic squeezing out songs like glue to hold himself together. The act of picking cigarette ends off the floor because you like the taste of cheap lipstick. Love crafted from a night in with Teletext and Benylin. A suit, stained with the amphetamine sweat-beads of your worst porno nightmare. A stolen suit, a borrowed suit, a dead man’s suit, a dead-skin mask. Dance with me, you syphilitic tramp. I love you. A silk cravat, a painted rope. Hysterical, literate, blackened by the sun. Pop svengalis pissing blood into bronze buckets. The very idea of a Masterpiece. Ancient orders, first religions, Old Gods. Tascam Porta-7. Sex for small change. Thrillingly lo-fi, absurdly ambitious. Man as blind abacus. Man as performer; touched by the hand of Thoth. Man versus the world; woman as insect. An enormous insect that you want to be eaten by. Eat me: keep me warm. Keep dancing. Did I tell you to stop dancing? Locked in the cellar: We have always been here. Bontempi nights: the moon is in control. Pulling to the sea pulling violently like a green disease from within ever-living divine but violated, blind more to come tonight. In the War Against Sleep winning is not even the issue. It’s the cheating that counts. Now dance, damn you. Dance until you are on fire.”

Nick Talbot (Gravenhurst)