Author: War Against Sleep

A rare pleasure: seeing that work you’ve spent hundreds of hours on finally turned into a real ‘thing’ in the world!

The new War Against Sleep album ‘Mysteries Of The Impossible’ is now available on streaming platforms. Physical copies will be available via Bandcamp from the date of our launch party in Bristol on 27 October.

Event / Tickets

The new album is about inexplicable weird-as-shit experiences, and those spontaneous epiphanies and moments of clarity that sometimes come our way when we least expect them.

It was written and recorded at home by Duncan Fleming – with additional drums from Andy Sutor, electric guitar from Rob Norbury, Clarinet from Sheila Fleming, and backing vocals from Christina Fleming, Emily Breeze and Heidi Heelz.

“My Face Is Outer Space” is a track from the forthcoming War Against Sleep album “Mysteries of the Impossible” which will be released in October 2023.

It is about an unusual experience I had in the Central Library shortly after moving to Bristol in my early 20s.

I made a psychedelic video by piecing together a ton of 2 second clips generated using DALL-E / Gencraft with lyrics from the song as text prompts.

You can buy / download the track from Bandcamp here https://waragainstsleep.bandcamp.com/track/my-face-is-outer-space

Spanning four decades of lyrics and spoken word from Duncan Fleming’s ongoing musical project War Against Sleep, this glorious scenery-chewing collection is available as a limited edition hardcover pocket book with twenty two psychedelic woodcut illustrations.

ISBN-9781803524733

A limited edition of 50 numbered copies available from live shows for £10 or online for £12+pp

Duncan Fleming will be doing a one-off live reading / performance on 20 April 2023 supporting Sharkboy at the Bristol Fringe. Facebook event / Tickets

“Infinite Shades of Porno Cliché” is the eighth War Against Sleep LP. A joyfully perverse album of outsider art about the delights and pitfalls of hedonism – tales of subterranean encounters and sordid parties…

Watch the live launch lockdown show here.

“Infinite Shades of Porno Cliché” is available now on streaming platforms and as limited edition CD. It also available now as a download from https://waragainstsleep.bandcamp.com/

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

“Duncan Fleming is a genius of a songwriter walking a razor sharp tightrope between deranged humour and classic pop music. War Against Sleep is his ongoing battle against the absurd waking dream that passes for life, in which he plunders the hidden treasures of a thousand charity shop records, writing songs that tingle the spine, move the soul and lift the spirit.”

“Gloriously ridiculous stuff” The Wire
“Classic songwriting” Record Collector
“He performs complete wonders” The Big Issue
“Sexy psychedelia” NME
“War Against Sleep are the audio version of the programmes that used to scare me witless as a child” Rough Trade

 

War Against Sleep tour dates