Predlue from Tony: I have two reasons for posting this article and video today. One is the extraordinary rendition of this song which I do hope you will have a chance to listen to throughout – it really gives an extra dimension to this song that we must all have heard 100 times or more before. That’s quite an achievement.
But also I am pleased to note where the proceeds from this recording go. There is a note to this effect at the end. I can only hope you are as moved by this recording as I have been.
How we arrived at our version of “Masters of War”
By Lithium Sea (Alex Müll & Sadie McClelland), Berlin
We had been circling this song for years. While we were working on our own material, it kept coming back to us. When Russia invaded Ukraine it was there again, and again with Israel’s ongoing attacks on the Palestinian people. It has been there every time the news became too heavy to carry. To us it feels more relevant today than it ever has. Over that time we recorded several versions with different instrumentation. None of them held up.
The difficulty is built into the song. It has eight verses, no chorus and no bridge, over a figure that barely moves. Dylan’s 1963 recording draws its force from exactly that: one voice, one guitar and no relief. In a fuller arrangement the same structure flattens out quickly. Start loud and there is nowhere left to go by the third verse. Stay quiet and the anger of the text goes missing.
The answer came by accident. We had set up an improvisation session with the cellist Jakob Uffrecht, with no plan beyond trying things out. Two ideas from that session ended up carrying the arrangement. The first was a set of slowly swelling, rising tones that sound like something approaching. The second was the opposite: fragile, melodic lines, which we placed in other verses as a counterweight. With those two poles we finally had a way to shape eight verses, because each one could sit at a different point between threat and fragility. Most of what you hear on the track is cello: many takes layered on top of each other, in different textures, forming those swells and arcs.
We left Dylan’s words and form exactly as they are, all eight verses. What we changed is everything around them. Where Dylan’s song is static, ours should have a dramatic arc, and the sound should radicalise along with the narrator. Sadie sings it, and we changed the key to suit her range. Her voice does not stay in one emotion. It moves through several phases, from spiteful to fragile, so the anger of the protagonist is carried by the vocal performance, not by volume alone. Underneath, synthetic noise bursts slowly work their way into the cellos, and for the last verse we added military drums. We wanted the menace to be in the room before the anger arrives.
One idea we gave up. For a while we thought about recording children in a refugee shelter for the track. We dropped it because doing it properly would probably have delayed the release by a year, and this song did not feel like one that could wait.
The track was mixed by Gordon Raphael and mastered by Dom Richmond. The cover artwork is by Felix Kiessling.
The video follows the same logic as the arrangement. It uses war footage, with a focus on Gaza, and in the seventh verse, the one about money, it names companies and people who profit from these wars. Every name is backed by a source list, which we send to anyone who asks.
All proceeds from the recording, including collecting-society royalties, go to Medical Aid for Palestinians.
Audio: https://soundcloud.com/lithium-sea/masters-of-war
Website: https://www.lithiumsea.net
Contact: contact@lithiumsea.net