About the Dream

The music of The Dream at the End of the World is cinematic in scope, sometimes aggressive, often dreamlike, and very difficult to neatly classify. Heavily influenced by both modern music and painting, there are elements of ambient, progressive, experimental, and noise in the mélange of sound. This music will take you on breathtaking and, at times, disorienting journeys through complex, ever-changing textural soundscapes reminicent of a Morris Louis veil painting. It will draw you in as the slowly changing focus and fleeting, unique moments are woven into the constantly shifting mix.

The Beginning of The Dream...

An unlikely transatlantic collaboration between notorious Stick Men With Ray Guns guitarist Clarke Blacker and British guitarist Simon Waldram, The Dream at the End of the World began as a casual discussion online in January 2021, and quickly developed into a close creative partnership as they began making strikingly original music together, despite the ocean between them.

Clarke Blacker

I studied painting in college and have been playing guitar for over 55 years, starting in the mid-1960s with rock, moving later to the burgeoning punk scene in 1977 when I joined the seminal Dallas, Texas, punk band The Nervebreakers. I later formed the notorious punk band Stick Men With Ray Guns with singer/songwriter Bobby Soxx in 1981, finally disbanding in 1988 when I moved to Florida to pursue my passion for catamaran sailboat racing and a career in the graphic arts.

In the intervening years, my entire approach to guitar has changed completely. I set about sytematically destroying my guitar sound and reconstructing it in ways I had only dreamed of, often making it difficult to identify as a guitar. Other than a single live appearance in 2018, I only returned to making music publicly by releasing my solo album Hear Us Through the Hole in Thin Air in November 2020. Collaborating with Simon was instantly comfortable; our styles neatly complement each other’s. I realized that we were exploring the same artistic goals that I had in my painting, the use of abstract languages to describe complex fleeting emotions. It is like painting with sound.

Simon Waldram

I got my first electric guitar at 16 and was immediately fascinated by making the strangest sounds I could with it (my poor Mum and Dad!). This was perhaps partly because I didn’t know how to write songs yet, but also because I’m just endlessly fasinated and obsessed with the possibilities of sound. I feel that music is everything we hear. Even silence is music. That might sound pretentious, but have you ever really tried to listen to silence? If there's nothing there, how come it's never the same? Sometimes it’s comforting, sometimes it’s like staring into the void. I know people who in their own words are afraid of silence. How powerful is that?

Those initial attempts at making a racket later led me to making albums based on experimentation and soundscapes like Songs Without Words (2010) and Industrial Skyline (2011). Clarke and I started talked about making music together after he heard my Manko Force album Stellar Remains (2016). I soon realized I’d finally found a musical partner who could hear and express the same music that was in my head for years. Music as abstract expressionism that doesn’t give you easy answers, but rewards you if you listen closely. Music that understands the conventions but has little-to-no interest in them. Whether people think of it, this is what we need to make. This is our music. It exists soley on its own terms.