Dreaming of Home featured on Memories Overlooked: A Tribute to the Caretaker compilation released through No Problema / sold out: caretakertribute.bandcamp.com

warped dark ambience and wartime plunderphonics. all tracks arranged (in 2011/2012) from samples of songs that were either recorded or were popular somewhere in the world during WWII. all artwork was originally used in my good friend Frank Tringali's war-focused installation, "Do Not Go Gentle."

Under Field Marshall Kesselring, a strict policy was followed that called for the execution of 10 Italian antifascists for every single German soldier killed by local partisan resistance; these draconian measures culminated in the mass killing of 335 antifascist Italian civilians by occupying German soldiers outside the city of Rome in the Ardeatine Massacre. Estimates place the total number of non-military Italian civilian deaths at the hands of German troops and fascist Italian militiamen at 22,000 during Field Marshall Kesselring's tenure as commander of German forces in the Italian theater. Field Marshall Kesselring's Bandenbekämpfung directives promised indemnity to German soldiers who "exceed our normal restraint in the choice of severity of the methods against the partisans."

When Field Marshall Kesselring took the stand to defend himself against the staggering war crimes and murders of which he was accused, he did so in a court room more favorable to his arguments than did the ill-fated General Dostler, who was tied to a stake and shot to death by firing squad after being found guilty by a US Army tribunal of carrying out the unlawful execution of 15 captured OSS officers under orders from his superior officer: Field Marshall Kesselring. Not only did the Prime Minister and wartime hero himself, Winston Churchill, plead for clemency on Field Marshall Kesselring's behalf, but so too did a litany of Britain's aristocratic, political, and military elite, including but not limited to: Lord De L'Isle, who in 1975 would co-found The Freedom Association, a right-wing, free-market libertarian interest group that helped to thwart the Grunwick Dispute strikes between 1976-1978, a mostly female and immigrant-led movement that was ultimately crushed, paving the way for Margaret Thatcher's suffocation of unions in the 1980s; Lord Richard Stokes, whose family business, Ransomes & Rapier, invented the Stokes Mortar during WWI and later unsuccessfully bid to be a contractor for British rearmament; General Sir Harold Alexander, commander of Allied forces in Italy and Field Marshall Kesselring's archnemesis in the Italian theater; Admiral of the Fleet The Earl of Cork William Boyle, who knew a thing or two about local, "homegrown," "partisan" resistance after assisting in the fomentation and prosecution of both the Boxer Rebellion and Arab Revolt; historian B.H. Liddell Hart, key figure in the creation of the revisionist Rommel Myth that sought to portray the infamous German Field Marshall Rommel as a tragic military hero; and J.F.C. Fuller, who, in addition to being a senior British military officer, was also a noted admirer of Adolf Hitler, a vehement critic of democracy, a staunch advocate for mechanized warfare, an operating director within the British Union of Fascists, and a member of the clandestine, pro-Nazi Nordic League -- each a man who had gained or still stood to gain vast fortunes and power from the perpetual churning of the war machine. Field Marshall Kesselring was found guilty of his charges, yet was released from imprisonment in 1952. Some war criminals, it seems, are more forgivable than others, while some victims are more easily forgotten.