EXCERPT The following text constitutes the narrative of Berlin-based artist Nik Nowak’s audio essay A War of Decibels (Flatlines, 2024) and relates to his exhibition Schizo Sonics, curated by Kathrin Becker, which took place between September 2020 and May 2021 in the Kesselhaus at KINDL Centre for Contemporary Art in Berlin. This large-scale audiovisual installation comprised two powerful sound sculptures (The Panzer and The Mantis) and, like most of Nowak’s work, engaged with the phenomenon of sound as a weapon and medium of propaganda, drawing from examples of loudspeaker battles over the Berlin Wall waged between East and West Germany between 1961 and 1965 and the politicisation of Jamaican sound clash culture in the 1970s. Alongside contemporary sonic skirmishes in the DMZ between North and South Korea, these instances constituted ideological and acoustic proxies for the Cold War. In the installation, Nowak positions the two sound sculptures facing off across a border fence. The 43-minute audio essay was conceptualised and sound designed by Nik Nowak and is divided into four movements combining narrative elements with original archive recordings from Studio am Stacheldraht, sounds of nature, and physically palpable basslines. This specially commissioned text was written (and read in the sound work) by Jessica Edwards. The audio essay also features spoken word interventions from Infinite Livez, which are not included in the text. I. West Berlin: ‘A Prison in Which Only Those Locked Up Inside are Free’ At the height of the Cold War, for nigh on a decade, a clamorous, acoustically-charged ideological battle of pyrrhic sonic victories ensued between the competing world views of Communism and Capitalism. Berlin: the recently maligned city of terror now turned ‘prize’, bi-functional portal (and portent of a future to come) to a barely penetrable Eastern bloc world behind the Iron Curtain and to the (manufactured) fantasy of the unfettered ‘freedom’ of the West. As each system fought for the defence and strategic geopolitical control of the already war-weary, multiply-occupied, and divided city, ideological sound clashes, played out speaker to speaker, sound system to sound system—a war by other means—were launched across the armed checkpoints and barbed wire of a new Wall under perpetual (Communist-initiated) construction.…