Hello,
Today's artists an industrial group whose members prefer to be known as a collective rather than reveal individual names; they've been seen as fascists and of practicing Germanophilia because of their music's Wagnerian thunder and their military attire. According to them, "We are fascists as much as Hitler was a painter." Since fascism needs a scapegoat to flourish, the members mocked it by becoming their own scapegoat and willingly sought alienation. Showing a ridiculous lust for authority, their releases featured artwork influenced by anti-Nazi photomontage artist John Heartfield, and the group's live shows portray rock concerts as absurd political rallies. In interviews their answers are wry manifestos, and they never break character... ..N'Joy
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continued from week
During 1991, Slovenia became an independent state. In 1992, the group released Kapital an album featuring their own vision of materialism. The following year, Mute Records released the Ljubljana–Zagreb–Beograd live album, recorded at performances in the three cities in 1982, presenting a document of politically active rock from the group's early career, especially in the songs "Tito-Tito", "Država" ("The State"), and "Rdeči molk" ("Red Silence"). In 1994, they released the album NATO, which commented on the current political events in Eastern Europe, former Yugoslavia and the actions of the NATO pact, filtered through their vision of techno and pop. The album featured cover versions of Europe's "The Final Countdown", Status Quo "In the Army Now", Don Fardon's "Indian Reservation" (renamed to "National Reservation"), and the Stanislav Binički composition "Marš na Drinu" ("March on the Drina").
Following the album release, the group went on the Occupied Europe NATO Tour 1994-95, resulting in the live and video album of the same name, which featured a selection of recordings from the two-year tour, including the performance in Sarajevo on the date of the signing of the Dayton Agreement. In 1995, the group for a while considered splitting into several simultaneous lineups so that they could perform in different places at the same time, but the idea was abandoned. The following year, the group released Jesus Christ Superstars, a reference to the Andrew Lloyd Webber's rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. The group promoted the album in the USA with an eighteen-date tour, as well as a German tour.
On May 15, 1997, the group performed with the Slovenian symphony orchestra, conducted by Marko Letonja, and the "Tone Tomšić" choir, for the opening ceremony of the Ljubljana European Month of Culture, presenting orchestral versions of their earliest material, which they rarely performed live, arranged by Uroš Rojko and Aldo Kumar with the members of the group. During the same year, the live album M.B. December 21, 1984 was released, featuring recordings of the forbidden concert in the Ljubljana Malci Belić Hall, a February 1985 concert at the Berlin Atonal festival, and the April 1985 performance at the Zagreb club Kulušić. The performances had featured a guest appearance by Jože Pegam on clarinet and trumpet, and recordings of Tito's speeches. On November 14, 1997 at a concert in Belgrade, another Peter Mlakar speech received a decidedly mixed audience reaction (in sharp contrast to the 1989 speech), in which he asked the audience to "eat the pig and digest it once and for all", referring to the then president Slobodan Milošević.
In 2003, the group released the album WAT (an acronym for We Are Time), which, as well as new material, featured the song "Tanz mit Laibach" (German for "Dance with Laibach"), inspired by the German band D.A.F. The song lyrics were co-written with Peter Mlakar, and the music was co-written with the producer Iztok Turk (former member of Videosex) and the DJs Umek, Bizzy and Dojaja. The following year, the group released a double compilation album Anthems, featuring a career spanning selection of material as well as the previously unreleased song "Mama Leone", a Drafi Deutscher cover, and remixes by Random Logic, Umek, Octex, Iztok Turk and others. The compilation also features a thorough group biography written by Alexei Monroe. The group also released two DVD's: the first, Laibach, featured music videos, including a new music video for the song "Das Spiel is aus", and A film about WAT directed by Sašo Podgoršek. The second DVD was 2 with a recording from the Occupied Europe NATO Tour concert in Ljubljana on October 26, 1995 and A Film from Slovenia, directed by Daniel Landin and Peter Vezjak.
In 2004, the group recorded The Divided States of America - Laibach 2004 Tour, released on DVD in 2006 and directed by Sašo Podgoršek during the group's fourth USA tour. During 2006, the group released the album Volk (German for People), featuring cover versions of national anthems, including the NSK state anthem "Das Lied der Deutschen", originally written in 1797 and used during the Weimar Republic. Each cover featured a guest vocalist singing the anthem in their own language. During the same year, on June 1, the group performed J. S. Bach's "The Art of Fugue" in his hometown Leipzig, and their interpretation of the work was released on the album Laibachkunstderfuge BWV in 2008.
On 15 October 2013 Laibach announced new album "Spectre" to be released February 2014 and released new EP record S featuring three songs from the album and one from a 2012 live album. The songs from the new album are also downloadable for limited time for subscribers of their new mailing list.[6] The first single Resistance is Futile was published on 8 January 2014. In July 2014 Laibach released an EP to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising. The project was commissioned by Poland's National Cultural Centre and includes a reworking of one of the classic songs of the insurgency; "Warszawskie Dzieci" ("Children of Warsaw").
On 11 June 2015 Laibach announced that they would be performing a show in Pyongyang, North Korea sometime in August 2015. The band later confirmed through their website and the website of their record label, Mute Records, that they will be performing two concerts on 19 and 20 August 2015 at Kim Won Gyun Musical Conservatory in Nampo-dong, Pyongyang, to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the end of Japanese colonial rule in Korea. The concerts will also be the subject of a documentary film scheduled for premiere in 2016.
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As Laibach took on more and more of a direct musical identity outside Slovenia, as opposed to being seen as simply part of the Neue Slowenische Kunst, the group's music gained a similar focus, though admittedly one still aimed specifically at an avant-garde level. Nova Akropola readily captures the band's stone-faced fascination with propaganda, fascism, and the implications of rallying and control, while the music was so perfectly on the money with stentorian rhythms, rough chants, and unnerving textures and samples that it almost beggars description. The title track is a perfect example, string-synths and horns slowly, creepily wafting up through the mix before a distorted, strangled voice starts howling over the slowest death-march beat around. There are signs at many points that the group is starting to explore the perversely accessible styles of later years, but it's still early days yet -- the appropriate comparison wouldn't be industrial/dance so much as the first albums by the Swans. "Die Liebe," though, is very much the stomping, riff-heavy semi-dance hit from hell, something of a dry run for the later demolitions of Queen and other groups. "Vade Retro" takes a calmer but not less haunting approach, a mix of keyboards and drums providing rhythms while vocals swirl like disembodied choirs from the mountaintop. The clipped, commanding vocals throughout may only be understandable to those who know Slovenian, but a handily provided translation increases the extreme irony even further -- sample lyric, from "War Poem": "The stronger one will wash our faces and moisten our lips with a rag/and the night with a cold knife will cut us black bread." A couple of older cuts make return appearances on the American issue, including the marvelous "Drzava," Tito sample fully intact.
Laibach - Nova Akropola (flac 270mb)
01 Vier Personen 5:26
02 Nova Akropola 6:55
03 Krvava Gruda - Plodna Zemlja 4:07
04 Vojna Poema 3:12
05 Ti, Ki Izzivaš (Outro) 1:20
06 Die Liebe 4:23
07 Država 4:19
08 Vade Retro 4:33
09 Panorama 4:52
10 Decree 6:41
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This record is a document of time; It was originally compiled and realised on vinyl in 1987 for the Slovene and Yugoslav territories only. A very well produced album with bombastic (almost anthemic / anthem-styled) tracks that just beg you, as the listener, to lace up your polished black military boots, don WWII German -or- Italian -or- Japanese Axis military uniforms (of your choice), and strap on a Laibach N.S.K. cog armband and head out into the world (or down to the local nightclub) as a Laibachian "shock trooper" of dance. This album and the ones preceeding it, would be considered to be the "forefathers" of what is known or classified today as "Martial Industrial" / "Martial" music. Highly recommend it to any "old school" fans of Laibach or to those wanting a bit of a contrast to Laibach's more modern / techno sound which they became associated with in the wake of 1992's "Kapital" album
Tracks 4, 7 and 8 were originally written in 1986 for the NSK Selpion Nasice Sisters theatre production "Baptism under Triglav", tracks 10 and 11 written in 1992 for the NSK Cosmokinetic Ballet Noordung Prayer Machine.
Laibach - Slovenska Akropola (flac 293mb)
01 Nova Akropola 5:24
02 Krvava Gruda - Plodna Zemlja 4:28
03 Vade Retro Satanas 4:32
04 Raus! (Herzfelde) 4:48
05 Die Liebe 3:52
06 Vojna Poema 3:11
07 Apologija Laibach 6:35
08 Krst Pod Triglavom 4:39
09 Die Grösste Kraft 4:20
10 Noordung 3:12
11 Kapital 7:42
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Having gained a fair amount of underground attention throughout Europe, particularly in both Germany and England, Laibach made its first attempt at crossing over -- in a way -- with Opus Dei. An alliance with Mute records led to Rico Conning handling the production, while the group decided to spell out the connections between mega-arena rock & roll and fascist spectacle all the more directly. Two brilliant singles were the end result, the first being "Geburt Einer Nation," a German-language cover of Queen's then-recent smash hit "One Vision," transformed into a Wagner-ian stompalong that remained as catchy as the original but with far more disturbing overtones. Hearing guttural voices talking about "one world, one people" over stomping drums and dramatic horns makes for pure Big Brother nightmares -- undoubtedly the point. Arguably even more fascinating was "Life Is Life," a hippie-ish song by the German group Opus that was reworked by Laibach into two different versions -- the German-language "Leben Heisst Leben" and the English "Opus Dei." Both are amazing, dramatic, and, thanks to some soft keyboards, even beautiful -- imagining a strutting, face-to-the-sun group of party members sweeping over the globe with these as accompaniment takes no effort at all. The dumbass metal soloing on the German-language version is especially hilarious. The other tracks on Opus Dei are a mixed but worthy bunch, showing the group trashing stylistic boundaries with more classical/hard rock/martial/dancefloor combinations. The results can be weirdly sweet like the start of "F.I.A.T." or explosive like "Leben-Tod" or the quick, nervous bombast of "Trans-National," but they're all good in their own ways. The CD includes four selections from Baptism as a bonus, that particular recording having not yet been released at the time of Opus Dei's appearance.
Laibach - Opus Dei (flac 340mb)
01 Leben Heißt Leben 5:29
02 Geburt Einer Nation 4:22
03 Leben - Tod 3:58
04 F.I.A.T. 5:13
05 Opus Dei 5:04
06 Trans-National 4:28
07 How The West Was Won 4:26
08 The Great Seal 4:16
09 Herz-Felde 4:46
10 Jägerspiel 7:23
11 Koža (Skin) 3:51
12 Krst (Baptism) 5:39
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Today's artists an industrial group whose members prefer to be known as a collective rather than reveal individual names; they've been seen as fascists and of practicing Germanophilia because of their music's Wagnerian thunder and their military attire. According to them, "We are fascists as much as Hitler was a painter." Since fascism needs a scapegoat to flourish, the members mocked it by becoming their own scapegoat and willingly sought alienation. Showing a ridiculous lust for authority, their releases featured artwork influenced by anti-Nazi photomontage artist John Heartfield, and the group's live shows portray rock concerts as absurd political rallies. In interviews their answers are wry manifestos, and they never break character... ..N'Joy
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
continued from week
During 1991, Slovenia became an independent state. In 1992, the group released Kapital an album featuring their own vision of materialism. The following year, Mute Records released the Ljubljana–Zagreb–Beograd live album, recorded at performances in the three cities in 1982, presenting a document of politically active rock from the group's early career, especially in the songs "Tito-Tito", "Država" ("The State"), and "Rdeči molk" ("Red Silence"). In 1994, they released the album NATO, which commented on the current political events in Eastern Europe, former Yugoslavia and the actions of the NATO pact, filtered through their vision of techno and pop. The album featured cover versions of Europe's "The Final Countdown", Status Quo "In the Army Now", Don Fardon's "Indian Reservation" (renamed to "National Reservation"), and the Stanislav Binički composition "Marš na Drinu" ("March on the Drina").
Following the album release, the group went on the Occupied Europe NATO Tour 1994-95, resulting in the live and video album of the same name, which featured a selection of recordings from the two-year tour, including the performance in Sarajevo on the date of the signing of the Dayton Agreement. In 1995, the group for a while considered splitting into several simultaneous lineups so that they could perform in different places at the same time, but the idea was abandoned. The following year, the group released Jesus Christ Superstars, a reference to the Andrew Lloyd Webber's rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. The group promoted the album in the USA with an eighteen-date tour, as well as a German tour.
On May 15, 1997, the group performed with the Slovenian symphony orchestra, conducted by Marko Letonja, and the "Tone Tomšić" choir, for the opening ceremony of the Ljubljana European Month of Culture, presenting orchestral versions of their earliest material, which they rarely performed live, arranged by Uroš Rojko and Aldo Kumar with the members of the group. During the same year, the live album M.B. December 21, 1984 was released, featuring recordings of the forbidden concert in the Ljubljana Malci Belić Hall, a February 1985 concert at the Berlin Atonal festival, and the April 1985 performance at the Zagreb club Kulušić. The performances had featured a guest appearance by Jože Pegam on clarinet and trumpet, and recordings of Tito's speeches. On November 14, 1997 at a concert in Belgrade, another Peter Mlakar speech received a decidedly mixed audience reaction (in sharp contrast to the 1989 speech), in which he asked the audience to "eat the pig and digest it once and for all", referring to the then president Slobodan Milošević.
In 2003, the group released the album WAT (an acronym for We Are Time), which, as well as new material, featured the song "Tanz mit Laibach" (German for "Dance with Laibach"), inspired by the German band D.A.F. The song lyrics were co-written with Peter Mlakar, and the music was co-written with the producer Iztok Turk (former member of Videosex) and the DJs Umek, Bizzy and Dojaja. The following year, the group released a double compilation album Anthems, featuring a career spanning selection of material as well as the previously unreleased song "Mama Leone", a Drafi Deutscher cover, and remixes by Random Logic, Umek, Octex, Iztok Turk and others. The compilation also features a thorough group biography written by Alexei Monroe. The group also released two DVD's: the first, Laibach, featured music videos, including a new music video for the song "Das Spiel is aus", and A film about WAT directed by Sašo Podgoršek. The second DVD was 2 with a recording from the Occupied Europe NATO Tour concert in Ljubljana on October 26, 1995 and A Film from Slovenia, directed by Daniel Landin and Peter Vezjak.
In 2004, the group recorded The Divided States of America - Laibach 2004 Tour, released on DVD in 2006 and directed by Sašo Podgoršek during the group's fourth USA tour. During 2006, the group released the album Volk (German for People), featuring cover versions of national anthems, including the NSK state anthem "Das Lied der Deutschen", originally written in 1797 and used during the Weimar Republic. Each cover featured a guest vocalist singing the anthem in their own language. During the same year, on June 1, the group performed J. S. Bach's "The Art of Fugue" in his hometown Leipzig, and their interpretation of the work was released on the album Laibachkunstderfuge BWV in 2008.
On 15 October 2013 Laibach announced new album "Spectre" to be released February 2014 and released new EP record S featuring three songs from the album and one from a 2012 live album. The songs from the new album are also downloadable for limited time for subscribers of their new mailing list.[6] The first single Resistance is Futile was published on 8 January 2014. In July 2014 Laibach released an EP to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising. The project was commissioned by Poland's National Cultural Centre and includes a reworking of one of the classic songs of the insurgency; "Warszawskie Dzieci" ("Children of Warsaw").
On 11 June 2015 Laibach announced that they would be performing a show in Pyongyang, North Korea sometime in August 2015. The band later confirmed through their website and the website of their record label, Mute Records, that they will be performing two concerts on 19 and 20 August 2015 at Kim Won Gyun Musical Conservatory in Nampo-dong, Pyongyang, to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the end of Japanese colonial rule in Korea. The concerts will also be the subject of a documentary film scheduled for premiere in 2016.
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
As Laibach took on more and more of a direct musical identity outside Slovenia, as opposed to being seen as simply part of the Neue Slowenische Kunst, the group's music gained a similar focus, though admittedly one still aimed specifically at an avant-garde level. Nova Akropola readily captures the band's stone-faced fascination with propaganda, fascism, and the implications of rallying and control, while the music was so perfectly on the money with stentorian rhythms, rough chants, and unnerving textures and samples that it almost beggars description. The title track is a perfect example, string-synths and horns slowly, creepily wafting up through the mix before a distorted, strangled voice starts howling over the slowest death-march beat around. There are signs at many points that the group is starting to explore the perversely accessible styles of later years, but it's still early days yet -- the appropriate comparison wouldn't be industrial/dance so much as the first albums by the Swans. "Die Liebe," though, is very much the stomping, riff-heavy semi-dance hit from hell, something of a dry run for the later demolitions of Queen and other groups. "Vade Retro" takes a calmer but not less haunting approach, a mix of keyboards and drums providing rhythms while vocals swirl like disembodied choirs from the mountaintop. The clipped, commanding vocals throughout may only be understandable to those who know Slovenian, but a handily provided translation increases the extreme irony even further -- sample lyric, from "War Poem": "The stronger one will wash our faces and moisten our lips with a rag/and the night with a cold knife will cut us black bread." A couple of older cuts make return appearances on the American issue, including the marvelous "Drzava," Tito sample fully intact.
Laibach - Nova Akropola (flac 270mb)
01 Vier Personen 5:26
02 Nova Akropola 6:55
03 Krvava Gruda - Plodna Zemlja 4:07
04 Vojna Poema 3:12
05 Ti, Ki Izzivaš (Outro) 1:20
06 Die Liebe 4:23
07 Država 4:19
08 Vade Retro 4:33
09 Panorama 4:52
10 Decree 6:41
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
This record is a document of time; It was originally compiled and realised on vinyl in 1987 for the Slovene and Yugoslav territories only. A very well produced album with bombastic (almost anthemic / anthem-styled) tracks that just beg you, as the listener, to lace up your polished black military boots, don WWII German -or- Italian -or- Japanese Axis military uniforms (of your choice), and strap on a Laibach N.S.K. cog armband and head out into the world (or down to the local nightclub) as a Laibachian "shock trooper" of dance. This album and the ones preceeding it, would be considered to be the "forefathers" of what is known or classified today as "Martial Industrial" / "Martial" music. Highly recommend it to any "old school" fans of Laibach or to those wanting a bit of a contrast to Laibach's more modern / techno sound which they became associated with in the wake of 1992's "Kapital" album
Tracks 4, 7 and 8 were originally written in 1986 for the NSK Selpion Nasice Sisters theatre production "Baptism under Triglav", tracks 10 and 11 written in 1992 for the NSK Cosmokinetic Ballet Noordung Prayer Machine.
Laibach - Slovenska Akropola (flac 293mb)
01 Nova Akropola 5:24
02 Krvava Gruda - Plodna Zemlja 4:28
03 Vade Retro Satanas 4:32
04 Raus! (Herzfelde) 4:48
05 Die Liebe 3:52
06 Vojna Poema 3:11
07 Apologija Laibach 6:35
08 Krst Pod Triglavom 4:39
09 Die Grösste Kraft 4:20
10 Noordung 3:12
11 Kapital 7:42
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
Having gained a fair amount of underground attention throughout Europe, particularly in both Germany and England, Laibach made its first attempt at crossing over -- in a way -- with Opus Dei. An alliance with Mute records led to Rico Conning handling the production, while the group decided to spell out the connections between mega-arena rock & roll and fascist spectacle all the more directly. Two brilliant singles were the end result, the first being "Geburt Einer Nation," a German-language cover of Queen's then-recent smash hit "One Vision," transformed into a Wagner-ian stompalong that remained as catchy as the original but with far more disturbing overtones. Hearing guttural voices talking about "one world, one people" over stomping drums and dramatic horns makes for pure Big Brother nightmares -- undoubtedly the point. Arguably even more fascinating was "Life Is Life," a hippie-ish song by the German group Opus that was reworked by Laibach into two different versions -- the German-language "Leben Heisst Leben" and the English "Opus Dei." Both are amazing, dramatic, and, thanks to some soft keyboards, even beautiful -- imagining a strutting, face-to-the-sun group of party members sweeping over the globe with these as accompaniment takes no effort at all. The dumbass metal soloing on the German-language version is especially hilarious. The other tracks on Opus Dei are a mixed but worthy bunch, showing the group trashing stylistic boundaries with more classical/hard rock/martial/dancefloor combinations. The results can be weirdly sweet like the start of "F.I.A.T." or explosive like "Leben-Tod" or the quick, nervous bombast of "Trans-National," but they're all good in their own ways. The CD includes four selections from Baptism as a bonus, that particular recording having not yet been released at the time of Opus Dei's appearance.
Laibach - Opus Dei (flac 340mb)
01 Leben Heißt Leben 5:29
02 Geburt Einer Nation 4:22
03 Leben - Tod 3:58
04 F.I.A.T. 5:13
05 Opus Dei 5:04
06 Trans-National 4:28
07 How The West Was Won 4:26
08 The Great Seal 4:16
09 Herz-Felde 4:46
10 Jägerspiel 7:23
11 Koža (Skin) 3:51
12 Krst (Baptism) 5:39
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could you please reup the Laibach Akropola albums? Thanks.
ReplyDeleteHi, just watched the excellent film on Laibach in North Koria, would really appreciate a reup of their stuff.
ReplyDeleteThanks
Michael