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Showing posts from May, 2009

Industrial events in London, then and now....

17 year ago this evening Laibach's Kapital tour reached London. Of the many shows I've seen, this was one of the most memorable. Tonight two audience members from the show will be performing in a less grand venue, but seeing that show was certainly a formative influence on their work: Sz. Berlin live at No Signal tonight!

Deca-Disco 2009: “Base – How Low Can You Go?!”

A 2009 follow-up piece to the orginal Deca-Disco text, (see previous post). The original Deca-Disco piece was written in 2003, just after the start of the war on Iraq and although there was no shortage of reasons for cynicism at the time and I was not exactly an optimist, I had no idea of the scale of greed, deception and incompetence that was to follow. Compared to political and economic developments since 2003, even the sleaziest and most consciously cynical electroclash now comes across as prim and repressed. As I said then, such tracks were and are examples of klepto-realism , palely reflecting and often supporting the kleptocratic order which remains entrenched even now (maintained by apathy and the real threat of violence in its defence). Now the zeitgeist is infinitely more decadent and authoritarian than it was even then. Although the word ‘electroclash’ is rarely heard now, its attitudes and textures still mark the present. There are at least as many people now who identify ...

Deca-Disco – Electro Disco Revivalism as Political Symptom

An archive lecture text given at the Musical constellations in the digital age event hosted at mama as part of the Zagreb Music Biennale in March 2003. Secret Militant History “Disco rhythm as a regu lar repet ition is the purest/most radical form of the militantly organised rhythmicity of technicist production, and as such the most appropriate means of media manipulation. As an archetypal structural basis of the collective unconscious in a worker, mass, it stimulates automatic mechanisms and shapes industrialisation of consciousness, which is necessary in the logic of massive-totalitarian industrial production… Disco rhythm stimulates automatist mechanisms and co-forms the industrialization of consciousness according to the model of totalitarianism and industrial production” [1] LAIBACH This statement was made by the Slovene group Laibach, which made notorious appearances at the Zagreb Biennales of 1983 and 1985. Its radical ambivalence illustrates one of the two p...