Plural Machine

The excellent Bio-Mechanics site invited Codex Europa to produce their latest podcast and the result is available now here . This is a harsh experiemental sequence taking a range of harsh and radical electronics that parallel or negate techno "proper."

Over the summer I had a long and interesting discussion with Thomas Bey William Bailey about Tech-Nostalgia, covering issues such as the fetishisation of analogue technology, the romance of Cold War Poetics and the current fashionability of EBM and other 1980s electronic and industrial variants. These exchanges can now be read on Vague Terrain .

Klub V.E.B./Codex Corporation Present: ‘40 Jahre’ : A.M./B.N. 1969 – 2009. A unique event for the 40th birthday of one of the V.E.B. members. Special tribute mixes from V.E.B. DJ’s and guests. A sequence of half hour sets will span a range of electronic genres from dark ambient/electronica to electro, industrial/EBM, minimal techno, doomcore gabber, electro and some surprises. Saturday August 15th. 19.30 – 23.00 The Fleapit 49 Columbia Road, London E2 7RG. FREE Techno – Industrial – Electro – Gabber and more…. Many thanks to Alex Nym for his work on the flyer.

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 ...

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...