Neo-Folk and Martial Industrial are two sub-categories of Industrial Music, which developed in the 1980’s. Industrial as such was a direction that – parallel to Punk Rock – worked with the latest electronics in order to create an aesthetic of futuristic noise machines of the late 20th century and research extreme zones of contemporary society and history. Throbbing Gristle already thematized concentration camps, serial killers, Aleister Crowley etc by using cut-up techniques of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin and thus with strategies of liberation from brain washing. Similarly, Cabaret Voltaire were said to wage a “propaganda war against the propaganda war” (Industrial Culture Handbook). With SPK this was combined with a critique of Psychiatry and a presentation of extremes of the body and death. In the 80’s there were agitational and critical bands such as Test Dept., Nocturnal Emissions and Bourbonese Qualk which were often associated with the ever broadening spectrum of “Industrial”. However, with Laibach the critique of totalitarianism became more ambivalent. This ambivalence was at first seemingly shared by Death In June, the band that in many ways was at the origin of what is now considered Neo-Folk and Martial Industrial. [Read more →]

Interview with Tommi Grönlund from Sähkö Recordings published in Alien Underground 0.0 in 1994.

In the short time of their existence Sähkö Recordings from Helsinki have made their name in the international underground, and are standing for a sound of electronic minimalism and purity, proving once more that some of the most interesting techno comes from places that are far removed from the hype and scenes of the various ‘techno capitals’.
Also this year they are running a project called Ambient City on local radio featuring material from all over the world, about half being exclusively recorded, the other half being DJ mixes of ‘ambient music’ in the broadest sense of the word, supported by a local radio station and the Finnish Museum of Contemporary Art. Walkmen locked to the frequency are available!
We spoke to Tommi, who runs the label, works as an architect and also designs the wonderfully minimalistic covers for the records, when he visited London for a few days recently. After going through the London record shops for those hard to find tunes and after some food at Wong Key we wanted to find out about the artistic background and intentions of Sähkö… [Read more →]

We sent a questionnaire with the same five questions to a few labels. The answers by Digital Hardcore and by Force Inc. were published in Alien Underground in issue 0.0 (1994) and 0.1 (1995) respectively. Here are the answers by DHR, plus reviews of their first three releases by CF [Read more →]

Spanish translation of
You Cannot Blow Up Social Relations
published in the zine accompanying Bogotrax Festival in Bogota, Colombia, Feb 11-21, 2010

Este es el texto de una charla presentada en Berlin el 12 de septiembre del 2009 en el Samacafé para el festival Bogotrax-Berlin. Fue parte de una tarde de discusión y documentación relativa a la situación en Colombia. El texto, traducido del ingles, lo reproducimos acá sin ninguna alteración y guardando algunos de los giros coloquiales relativos a una texto destinado como soporte de una conferencia. La mayoría de las citas fueron primero retraducidas del alemán por el autor y a su vez retraducidas por nosotros al castellano.

El Autor : Christoph Fringeli es desde 1997 el editor de Datacide, la revista subterránea sobre “ruido y política” (datacide.c8.com, donde pueden encontrar la versión original del siguiente texto). Es también desde principios de los 90′s el motor de Praxis (praxis.c8.com) el primer sello de música electrónica radical, vanguardia de los ritmos rotos, del “breakcore” avant-la-lettre y del compromiso sónico con la revolución. Bogotrax lo vuelve a convocar como el singular ejemplo de uno de los más dicientes compromisos tácticos entre la teoría y la práctica.

LOS LAZOS SOCIALES NO PUEDEN DINAMITARSE !
You cannot blow up social relations !!!

Para una crítica real de la lucha armada
[Read more →]

A Critique of Armed Struggle
(Talk at Bogotrax festival in Berlin, Sept.10, 2009)

1.
In this short critical talk I will briefly outline a view of particular strains of the communist movement of the 20th century and in particular the guerilla movements purporting to be communist and their historical role.
Central to my argument is the transformation of Marxism as a critical method and communism as a movement into an ideology of so called Marxism-Leninism.
Therefore this is not a critique of revolutionary violence as such, but of its particular manifestation in the form of traditional Marxist-Leninist guerilla movements, both of the rural and urban types. [Read more →]