When TNT came out, some of the band members mentioned whilst interviewed that using Pro Tools had given them too many options, and that they had feared at one point that the album would lack direction. Lacking direction would be a harsh criticism for TNT, however it could definitely be said that it’s a sprawling album, and can become aimless and like something akin to sonic wallpaper from time to time.

By now listeners knew what to expect from Tortoise, and indeed the opening track “TNT” delivered their trademark sound. Relatively upbeat, pretty serious and muso, it opens with jazzy drum frills which give way to a guitar riff straight from the band’s workbook. Dubby effects and muted horn riffs come into play in what is essentially a pared-down Jazz Fusion for the 90s. The second track, “Swing From The Gutters,” is one of the real highlights of the album. Atmospheric and cinematic are two adjectives that spring to mind when listening to this piece. A subtle Latin influence permeates the drums and percussion, which carry you along while a repetitive melancholic guitar refrain plays out gently.

Things thankfully pick up again with one of the album’s real standout tracks, “In Sarah, Mencken, Christ, and Beethoven There Were Women and Men,” which is named after, but isn’t a cover of, a 1972 piece by Robert Ashley. The composition hooks you from the onset with the irresistible guitar riff. The Latin influence cited earlier is more overt; like Ry Cooder playing flamenco. An undercurrent of Warp Records-style electronica makes its way into the track, replete with old school Detroit Techno handclaps. In fact, the track has the same emotional pull that many of the classic Detroit numbers have to them; a tugging of the heartstrings that Derrick May and Juan Atkins could so readily achieve.

When looking back over the past hour and a bit one can’t help but think that TNT could have been shorter and punchier. However that would have also depended on what tracks stayed, and which ones were omitted. It was an album heralded as a masterpiece by some but in reality was a dip in form, and an indication that the band were possibly losing their potency.

-Jay Harper-

By the time the second Tortoise album appeared on the scene, there seemed to be an inordinate amount of time dedicated to the discussion as to whether they were in the spirit of Prog, or Krautrock.

It seemed that much underground and forward thinking ‘rock’ at this time was being examined under the withering light of Krautrock. Some bands were left looking rather tame, which was embarrassing as, let’s face it, the German avant-rock that was suddenly thrust back into the public consciousness was over 20 years old. Prog on the other hand, was still being used as a benchmark of what not to do when you wanted to take your sound beyond the usual confines of rock formulae; an ugly stain on the musical tapestry that reeked of unnecessary excess and overreaching ambition.

The track opens with crunchy effects and a simple, plaintive bass riff that has a warm, dubby feel to it. This lasts for a few minutes before a motorik drum pattern kicks in. Hints of NEU! are apparent, giving truth to the Krautrock comparisons that were being thrown about, and the bass riff also has a similar lilt to Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother‘s iconic band. A perky melody joins proceedings, lifting the track above motorik pastische whilst also bringing the Jazz Fusion comparisons to mind. This structure breaks down at some point and the track starts to throb, throwing warm and fuzzy dub shapes where the crisp riffs were previously. The piece morphs several more times whilst always giving the impression that it’s a natural flow. Icy glitches show up at one point; and at another it feels like the track is being smeared over the original tapes. Then the track enters into a beautiful section that is an outright homage to Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians replete with mallets, xylophones, and what have you. It closes with an almost crippled breakbeat, with remnants of the track’s riffs and melodies hovering over the brittle drums. It’s a fantastic ending to an astonishing track, and is the sort of piece that has you yearning to instantly listen to it all over again. Addictive.

The closing track is an atmospheric piece that suggests Ennio Morricone’s Western soundtracks, and is a great way to finish. However, it is very difficult not to wonder at what a whole album done in the spirit of “Djed” would have sounded like. Millions Now Living Will Never Die is still an album whose strength lies in the lengthy opener; an opener that doesn’t sound dated one little bit.

-Jay Harper-

The arrival of Tortoise brought along a discussion surrounding the widespread use of a new genre term that described a supposedly emerging musical genre. The term was ‘post-rock’ and, at the time, seemed to be the focus for as much debate as the band were themselves.

Supposedly coined by music journalist Simon Reynolds, the term appeared to be much maligned at the time. Deemed as po-faced, as was much of the music which fell under the banner, it shared space in the musical room of shame alongside IDM (intelligent dance music); surely the most irritating of all genre titles.

Reynolds first used this term when reviewing the Bark Psychosis album Hex for The Wire; and indeed post-rock was initially attributed to the British underground as a way of categorizing bands such as Stereolab, Pram, Laika, Moonshake, and the aforementioned Bark Psychosis. However, it wasn’t long before the American Tortoise were held up as the figureheads for Post-Rock; which seems unusual as Tortoise had a definite ‘American’ sound to them that was very different from the UK bands mentioned.

Another band that has to be mentioned when discussing Tortoise is Slint. Stylistically close to Slint, apart from the fact that there are no vocals to be found at all, Tortoise build the same tension through slow build ups and restraint as the aforementioned Slint. In fact Slint’s Dave Pajo joined Tortoise for their next album Millions Now Living Will Never Die.

Their sound was fully realised and confident by the time they released Tortoise, their debut album, in 1994. Opening track “Magnet Pulls Through” has a pulsing bassline riff offset by lazy motorik drum patterns. The tension is temporarily relieved from time to time with an intensification of the minimal riff, and the drums hit with more ferocity. However, normal service is resumed instantly with the piece falling back into tight restraint. In fact the term restraint can be used to describe the whole album, and the band in general.

Luckily the majority of the album avoids being easily tagged as dull, although the tension mentioned in the opening track isn’t really touched upon again. What we get instead is Ry Cooder-esque quitar stylings on “His Second Story Island” and spaced out drone and skittery percussion on “Onions Wrapped In Rubber,” a track that has a great false start with the listener thrown into 80s Hip-Hop territory replete with heavy reverb on a John Bonham-style drum pattern. This B-Boy reference shows up at the end of the track with the skittering percussion threatening to usurp the steady pulse.

The thing that is clear from this album is that Tortoise were a band who truly understood the term ‘fusion’. Rather than tacking on bits and bobs from several genres, they came up with genuine hybrids; twisting new and unfamiliar shapes from old familiar ones. This was an incredibly strong debut from a very confident band; and it still stands up today, 18 years after its first release. Tortoise is indeed a reissue that can stand tall.

-Jay Harper-

The drone is king, it calls from the high mountain tops, it echoes in the valleys, it is the sound of ancient ritual or the smell of incense from temples, long may the drone exist.

Track 1 “Dreams of Mana Yood Sushai” starts with a low sitar like drone like a voice humming from the Himalayas calling people to prayer. A heavy bass riff begins to take over; this is joined by a clattering of drums, all keeping a funeral procession pace swathed in reverb from the mountains of madness. Ritualistic chanting vocals join in and the track seems to alter into an almost hymnal quality. It’s here we move from the outside into the darkened candle-lit space and a whiff in the air of necromancy. When the lead guitar hits in for its solo it brings an almost West Coast vibe into the track, its psychedelic meanderings sounding like Jerry Garcia on a downer. From here on in the ritual begins to speed up, the solemn voices drop back in and the dancing of naked bodies around the flames of a fire become apparent as wah-wah guitar hits into the riff and feedback fills the air. Slowly the track drifts away to a phased drone, like a movie camera panning away from an important event to give us a wider view.

Bong’s new album is a journey. It takes you to sun-filled plateaus but also to the shadowy places the sun’s bright rays cast. If you want to go on a travel to somewhere strange then Bong can take you to that very place as excellent tour guides.

-Gary Parsons-

Jonny Mugwump’s label is throwing up some breathless oddbits. Every release is a tabula rasa, a slash and burn policy. Exotic Pylon is as fidgety as the radio show, a spastic in space and time and genre (never truly separated). He’s releasing stuff like a psychedelic squid. So far (and this is just the stuff I’ve managed to keep up with) there’s been the sweetly benevolent soaring of Gentleforce, the ‘kangaroos loose in top paddock’ hip-slop of Infinite Livez, the mental jungle concrete of Ronny Juzzle, a resurgent Band Of Holy Joy (he kept hearing them when others turned away; and he was right) and now… this.

I’m probably hearing this wrong but… just search out a video. They think they sound like this too.

-Loki-

The Seventies’ favourite candy-coloured California cowboy, Lee Hazlewood stands alongside the likes of Leonard Cohen and Serge Gainsbourg in his stature (if not physically) as one of those perennially louche raconteurs of the counterculture whose influence has accumulated and expanded over the passing decades. The throaty baritone, the whiskey and tear-stained sheets, the twang and strum of a full-spectrum pop sound which still managed to be imbued with a quintessence of the stories which the American pop-cultural elite (and they were an elite) told to and about themselves and spread across the wing-collared, bead-fringed world until it became the accepted face of what the Seventies meant to the popular imagination.

To be Lee Hazlewood in these songs of love and loss – often loss – is to be a sensitive man who knows his limitations, who is of the world yet wishing it were better, a man who loves the ladies but can’t keep them wholly in his flawed heart. So far so Romantic, and this is exactly where Hazlewood’s lineage lies, in the tradition of Shelley and even the dark heart of Beaudelaire – though withal, among the occasionally clopping along descriptions of heartache and self-inflicted loss, Lee sounds (and looks, judging from the self-deprecatingly ridiculous cover) like he’s having, if not a ball, then a life lead with barely a dull moment.

-Antron S Meister-

It was 1974 when Comus, after two truly blood-curdling albums (1971’s First Utterance and 1974’s To Keep From Crying), retreated to his woodland bower, lay down in a mossy hollow and went to sleep. Those recordings had been barely understood at the time, their power and strange attraction undeniable, yet somehow they remained too demonic, too priapic, to be embraced by those frightened of the twisted, leering face and the danse macabre melodies. The time of Comus had not yet come.

Before the decade was out, though, the landscape around the forest had changed beyond all recognition, whether through the angry thunderhead of Punk ripping apart Rock’s progressive trajectory, or the emergence of Chaos Magick leading away from the old gods and towards the deepest layers of the unconscious mind. Comus slept on in his secluded glade, through the horrors (and occasionally the triumphs) of the 1980s, on through the rise (and fall) of Dance culture and the eras of Major and Blair, and on into the 21^st century.

And now, four years later, Comus’ first new material in many years arrives in the form of an EP, Out of the Coma. Bearing a cover on which the familiar figure of Comus arises in a mass of and bone and sinew reminiscent of Frank Cotton’s sticky reanimation under the floorboards in Hellraiser, the EP is driven by a desire, described by Roger Wootton (the driving force behind Comus), as “[a feeling by the whole band] that we needed to show that we were not fossilised and that Comus was still a creative act.” It is admirable that the band are not content to exist merely as a museum piece, no matter how well-regarded, and starling that in tone, texture, twisted word and unsettling musical deed, the Comus of Out of the Coma sounds as forbidding as ever he did – age cannot wither him, nor custom stale the four tracks presented here.

“The Sacrifice,” opening in a jangle of pure ringing notes and sweet girlish vocals, takes us straight to Summerisle to hear tell of a failing harvest put right through a blood sacrifice. Animals are fine, as they say, but their acceptability is limited, and next year’s harvest can only be ensured by something more human. Perhaps one of the most authentically ‘folk’ in the Comus canon, the track is filled with almost hummable chords and hysterical twittering flute. “The Return,” written by guitarist Glenn Goring, with arrangements by co-vocalist Bobbie Watson, is a beautiful and mournful lament for a drowned Ophelia, her lover pining by the cursed pool, awaiting the return of his lost lover. The song is nicely complementary to the material written by Wootton, a lighter tone to his darker shade, although no more cheerful in preoccupation. Watson’s singing is truly stunning in places and John Seagroatt’s woodwind offers a small glimpse of redemption by the pool of tears where no creatures reside.

The final track, however, is something slightly special, and worth the price of admission alone. During the summer of 1972 Comus cloistered themselves away in a dusty old village hall in Eynsford, Kent, near to where Wootton was then living, and there in the heat, perched upon battered sofa and old church chairs, gradually and painstakingly shaped their fragments and ideas into an epic two-section song-cycle entitled “The Malgaard Suite” – the story of a young maiden captured by a warlock ogre called Malgaard – and intended as the follow-up to First Utterance. Heartbreakingly, this material was never in the end recorded; the first section was performed live several times, yet, on presentation to the record company, was deemed too uncommercial. Instead it was suggested that a three-minute edit be issued as a single. The second section, completed just before the band broke up in September, was never even performed, let alone recorded. Sic transit Gloria Comus.

The band’s history took a different turn, and “The Malgaard Suite” remained a distant memory, striations of sound hanging forever over the soft, summer haze of forty years ago.

Out of the Coma mixes the best of the band from a time long ago when a ludicrous Tory prime minister was gradually starting to lose the faith of the nation, to some superb new material from a time present when a ludicrous Tory prime minister is gradually starting to lose the faith of the nation. During Comus’ long, long sleep, maybe some things didn’t change quite as much as it seemed.

-David Solomons-

If someone had the bright idea of making a low-budget, crowdsourced skiffy film about Nazis found on the dark side of the moon, which artists should be asked to provide the soundtrack? Laibach, of course – who could be better suited to orchestrate the sound of fucked-up futurist fascism, the SS in space, of the ultimate Nazi holdout story – and so much the better if it’s the darkest of comedies.

So given the opportunity to dole out faux-Völkische oompah lieder, Laibach of course seize the moment, and their particular brand of history-questioning industrial modernism comes to the fore often and with gusto, brazen horn sections meeting trundling beats and swirling Romantic interludes; in other words, the perfect accompaniment to the scenes which are presumably going on as the music sweeps and dives. It’s difficult to divorce the orchestrations from the film, of course, and the occasional snippets of dialogue help give a sense of the flow of the film, as to the titles of individual pieces, some of which contain so many spoilers it’s probably not beneficial to listen to this album before seeing the film itself. Suffice to say, Laibach can whip up a suitably Wagnerian soundtrack – numerous “Ride of the Valkyries” references included – to a space battle better than anyone else given the chance to place tongue firmly in cheek as the high-Gs kick in and the render farm gets its CGI work done.

As with most of Laibach’s oeuvre (as demonstrated at their recent Tate Modern show in London), the film and soundtrack both have serious things to say about the ridiculous nature of the appeal and opportunities for control offered by both apparently utopian narratives (science fictional, operatic, pop or otherwise) and thrillingly visceral music. That and glorying in the opportunity to pastiche with a purpose, to hold Nazi kunst to the mirror of what if? and find it both seductive and ultimately far too familiar.

-Richard Fontenoy-

The sound of two hands not clapping.

This is the latest monster release from the ever-prolific Ekoplekz, this time seeing him flip cassettes from selected live bits and bobs (more bobs than bits, judging from his live performances) to studio improvisations and back again. There’s a wealth of material here, unformed and fruity, mangled like he likes it (like we like it) Echo dominates, nothing goes unmodulated, sounds screwed out of wires, savaged by electrics and misfires (and miswires). It’s perhaps superfluous to focus on individual tracks because these work best in bunches of three to five, like fingers in a fist, with knuckles knotted by knob-twists (the boy’s gonna have arthritis at this rate).

Wonder-ful.

-Loki-

I must admit that the thought of a new release from Gallon Drunk was a bit exciting. Lead singer, guitarist and organist, James Johnston has been a revelation to experience in recent years with Faust, though mostly creating fantastic sounds and noises with his guitar and organ. Terry Edwards comes along as a guest with his saxophone occasionally, creating additional depth to whatever is happening on stage. Gallon Drunk did tour with Lydia Lunch for some time as Big Sexy Noise, and it was as that I saw them live in Germany a couple of years ago. Appearing as a steady rock act, and of course with Lydia Lunch, much is focused on her doings. That aside, Gallon Drunk also did a full set, and I saw what a charismatic singer Johnston also was. The noise and experiments, it seemed, had been put away in the Faust-locker, but the steady refreshing powerful hard rock band was very much alive.

Starting up with the really catchy single “You Made Me” (it literally ran in my head for a while after a couple of spins), which sets the pace for an album that is full of good rock ’n’ roll melodies. But they are not as easygoing all the way through. Rhythm and blues aside, they come on hard and rough, James Johnston spitting out of my speakers, Ian White pounding those drums steady as a rock, and the multi-instrumentalist Terry Edwards colouring the tunes with his sax and bass or percussions (he’s said to be the steadiest maracas player east of the Atlantic). Songs are very well written and arranged, stuffed with layers of sounds and instruments, and some occasional strange noise and feedback appears in the background to fill out the sound image. Songs range from sleazy rock ‘n’ roll guitar fury with saxophonography and boogie to the hypnotic slowing down on final track “The Perfect Dancer.” Additional haunting vocals on a couple of tracks are well done by Marion Andrau from Underground Railroad.

Not to mention that they are nice and friendly people.

-Ronny Wærnes-

I listened to this without looking at, without even seeing the title and it was still the first chimes of Summer. This is Spacemen 3 warm, a kind of druggy depth that might almost be twee if it wasn’t so headstrong, so sure of where it was going. I feel like I’ve spent over a year listening to Autumn and Winter records. The Tory/Lib Dem coalition doesn’t do Summer. Artists have been almost uniformly dragging themselves along the grey, downcast days, making more of geist than zeit, letting music drift away into the dark, into (mere) hauntings and echoes. The best psych folk album of the year (Alexander Tucker’s Third Mouth) mostly turns away from summer hues and even the cleaner, sharper ends of electronica (Rustie et al) seem headed towards caverns of frost and tunnels of ice…

You probably won’t be surprised by this record, and in this case I don’t think this is a bad thing. Despite the fact they’ve been away for ages (I could look it up but then maybe a fairy would die), they sound like they’ve just kept going. If anything, this sounds more like their influences than they ever did and this time most of their influences are literally here as well: bits of Galaxie 500, Luna, Seefeel, Spacemen 3… There’s a …cosiness about this that I like despite sort of hating that term and normally preferring, er, Coseyness (Jesus, sorry). Everyone seems to be having great fun, even when they’re pitch-shifting down The Go Gos “Our Lips Are Sealed” into some slurred trip hop nightmare (doesn’t beat the Fun Boy Three version, though). There’s a predictable cover of Suicide’s “Cheree” which is unpredictable only in the sense that it’s probably my favourite version of the song (and it’s against some pretty stiff competition); it drifts in and out of consciousness, slipping by on (I guess) lazer guided melodies. Beautiful, even for an old guy like me who thought they were drained by that song.

Be lazy. The revolution will come a little later, this year.

-Loki-

Snoring into view, Francisco López‘ umpteen-hundredth record (many of them untitled, and here each track is unnamed and numbered instead) crepitates and crunches, rustles, whistles and sussurates with the close-mic’d presence of musique concrète, up close and present in the ears. López’ attention to detail is almost disturbingly intimate, sound sidling, shuffling and creeping around the stereo image. Across two discs of supremely directed environmental manipulations and software arrangements, the overall effect is one which is replete with moments of intensity, a full-fat repast of sonic flavours which tickle the palette and satisfy cravings for the sort of sounds found lurking at the back of the fridge (in the machinery, crackling, and in the ice box, squeezing) before hissing flatulently into overloaded, satiated oblivion.

To listen to this on headphones in an otherwise silent environment is the pure form of its assimilation, doubtlessly; to have it on a personal stereo in a public place is an altogether more random experience. Blending spluttering granular synthesis with the dynamic onbound rush and curving rumble of an intercity train, where the exterior thrum of the engine and the quotidian chatter of the passengers rubs up against the sound of what could be a box of nuts and bolts being shaken, then stirred, is a particularly apposite combination; to bring in the hurly-burly vigour of more public transport is more often a losing battle for López, though one not without its synchronic moments of incongruous enjoyment. In both circumstances, the blurring of the lines between interior and exterior soundscapes is one to pique and stimulate the listener (and it had better be, otherwise the choice of listening is probably be left to more dominant forms of music where the outside can be overridden more easily; though admittedly some of the latter sections of disc two do a very good job of blotting out – or perhaps absorbing and assimilating – competing sound sources through the sheer force of their spectrum-covering sonic accretions) – and where the leakage of sound from less contained earpieces might impinge in their own recursive fashion upon the wider world.

-Linus Tossio-

It had been raining solid for 24 hours. The streets of London were filled with a babbling brook of water that the sodden masses had to navigate to stop them from getting drenched further and all the while more fell from the sky to dampen peoples Saturday night.

As I entered The Borderline the place was already beginning to fill out early. The word was out that Purson were hot and people gathered to see what the fuss was about. I had already heard them as I had managed to find a copy of their limited single on Rise Above and was looking forward to finally seeing the band live, and they didn’t disappoint.

From the opening chords of “Wool” you could already tell you were about to witness something special, the guitars sang melodically while flute sounds played from the keyboard – it was like suddenly being transported back to 1971 and being on the set of Simon, King of the Witches. By the time the band hit “Spiderwood Farm” they are really happening, Rosalie Cunningham’s vocals and lead guitar playing soaring as the audience stand transfixed, like a high priestess at a sabat she held court over the crowd watching. The single “Rocking Horse” plied deep pagan depths as the organ sound now began to rise and the bass and drums pounded out to the damp, dark night. “Twos and Ones” carried on this momentum and sounded like a stroll through darkened trees on an autumnal evening. By the time the band hit their final song, “Sapphire Ward,” you were already wanting them to stay and play another song or two, to transport you back to that late Sixties, early Seventies occult rock vibe that meant mystery and musicality, that was danced to by satyrs in the wild wood. Catch them they the next time they bring their prog/doom/pagan rock close to you, they are a must.

The Fusion Orchestra 2 hit the stage with a bang and from the start of their first track you could see already what fantastic musicians they are. Their sound – a mixture of Seventies progressive rock and jazz – made your ears jump up and listen to their complex melodies. Colin Dawson’s guitar was as fluid as a stream over some masterful Hammond organ playing. The bass and drums tackled the different time signatures with ease and all the while Elsie Lovelock’s vocals sang heavenward crisp and clearly as if calling to the thunderous clouds outside to part. At times I found the sound similar to that of the first two Yes albums and then again similarly to Magma they could transport you to another time and place.

As I strolled out of the venue I realised I had been to very special kind of evening with three bands that perfectly complemented each other and took your imagination somewhere special. The rain still hammered down and the brook had now turned into a river but now I was crossing it with the music of the ages ringing in my ears.

-Gary Parsons-

Twenty plus years and albums into the long strange trip that is Circle, Manner confirms that they are still a seriously out there band, whose œuvre can encompass punky noise and proggish metal with equal dexterity, a group who are never less than tight and whose playfulness is as convincing as their steely-eyed commitment to the very meaning of rock. This is the band who spearheaded the ever so slightly sardonically-yet-righly-named New Wave of Finnish Heavy Metal, who keep their faces poker straight even while ramming tongue firmly into cheek. Yes, singer/keyboardist/occasional ballet stooge Mika Rättö does dress as leatherman’s wet dream of a Rob Halford wannabe while singing like a demented cross between Ronnie James Dio and Freddy Mercury at his most operatic, but none of those are bad qualities when possessed by Circle. Man-mountain Jussi Lehtisalo is on bass, of course, a Nordic legend made flesh and lung-crushing bone, while Tomi Leppänen‘s unobtrusively pinpoint drumming operates at the point where Jaki Liebezeit crosses over onto the metronomic side of motorik metal. And there really are three guitarists, all of them frequently playing together.

The swagger on offer is born of confidence, and Manner slips into place easily as yet another essential Circle release in a catalogue jam-packed with gems. Listening to it over and again, its jawdropping combination of bravado and monster technique is presented with equal amounts of surprisingly modest pride and outrageous showmanship in evidence, proclaiming (loudly and clearly): this is Circle, and this is what they do.

-Linus Tossio-

In the days following the Laibach “We Come in Peace” show at The Tate Modern it is Mina Špiler’s singing of “Across the Universe” that stays on permanent replay in my head. Such a beautiful nearly acapella lullaby she made of the ominous lyrics, both promise and threat that nothing is ever going to change in this or any universe. Her clear little voice a fantastic bell ringing softly in contrast to the super power sound of the rest of this gig; she so delicately poised over her little keyboard and slightly trembling. Not one other Laibach song of the evening impressed itself upon me so, or equalled the nervous tension, the fragility of music, life as we know it or these trying times.

There is the stag’s head, in shadowy silhouette fronting the stage. That’s it, all that would mark out the Laibach branding. There is a beginning with some rather chirpy klezmer-type music being played whilst a giant screen behind shows us grainy films of frightened gypsy families, unwashed children backing away in obvious fear from a threat we can only imagine. Cheerful music fading away to a reveal of dark militaristic march beats and images of the weak fading into symbol heavy propaganda type flashes of what most of us will associate with Nazi-style promotion, clever to never be specifically this or that. I think, “OK, here is the Laibach I recognize, here comes the showy part.”

During the performance there are other aspects, familiar old Laibach anthems, sing-a-longs- with and without stomping, the pig-man with his fierce grunting oddity, clips from their films and the one they’ve sound-tracked. Again and again I think of the responsibility Laibach shirks in their attempt to either promote or squash fascism, one can never be sure where they are really coming from and I get the impression they like it like that. Are we supposed to be indoctrinated into evil through all the forthright and subliminal messaging systems or is it all to be diffused into insignificance by sheer boredom of repetition? Should we be concerned about the impressionable youth who might attend and take it all to heart or worry for ourselves who may be too old and blasé to recognize the infiltration of our tired minds? “Times are changing, memories are fading. Another chance to tell you belong to me.”

Finally though, it is the quality of the pure voices, his and hers which have impressed me. I am still humming that tune. Still the stag’s head stands.

-Maryna Fontenoy-

(pics: Pete Woodhead)