Chamber Music
Leichenschrei by SPK
Oh boy oh boy oh boy, I got a huge blast from the past today. Last week I ordered from Amazon.uk a CD copy of a little record I used to own, which I grew up with and spent most of my late teens absolutely fascinated by; "Leichenschrei" by Socialistisches Patienten Kollectiv or SPK. This record is a little beauty; the title translates to "corpse screams", an accurate picture of the audio content - a mad rush down a dismembered-body stuffed bolt-hole to HELL. All your latter day "dark music" and experimental-noise pretenders know nothing compared to what is on this record. Forty-three (43) minutes of pure aural noise assault, a bad acid trip accompanied by the incidental soundtrack to a 18th century battlefield surgery set in a dysfunctional iron foundry run by lunatics, and visualised for a dispassionately narrated US Army medical description of the results of torture. There are is little in the way of compromise here; nothing remotely resembles pop music, all is non-stop assault. Released in 1982, this record is the forerunner to a long history of industrial music that was to follow; dark noise experiments, experimental synthesiser music, "EBM", it's all here. More focussed than fellow "industrial" music luminaries Throbbing Gristle, less prone than that group to psychedelic noodling, and a thousand times as bleak, one gets the impression rather than a bohemian carnival of insanity that TG managed to project, SPK's music is the very embodiment of the insane.
Track listing
-
Genetic Transmission
Post-Morten
Desolation
Napalm (Terminal Patient)
Cry from the Sanatorium
Baby Blue Eyes
Israel
Internal Bleeding
Chamber Music
Despair
The Agony of the Plasma
Day of Pigs
Wars of Islam
Maladia Europa