By Christine Natanael
LINKS:
I sent my queries via the wonderous internet to Laibach. Below is their return transmission.
CHRISTINE NATANAEL: When did you first formulate the idea for the concept behind the album VOLK? Was it something you had been thinking of for a while, or was it a spontaneous creative extension of a discussion about current nationalistic aggressive events as they relate to past nationalistic aggressive events and the politics behind them?
LAIBACH: First we wanted to do this record approximately 10 years ago, but somehow the picture was not yet clear enough. We were always interested in pop culture and in relation between culture and politics. We were fascinated with the idea of an anthem, a song entire nation identifies with emotionally, singing it from the heart. VOLK is dealing with such relation between pop/folk culture and politics therefore we decided to base songs on national anthems, which we first of all consider great pop songs.
CN: What was the criteria you used to decide which countries and anthems that you would re-work? Obviously, we are looking at nations that all have aggressive tendencies as well as imperialistic, fascistic, and dictatorial natures. So, having also said that, which was top of the list, and why?
L: Nations were chosen by their historic context and their role within political and cultural imperialism. The main criterion was the expansive, imperial character of a nation-state. Although we could easily add few more countries (Belgian, Portugal, Suisse, Sweden, maybe Arabian Emirates…) we decided only for the most aggressive ones, those who still think they play the major role in the world and those who actually are doing it so.
CN: How did you decide to work with SILENCE (Boris Benko and Primoz Hadnik) on this album?
L: Silence is a brilliant musical duet from Ljubljana. Since we heard their music for the first time, we wanted to invite them in a joint project. With VOLK we have created a concept where their expression would fit perfectly and such collaboration would make a good sense. Most of national anthems have male and female character, emotional and militant side; we wanted Silence to create the female, emotional part and Laibach was taking care for the rest. Silence accepted the invitation, they did great work on the record and they definitely helped us to create the album the way we wanted it to sound.
CN: How did you decide which guests to have featured on VOLK?
L: It came along the process while we were doing songs. We made decisions together with Silence and we took what we could get.
CN: Describe your working process, musically, since you were not composing organically from a zero starting point, but were working instead with definitively recognizable source material. Was this restrictive or a more difficult process than creating your own compositions?
L: Not at all; the source material gave us a frame, we just had to interpret the picture within. Composing process is always a complex procedure. The most intense is the process of getting the right idea in the head and then getting it out of head during the recording. Therefore we meet & talk a lot before we decide about the basic idea of the album. We follow the principle of dialectic materialism – thesis, antithesis, synthesis. For VOLK the initial idea came with the previous album, titled ANTHEMS. First we have collected information about the original national anthems, comparing different versions and recordings. Than we forgot everything for a while and when we finally started to work on songs we followed our instincts and let material leading us into its own directions. Music came by itself.
CN: What has been the reaction from the governments and media of and in the countries whose anthems you have interpreted?
L: No hard feelings yet. For now. Some countries were disappointed not to be included.
CN: I greatly enjoyed the presentation of the VOLK CD in the hardback book format with the CD in a sleeve in the back and the illustrations all in watercolor. This format reminded me of a book that my great-grandmother gave me when I was a child. It had sleeves in the back with 78rpm records that told the story of The Grasshopper and The Ant, and the illustrations on the pages went along with the story. How did the NSK members come up with the idea to present this CD in a retro storybook design?
L: Design of the album is for us equally important as the music itself. It illustrates the content therefore it is a part of it and only with it we are getting the complete story. The word “volk” in Slovenian and other Slavic languages for instance actually means “wolf” and looking through wolves’ eyes folk very probably look like sheep... Bucolic water color images of wolfs and sheep are partly frightening and partly idyllic – depending on the viewpoints. On symbolic level they evoke and illustrate the dual character of the national anthems, which are more or less all based on 18th century “Blut und Boden” ideology. But this is of course only one possible interpretation.
CN: Are you planning a US tour, and given the current
hyper-paranoid nature of our immigration and border policies, do you believe
you will be given a hard time entering our country or touring here because
of the nature of the content of VOLK?
L: We would love to do a US tour but unfortunately America is further and further away from Europe and for groups like Laibach it is getting more and more difficult to come over. Eventually we’ll find the way. We always do.
CN: Would you like to open an NSK Passport office here in NYC or the US and if so, what do you believe would be the most fitting and likely place to do so?
L: In fact there was a temporary NSK Passport office in NYC in the past already. Ideal place to establish new one today would be Ground Zero, UN, or at least SALON DE FLEURUS (click here for salon de fleurus).
CN: Laibach has, throughout its career, alternately been accused of far left and far right political stances because of its use of uniforms, totalitarian style, aesthetics, Wagnerian influences in its music, its use of artwork by the Communist and early Dada artist/satirist John Heartfield, and the fact that its concerts have sometimes aesthetically appeared as political rallies. Do you feel these condemnations are more a case of Laibach holding up a great mirror to certain ideologies and actions, and those who identify themselves in that reflection not really liking the fact that you are pointing out their bad behavior?
L: We don’t mind such accusations; Laibach cannot be offended and does not need to defend itself. We are not against interpretations, but they usually tell more about the interpreter than about us. Anyway - for us every interpretation is “right” and basically correct, specially the “wrong ones”. With every rational interpretation in poetry songs are more and more vanishing, therefore please - let us be ‘misunderstood’!
CN: You’ve done many controversial covers during your career, in 1988 you released the entirety of the Beatles album Let It Be in your own inimitable style, as well as, that same year, your deconstruction of The Rolling Stones “Sympathy For the Devil” on an EP of the same name in seven different versions. You’ve also covered, “Life Is Life” (a cover of Austrian band Opus’s “Live is Life”) and “Geburt einer Nation” (a cover of Queen’s “One Vision”) on the 1987 album Opus Dei, Europe’s “The Final Countdown” on 1994’s NATO, and more recently, Rammstein’s “Ohne Dich”. What criteria do you use to choose the songs you are going to cover and rework? Are you planning on choosing any for the new record?
L: We never covered Rammstein – they invited us to do a remix of their song which we did. We only ‘uncovered’ them. Otherwise we use very different methods when we decide to “cover” a song. In fact we are not doing cover versions but re-makes and reinterpretations. We are adopting and recycling the »original« material and – instead of making copies and plain cover versions – we produce new ‘original’ material with new content and meaning. The process is a basically a question of alchemy and most of the times it happens unintentionally. Our criteria in choosing songs are very flexible. We are mainly interested in those ones whose content is hiding a certain schizophrenic character of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Usually we don’t even search for songs much; the right ones simply find us by themselves.
CN: News is you’re going to release another new CD. Have you started any writing or pre-production work on the next album yet?
L: We’ve
got few ideas in the ‘oven’ but it’s too soon to ‘bake
a cake’.