This is so perfectly dystopian. From Commissioned Music (1995).
“This was Blixa Bargeld’s first solo album, where he positioned himself as an independent artist beyond the context of Einstürzende Neubauten – as a musician with an extraordinary feeling for sounds and their effects, with a bold sense of design and a strong intuition for the complex relationship between visual and musical inventions.”
Watch this brilliant film in English HERE.
Animation by Steve Cutts, looking at humanity’s relationship with the natural world.
Music: “In the Hall of the Mountain King” by Edvard Grieg.
“Liars rule the world…”
“Treason” and “End Beginnings” — tracks from the album End Beginnings (Shifty, 1991). This is the sound of South Africa in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Of course, I never got to hear this until years later.
Music: Warrick Sony
Words and voice: Lesego Rampolokeng
Download this album HERE.
From one of the most arresting albums of the twentieth century, Maxinquaye (Island Records, 1995). I bought this CD in my final year of high school, and spent hours and hours in its company over the next few years, lying prone, alone, on the floor, curtains drawn, drowning. The album’s fractured claustrophobia felt so exactly right for the time, particularly in South Africa… its heart of darkness festering quietly while the rainbow nationalist rhetoric raged outside.
“It was the most bizarre record I’ve ever worked on,” says Mark Saunders about Maxinquaye, the 1995 Tricky album that, with the exception of the previously released singles ‘Aftermath’ and ‘Ponderosa’, he co-produced with the artist, in addition to taking care of the engineering, programming and mixing. “It was a complete un-learning experience and it was also a total re-learning experience. Think of how to make a record, then forget everything you’ve learned and start completely backwards and upside down. I could write a book about Tricky. He’s such a great character.”
Read more about the highly unorthodox way in which Maxinquaye was made, HERE.
“Everyone in the World Is Doing Something Without Me” and “My Kingdom”, from the 1996 release on Astralwerks, Dead Cities. The quintessential sound of nineties dystopia.
fleurmach 