Genocide Organ
Remember

If Americans were consistent, they should bomb Genocide Organ as possessors of weapons of mass destruction. Or as weapons of mass destruction themselves.

Authentic rogue artists, Genocide Organ have represented for over twenty years (they took their first steps way back in 1986!) the most vivid example of what we can mean by the label power-noise, a dark territory where the original industrial tradition of Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, and White House merges with the bombardment electronics of NoN and Merzbow: Genocide Organ circumscribe in the outline of a bloody barbed wire a crowd of humanoids exalted before the furious rally of a bloodthirsty dictator, while bombs fall from the sky, rubble clutters the streets, and corpses hang mutilated from the power line poles.

":Remember:" tells the story of the seminal German combo by gathering as many as 27 live tracks selected from a handful of performances held between 1989 and 2000: a double live anthology of massive duration (almost 2 and a half hours!) to describe what it means to be sound terrorists.

Deadly bass lines, screeching drones, almost nullified rhythms: except for the creaky sampled monologues used as interludes, Genocide Organ's music is a Niagara of vitriolic sounds in which the sonic layers overlap generating dissonant crescendos with unbearable tension for mind and ears. The declamatory vehemence of the distorted voices completes the picture: soliloquies in chaos, vulgar screams amplified by rusty megaphones that shatter against the violence of the words, while smoke bombs fog the view and batons crack skulls.

Accused from time to time of being right-wing extremists, left-wing extremists, racists, warmongers, instigators of hate, Genocide Organ actually represent a coherent project: the faithful transposition of the world's filth, "constatative" non-music that stands outside of any ideological connotation. The protagonists themselves, not inclined to provide explanations, prefer to bask in ambiguity: "We have never said what we think, and we never believe what we say, and if by mistake we happen to tell the truth, we bury it in so many lies that in the end it is difficult to recognize it."

Or also: "Everything is as it is, and nothing is as it should be."  

So much provocation, therefore, at the base of Genocide Organ's proposal (and how could it be otherwise?, industrial was born precisely to break patterns, destabilize minds, and push everything beyond the limit of human decency?).

And if Genocide Organ do not take a clear position, it is their music that takes it for them: theirs in fact becomes an opera of representation, where facts speak for themselves, without the need for a mediator to convey the content. The underlying thesis thus lies only in the selection of sources from which to draw and to inspire, at a lyrical level like an iconographic one (and those who have had the misfortune to undergo them live know it): atrocities, tortures, wars, devastations, genocides, a red thread that crosses all corners of the globe, from the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century to the alleged democracies of today. And it is in this calculated equidistance from right and left, in this focusing on the rotten core of human nature, that truly make Genocide Organ terrible, witnesses, and disseminators of something that survives the peculiarities of different societies and cultures, and the various phases of history.

"Dogday", "Patria y Libertad", "Vive la Guerre", "Und sie Hatten Noch die Frechheit zu Weinen", "Klaus Barbie", "Hail Amerika", "Klan Kountry" "Cause Conflict" speak to us in every language of the same hate, the same brutality, the same subjugation of man over man.

Far from any desire to pander to and legitimize the low instincts that permeate human nature, Genocide Organ are a sad orchestra that bans every hypocrisy and slaps in the face what we try to repress in the collective unconscious, excluding (rightly or wrongly) any theoretical possibility of absolute redemption, of total emancipation of the human species from its bestiality.

Or is it actually all a cynical critique of the system?

This too is a hypothesis among others. As irrelevant as the others.

For this reason, ":Remember:", as remarkable as it is, is not the album you will merrily consume along the path of your colorful existence; rather it will be the one to consume you.  

":Remember:" is the album to listen to once a year: naturally during that one time you must be ready to face the worst, but if you find yourself in the right frame of mind and ears (and with the insane desire to throw the stereo in the toilet!), what sublime visions will arise from your broken mind!

5 stars for intransigence. 4 stars for the respect we owe to our ears, which, after all, also serve us for something, and for this, they should be sacrificed with a minimum of awareness.

But in this case, I'd say it's really worth it.