Lydia Lunch
13.13

In 1981 the Siamese Queen left her throne to walk down a dark path with no return and no hope. As the Anti-Sound Priestess par excellence, she had already sacrificed all possible Myths on the altar of Rock'n'Roll. Nothing remained but the total Nothing: sinking into a black hole of indistinct spaces without time, not even the remains and carcasses of those Myths were left.

Teenage Jesus & The Jerks had been the roar, the explosion, the atomic disaster. Of what existed before, not even the memory remained: away with Patti Smith, away with Punk, away with Rimbaud, away with Verlaine (in both possible senses: Poet and Guitarist...). Away with the flame of "Horses" and the Dionysian fury of "Radio Ethiopia", away also with the last gasps of life from a '77 now a million kilometers away and (despite the real time elapsed) at least as many years. Make room for nightmares, for death, for sleep without awakening.

Her Highness Lydia today claims to feel horror for that soulless and emotionless body that was the SHE of that time. And in the mouth of Someone who sang about horror (and wrote about it) in all its deviations, it holds a certain meaning. But those early '80s reserved something even more terrifying than the Lydia-No Wave, the one New York had discovered in the one-minute explosions of the "Teenage Jesus". Namely: her most inhuman side, the chilling indifference of someone who looks that horror in the face and enacts it with the ruthless apathy of a monster.

For this reason, "13.13" is a TERRIFYING Album in the highest sense of the term. The symptoms that may accompany the first hearing are nausea, disgust, extreme suffering. And a revolting sense of suffocation. The monster expresses itself in the language of a disorienting and protracted lullaby, in the deformed sounds of a long slog through a tunnel with no exit or lights. All black, all damnably soulless. An incurable chronic malaise.

This album took "shape" in California, almost emphasizing the distance that separated it from the New York days and the entry into a new - aseptic - environment. Against which background emerges, vaguely, the profile of another QUEEN of Darkness: Siouxsie. And indeed, in "13.13" there is perhaps more England (the sound of the guitar is eloquent) than America. And Berlin, too: in the horrifying (even from the title) and icy piano interlude of "Dance Of The Dead Children", the most deathly side of the future Bad Seeds already resonates well in advance. But the pagan cult of the Sioux doll and the desecrated Elvis that was King Ink's obsession is replaced by a cosmic nihilism that allows for no symbols or fetishes. An obsessive cloud of total negativity.

"Nothing to do or say".

Nothing.

Except to listen to the mind explode and face the abyss of "Stares To Nowhere", or rather let the ears resonate with the beat of a bass rarely so dark and sinister - that of Greg Williams in "3x3". Straining to scream but finding no tongue ("This Side Of Nowhere"), seeking a way out in the awareness of already being entombed alive. Feelings erased and pulverized, even love transformed into violence that humiliates and buries every day more ("Snakepit Breakdown"). And ghosts that populate the midnight of "Suicide Ocean", evoked precisely by Her (Lydia, the monster), Suicide's adopted daughter, always in dialogue with Suicide. Reserving time to weep tears of blood soon evaporated and swept away like ashes after the fire ("Lock Your Door", over drumming pilfered by Cliff Martinez for "Come Together") and waiting for the horror to flare up, finally, bestial and uncontrollable ("Afraid Of Your Company", a seal - or a tombstone...? ).

"I could close my eyes and sleep forever,

locked inside this secret silence..."