Fad Gadget Retrospective

Last week saw the London launches of the new Fad Gadget 2CD/2DVD box set issued by Mute. Watching the documentary and seeing the range of people present, FG's influence on electronic pop(ular) music was more obvious than ever. The rich selection of live performances from the early to mid eighties finally give a chance to see why these shows were so influential and talked about. The CD tracks are a fairly obvious selection of career highlights, but the demo tracks are worth listening to for an understanding of Tovey's earliest efforts. If well selected, what might be interesting now would be a remix album or some vinyl issues with contemporary artists taking on FG tracks. In any case, this collection is a useful document cementing FG's place in the history of electronic music (and of course of Mute).

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Talk at Ausstellung Laibach Kunst, Łódź, 23rd June

I will be giving a talk on ‘Laibach Kunst and the Art of Total Non-Alignment’at the exhibition on June 23 rd at 6pm. Codex Europa and Wiktor Skok will DJ in an industrial vein afterwards. This Polish site has a short film which has a clip from the opening performance , similar to the one given at I.C.R.N.’s RoTr event in 2006. Read more here about this major exhibition, which presents the most comprehensive overview of Laibach Kunst works yet staged.

4th Annual Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture 2021 recording

Thanks to all who watched the event on Friday, we all enjoyed it and were really pleased with the response, we were only sorry not to have more time for questions and discussion. Ludmilla Andrews did a great job of executing the film at great speed in lockdown conditions. My commentary for the film was written in haste over the New Year and recorded in the following week. It's a snapshot of the transition from 2020 to 2021 through the prism of Test Dept's work and Fisher's response to it.

Doctor Who and the Death Factory at Noise=Noise, June 8th.

Montage by Vera Bremerton. Next Friday I'll give an experimental presentation at Noise=Noise on the strange parallels between the sonic and conceptual dystopianism of Doctor Who and first generation British industrial music. Dr. Who exposed mass audiences (often very young) to a combination of experimental electronic sound and dystopian themes, a combination that could also summarise industrial music. Dr. Who frequently presented post-apocalyptic scenarios of mutation, mind control and para-militarised societies and, in the process, at least implicitly criticised actual political and technological developments of the time, particularly those associated with the Cold War arms race. Due to budgetary constraints these visionary scenarios were often realised in a rudimentary ad hoc fashion; an approach that also applies to industrial. The early industrial groups highlighted the most serious social and political themes using very primitive electronic equipment, creating a kind of

Plural Machine

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