 The 1820 book Death in the Pot: A Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons, by the German-born and London-based chemist Friedrich Accum, was written to help consumers detect adulterated food sold as genuine. At the time, dangerous food practices that exposed people to economic frauds were widespread in the UK market, and profit-driven business owners who sold counterfeit food as genuine used additives that contained substances harmful to health. His methods could help detect whether the tea of a particular seller, for example, was genuine or just grass, which had been laid on sheets of copper to give it a golden hue and make it look like tea. They could also help detect a toxic, bleaching additive called alum, which was used to adulterate bread and make it appear whiter, allowing the baker to spend less on whiter flour, but charge more for it in the shop.
The album A Story of A Global Disease (2022) by Marseille-born and Brussels-based musician Naomie Klaus also relates to fake things that are made to seem genuine. It is based on an idea about the Japanese Tower in Brussels and the Japanese Gardens that surround it. The Japanese Tower was constructed during 1901-1904 by orders of King Leopold II of Belgium, who had admired a similar tower, a Japanese pagoda, at an international world fair of commerce, the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris, and purchased it immediately. The King then asked the French architect Alexander Marcel to modify it and re-build it for him in the gardens of his Royal Palace in Brussels. When it was completed, he promised to transfer it to the nation after his death, so when he died in 1909, it passed to the Belgian state.
The album was recorded during the recent pandemic for the project ‘On the Go’ by a Brussels arts organisation. The project invited artists to share art with the public, while restrictions were still in place, by making music to accompany walks throughout Brussels. Klaus decided to write music for a walk in the park around the Japanese Tower. Today, the Japanese Tower is administered by a public organisation within the City of Brussels authority which uses it as a museum, the Museum of the Far East. Visitors can admire not just the architecture and the surrounding gardens, but also the building’s decorative elements, including furniture and stained-glass windows, and a collection of art objects relating to the Belgian-Japanese relations throughout the years of cultural and economic exchange between the two countries.
Klaus herself describes the album as a collection of songs about ‘the artificial paradises of globalisation’. Using a range of electronic equipment to filter voice, drum-kits, and trigger synths, she expands on the idea that copies of famous cultural artefacts – like the Japanese Tower – can be enjoyed as exotic spectacles outside of the country they were made, to talk about global communication, free trade, and the problems of a consumer society. Songs such as ‘Can I Be Your Gheisha?’, ‘Crocodile Skin Shoes’, ‘Tourism Workers’, and ‘Can You Tell Me What Is Micronet?’, question the idea that the world is a tightly-woven international community with strong cultural and economic links (through international exhibitions or festivals and inter-governmental trade agreements).
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 After its appearance as a musical work in live performances in the 2010s (i.e. Dark Mofo festival, Grotowski Institute, etc.), and as an art installation in 2020 at New York’s Fridman Gallery online and in 2022 in Germany and Portugal for in-person audiences, ‘Broken Gargoyles’ was released as an album in August 2022. The album, however, is neither the soundtrack to the installation, nor a recording of the musical performance.
With a booklet containing illustrations of paintings, photographs and poems, Broken Gargoyles (2022) is more than a music release. Diamanda Galás has included in the booklet four illustrations of her own paintings (there were sixteen in her installation), pre-WW1 German poetry, both in the original language and the English translation, and eleven images of wounded First World War soldiers with damaged faces, taken from a 1924 illustrated book compiled and published by the German activist and pacifist Ernst Friedrich.
The reason why Galás merges these textual, visual and audio elements is that they had been used separately for years – in isolation from each other. So, with Broken Gargoyles (2022) she re-connects them. This allows her not only to re-establish the links that existed between them, but also to create new links between the historical material and some contemporary elements (her photographic portraits, taken by Robert Knoke and Austin Young, and her music). In the 2020 installation, Galás had also included film.
But the linking of all these artefacts is more of a protest against the forces that un-linked, or separated, them, and the forces that kept them apart throughout the years. In this sense, Galás engages with the separation of the arts, or the tendency to place strict barriers between different art forms. This is a widespread phenomenon in our time. We have, for example, music magazines, art magazines, poetry magazine, and so on, in which music, art, poetry, or any other art form, is discussed separately, in isolation from the other arts.
Separating the arts, and cutting off the links that exist between them, can be problematic. The arts are different forms of expression, so if we work using a single art form, we cannot provide the whole picture of a given subject. In other words, we do not tell the whole story to our audiences.
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Somewhere in Berlin during a cold and foggy winter: Hyboid is recording his album “Sequencing the Apocalypse” directly to a 2-track recorder, using analog synthesizers and a couple of old effects units. Raw and no-frills. Influenced by the great French and German pioneers of the 70s, this is a soundtrack for dystopian minds in dystopian times!
LP / Digital Album
DKA is starting 2023 off with an EBM bang with Violent Protocol by Semantix. The solo-project of Keaton Khonsari (Razorbumps, Narrow Head), Semantix is the result of years in the Texas underground that Khonsari spent learning synthesis and production.
Violent Protocol contains 5 originals and three remixes from DKA alumni Balvanera and Autumns along with Orlando’s Mother Juno. Violent Protocol’s catchy, rhythmic basslines, tense atmosphere, and old-school EBM samples confronting despair, violence, and power structures will surely appeal to long time followers of DKA and new fans alike. We here at DKA loved Semantix’s first release Mania in the Psychosphere and feel that this sophomore release will place Semantix amongst EBM’s elite dance floor destructors in 2023.
Cassette / Digital Album
Roberto Auser is a musician and artist from the Netherlands. Providing oasis in the Babylon of information.
7″ / Digital Album
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The 1820 book Death in the Pot: A Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons, by the German-born and London-based chemist Friedrich Accum, was written to help consumers detect adulterated food sold as genuine. At the time, dangerous food practices that exposed people to economic frauds were widespread in the UK market, and profit-driven business owners who sold counterfeit food as genuine used additives that contained substances harmful to health. His methods could help detect whether the tea of a particular seller, for example, was genuine or just grass, which had been laid on sheets of copper to give it a golden hue and make it look like tea. They could also help detect a toxic, bleaching additive called alum, which was used to adulterate bread and make it appear whiter, allowing the baker to spend less on whiter flour, but charge more for it in the shop.