“Boyd’s rather unimaginative sadism used to embarrass me, but then he explained it using words like ‘Weltanschauung'”
Lisa Crystal-Carver, Drugs are Nice [LC, p215]

I last saw Boyd Rice play (as ‘Non’) back in August 1981, alongside Throbbing Gristle (TG), Z’ev, Cabaret Voltaire and Clock DVA as part of the ‘Industrial Night Out’ at the Lyceum, London, which brought together the big cheeses of Industrial Music in what was to be something of a coming out party for the scene but turned out also to be its swansong (it was TG’s last UK concert; they broke up a few months later). At the time Rice presented himself as a Dadaist and prankster though his aesthetic was actually closer to the sub-Futurist ‘instant karma for kids’ noise-racket that Merzbow has since successfully appropriated and turned into a brand / ‘racket’ of his own. While TG boasted of making music from ugly noise, Rice tried to outflank them by serving up the ugliness directly, unfiltered by any obvious concern for form. In fairness Boyd Rice could be said to be among the key players of early Industrial Music, and as a result he perhaps has a shade more kudos than some of the complete musical non-entities we’re generally concerned with around here (Wakeford, Pearce, Moynihan, et al). Rice has declared his Fascism in a number of statements, in his art, and through public actions such as appearing in full Fascist regalia and holding a dagger in a photograph alongside Bob Heick, taken in 1989 to promote the latter’s organisation, the neo-Nazi skinhead party, American Front. He has also appeared on White Aryan Resistance founder Tom Metzger’s cable TV show Race and Reason, where he declared that his friends in Current 93 and Death in June were promoting a ‘racialist’ agenda and emphasised the importance of Industrial and Neo-Folk music for building the ‘Aryan youth movement’.
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The brand new Almanac for Noise & Politics 2016 (release date May 28, 2016) is made up of a total of five sections that go into depth on some topics previously examined in datacide. Some of the texts have been previously published, some are new and exclusive or translations.

The first section compiles material about and by Nomex, noise artist and film maker, including a discography of his label Adverse.

The second section consists of two critiques of the Left from a communist point of view, one targeting the knee-jerk anti-Imperialism still prevalent in many sections of the Left, the other is an excerpt from a critique of anarchism by Luther Blissett.

The third section is concerned with our ongoing investigations and denouncements of far Right infiltration in popular culture. We see this as an integral part of antifascist activity. Featured here is the article From Subculture to Hegemony – Transversal Strategies of the New Right in Neofolk and Martial Industrial by Christoph Fringeli from datacide eleven.

Part 4 consists of an appraisal of the Vision label which CF ran out of Basel, Switzerland in 1986-1992. The main text is an edited English translation of a contribution to the book Heute und danach by Lurker Grand and André P. Tschan, which appeared in 2012. As it is 30 years ago now that the first Vision appeared it makes sense to document this pre-history of Praxis, which was founded in 1992 after Vision was disbanded.

To illustrate this further and make a connection to the present we reprint Die Menschenhauttrommel (the human skin drum) by Alex Buess from the Vision zine Flash Team Report (Vision 18) from 1988.

The final part of this almanac is a catalogue of our exclusive titles, back issues of datacide and available books.

From the booklet ‘The Unconquered Sun’. London: Sol Books, 1989

When this travelling correspondent examined, as she habitually does, the bargain basement boxes of a second hand CD and record shop in the English seaside town where she sought refuge from a heatwave designed to punish mankind for its sins, she came across Sol Veritas Lux, a CD containing the first two LPs by a band called Sol Invictus. As she had read about this outfit (in datacide, but chiefly on the web pages of Who Makes the Nazis)1 but had never actually heard their music she thought it not excessive to invest one (currently, though, very expensive) pound Sterling on some enlightenment in this murky area. The bandleader of the (in spite of the Latin name) very English ‘Invincible Sun’ is Tony Wakeford,2 a man who has asserted in numerous interviews and statements that he is not (anymore) a member of a fascist party (he had at a time been a member of the National Front) without ever, though, being very clear about why not. (I mention this because people leave parties or other rackets either because they have a change of heart about the ideas, ideals, goals, values involved, or because they find the respective party or racket fails to serve these ideas well enough. In the absence of any substantive evidence suggesting otherwise, it has to be assumed Wakeford’s is the second case: in various interviews with fanzines that are available on the internet he only ever makes comments that imply a critique of how the fascist party he was in operated, but nothing substantive concerning fascism as such.)3 ‘Sol Veritas Lux’ consists of ‘Against the Modern World’, the 1988 debut album of Sol Invictus and a follow up live album originally released shortly thereafter, ‘In the Jaws of the Serpent’,4 containing some of the same and some other songs.

The most prominent characteristic of this album is its [Read more →]

Praxis and Datacide support the OKK and their Critical Reflections of Berlin Biennale 7 titled “2012 is the Season for Treason”. Taking place at Raum 29, Prinzenallee 29, Berlin-Wedding. Free entry.
Watch out for Datacide talk this saturday based on the article “From Subculture to Hegemony: Transversal Strategies of the New Right in Neofolk and Industrial”. More infos on the rest of the program:
http://www.kritische-kunst.org/
and here:
http://2012istheseasonfortreason.wordpress.com/

… And more charts: these were the 10 most read articles on this web site during 2011:

1. From Subculture to Hegemony: Transversal Strategies of the New Right in Neofolk and Martial Industrial by Christoph Fringeli

2. Shaking The Foundations: Reggae soundsystem meets ‘Big Ben British values’ downtown by John Eden

3. Tortugan tower blocks? Pirate signals from the margins by Alexis Wolton

4. We Mean It Man: Punk Rock and Anti-Racism – or, Death In June Not Mysterious by Stewart Home

5.COIL – Interview from 1986 plus Introduction by Christoph Fringeli/John Balance

6. Dance Before The Police Come by Neil Transpontine

7. What The Fuck – Operation Spanner by Jo Burzynska

8. The Brain of Ulrike Meinhof by Christoph Fringeli

9. Dope smuggling, LSD manufacture, organised crime & the law in 1960s London by Stewart Home

10. Battlenoise! Review by Christoph Fringeli