The Molehill Report #13 – January 2024

Transcript

Welcome to episode 13 of the Molehill Report.

Music playing: Metatron – Seduction Pt.VI (from Seduction EP, Praxis 8, 1994)

Christoph Fringeli: In this transmission we present the new print edition of Datacide, the magazine for noise & politics, show some excerpts from an extensive interview with Stewart Home, as well as bringing you up to date with some other developments here at Noise & Politics and the different projects the channel represents and combines.

In this issue we’re unfolding a counter-cultural panorama, this time commencing in the mid-20th century, exploring the beginnings of the electronic disturbance zone, progressing to West Berlin in 1967, where situationist ideas popped up in the extra-parliamentary opposition, and moving on to 1978, tracking the movements of Throbbing Gristle as they played their first gig up north at the aptly named Wakefield Industrial Training College. Uncanny overlaps of the timelines of TG’s operation and the Yorkshire Ripper’s killing spree reveal themselves.

Our time travel then takes us back to the present day to meet Nihil Fist, as we’re printing the interview previously published in video form on our YouTube channel. There’s an extensive fiction section in this issue as well as book and record reviews, graphics, comics and charts.

There were already presentations of Datacide in Rome at the Hekate event at Forte Prenestino, in Bologna at the Sonic Belligeranza Megastore, and in London where we tabled at the Radical Book Fair, and it is going into proper distribution this month.

This brings me to the special guest in this edition of the Molehill Report, Stewart Home. We met up with Stewart in London in November 2023 and talked about art, politics and literature. There will be two parts of the long version of this interview. The first one will focus on anti-art, Smile Magazine, the assault on culture, his first Richard Allen-inspired novels and the art strike 1990 to 1993.

The second one will go into genre theory applied to Punk Rock and Bruceploitation movies and his anti-novels since the mid-90s and into the present.

Stewart Home: I was just looking at a lot of recent historic kind of events around the art world because I decided when I got fed up with music that I wanted to be an artist, but I knew nothing about how to be an artist. I hadn’t been to art school, but I kind of concluded it was a matter of bureaucratic manipulation.

The Assault on Culture

I mean at the time it was difficult to find a lot of the information, so what I found was that when I went around the political scene in London, there were people who knew about the political aspects of the Situationist International, and then if you moved around the art world and met people like René Gimpel, he would know about the kind of Second Situationist International and I was able to borrow from him because I couldn’t access them any other way, copies of the Situationist Times which he had, and so I was interested in getting a full picture of kind of Fluxus and the Situationists and various other groups.

So I was kind of looking at the two sides of it and going to the British Library where I’d also go to read New English Library novels of kind of Skinheads and Hell’s Angels if I couldn’t find a copy in a charity shop.

Art Strike 1990-1993

It was an idea that could be revived, but it needed to be done so as a kind of piece of propaganda rather than thinking that you were actually going to get artists to strike, which Metzger genuinely was trying to do. I thought it was more a way to wind up people within the art world and to kind of use it as an exercise in demoralisation basically.

What’s next for Datacide?

CF: It’s our aim to get back onto a much more regular schedule, if possible twice a year, and combine it with more video versions of articles as well as live events, but to be able to do that we need to improve the financial situation of our tiny media organisation. Right now all we can rely on are funds coming in through sales and subscriptions and I want to thank everybody so much who supported our end of 2023 fundraiser. Even if we didn’t entirely reach our goals, it helped a lot and it means a lot. Thank you.

We just launched a new campaign for 2024.

Finally, I would like to point out that in 2023 we also started a new DJ mix series which is exclusively featured on the Noise & Politics YouTube channel and the Praxis Soundcloud. The first two mixes are by Saxenhammer and 0bleak, breaking barriers between different music styles and connecting past and future experimental electronic dance music.

The Molehill Report #13 was produced in December 2023 and January 2024 in Berlin by CF and Linxi at the Psychic Defence studio.

SUPPORT DATACIDE – ORDER A COPY, TAKE OUT A SUBSCRIPTION OR MAKE A DONATION – You can do all this through the form on the right of this web page (on mobile devices scroll down), or by clicking HERE for more information and payment options. THANKS!

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