[kj] article/review in german VISIONS mag

countessghoulita at aol.com countessghoulita at aol.com
Tue Oct 12 09:23:19 EDT 2010



Very good job, Marcel, and really interesting interview! Thank you!



CG






-----Original Message-----
From: Marcel <spooman at freenet.de>
To: gathering <gathering at misera.net>
Sent: Fri, Oct 8, 2010 12:46 pm
Subject: [kj] article/review in german VISIONS mag


Hi there,
this is from the german alternative rock magazine VISIONS.
Sorry for the shitty translation, my english has seen better days. The only thing I can say in my defence is that some of it sounded already pretty awkward in the german original. :-)
I'll scan the thing when I get the chance...
btw, does anybody know what he got the grammys for?

Marcel


Killing Joke – Visions 211 /10.2010

Nature has the last word

Three decades of Killing Joke – and something special for the anniversary: The first album by the original members in 28 years. With this one the old heros are reaching new heights – Absolute Dissent is the most thirring in at least a decade. In the interview band-boss Jaz Coleman describes the journey to a monster turned into music – and explains why the world is in for apocalypse soon.

Jaz, no matter if one likes or dislikes you (the band), no matter if it’s a strong or a weak KJ-period, one thing’s always the same: There is a subtle feeling of dark matter (sic) in your music, like claustrophobia turned into sound. Why is that?

When we’re together in a room something happens. These boys are my lifelong education; there is nothing in my like that’s not connected to them. I’ve spent more time with these three guys then with my whole family.

All of us wouldn’t exist without Killing Joke, there would be no conscience.

This is not a band, this is a way of life, a worldview/view of life. Everybody who has recorded an album with KJ speaks of it as a traumatic experience. We literally go through hell every time. And that’s what you hear on the finished record afterwards; something that you’ve described as claustrophobia quite fittingly. It feels similar to me, however it’s more of an inner claustrophobia than an outer claustrophobia.

As if you’d rather run away from yourself?

Not run away, but to gain more distance. It’s such an inner pain to go through it every time, you’d rather be an observer of the process and not a person concerned. At the same time I know: It’s only because I go through it the music that we’re looking for can be created. But it fucks us up every time.

No idea how to change that?

No idea, no. We don’t know how it evolves, but it’s there. We’re shouting at each other until we lose our voices, throw around stuff and get to the borders of our capacities. With this comes what we call the “unforeseeable”. Not one KJ album even begins to come close to the concept I thought about beforehand. Obviously this band is also about the constant destruction of all of your beliefs and ideas.

No way to compromise without intern struggling?

No, that doesn’t work for us. Especially this time I wanted to focus on - and follow a few things, to stick to some ideas. One had been to have the better part of the album with precomposed structures. I had written about ten of those as a basis beforehand. Now there are two structured songs left on the album. The rest of them are jams. The unforeseeable has occurred once again. As a matter of fact all the songs that we think of as being the strongest in our career have been the result of such jams. It seems that we are on top of our game when we achieve a collective spontaneous combustion (sic) of our egos and personalities. Into disaster without preparation: That’s the way KJ-music emerges.

Desaster is pure chaos. Your music on the other hand brings structure to chaos – where does the structure come from?

We have two antipodes whenever we work creatively: At least one of us takes the revolutionary point of view, another one the reactionary one. That’s not planned or a conscious decision, these parts aren’t always assigned in the same way. But there are always these two points of view about a piece of of music. When we manage to combine them we get a song. When we don’t - we get noise, nobody has uses for. The structure comes from these contrasting opinions that we have to find a common ground for.

Well, it remains amazing, how stabilized you keep your agressions even beyond the age of 50. So you’re not getting milder?

Not with KJ. It’s the audible face of all that is evil and dissatisfied within me. It’s the channel that allows me to get rid of my demons, without having to hurt others.

What exactly is pissing you off, that it brings out your pure aggression.

There are a lot of battlegrounds /unnerving topics for me. It only takes a picture of the Rockefeller family in a boulevard magazine to ruin my mood in a catastrophic way for days. Or the profit report in the quarterly period of one of these banks, that have just cost us billions. Or a picture of african landscapes that have been contaminated by Oil-barons. Hardly a day passes without me coming across something that drives me crazy. It’s this unbearable injustice of the distribution of chances within the human race.

And this mindless destruction of the basic fundamentals that’s growing faster and faster.

Another fighter for these values is the writer T.C. Boyle who has turned to fatalism by now once said: There are simply too many people on this world to save it. We are bound to fall down.

That’s a scenario – it’s realistic, but too hopeless for me. I represent the thesis that there will be apocalypse in the near future. Not a religious one, but a natural one, that will reduce mankind at least by half. That’s our chance to start over, so to say the hardest form of a purging thunderstorm.

Off course it won’t be easy to bury 3 to 4 billions of corpses at once, but those who will survive will come out purified – most of all morally and ethically. They will then understand that you cannot force the existence of a race against nature. Nature always has the last word.

Is it correct to assume that you are able to stand all of this, because you find your peace of mind in classical music by now?

Yes, that is correct. It reflects the other side of my personality, it’s the realm where I can express all the beauty and the sublime I experience. Just because of that it is such a very different world, that I can’t draw any parallels to my work with KJ. Both of it is music and that’s about it. Apart from that these two worlds have nothing in common. Still – I don’t necessarily need classical music as compensation. My compensation is the humour I find in KJ. It’s the blackest humour you can imagine. More black than black. That’s what builds me up.

What advise do you have for younger people on how to create socially responsible art?

I wish for more anarchy and uprising in the younger generation – not only in the arts, but in general. This generation is still under the influence of the last effects of the blooming world economy, that doesn’t exist anymore. This safety of wellbeing and education has made them sleepy – while their chances are a lot worse than those of their parents. They haven’t realized that yet and I wish that the young rise up before they are forced to do so. Because then it’s usually too late, society is much too deep in shit. The last time the world saw a situation like this the 2nd WW broke out. And we all certainly don’t want a 2nd Hitler as an alleged savior from the crisis, do we? So – rise up and take care of yourself, before others do it. Interview: Sascha Krüger. Shitty translation: Marcel

A classic: Already as a teenager Jaz Coleman won numerous prizes for his violin-playing and enjoyed classical training. Later he studied arabian music and lengthily studied Klezmer- and Maori-music. Through this occupation with world-music he returned to classical music. At first he interpreted the work of the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin or the doors with symphonic orchestras in the nineties, before his first own symphony was staged with the Prague symphonic orchestra in 1999, for whom he remains the composer in residence and conductor until today. 2001 saw his first Opera “The Marriage At Cana” in the Royal Opera House in London. By now he has received 4 grammys for his classical work and works with the big orchestras of the world on a regular basis as well as soloists like Nigel Kennedy, Sarah Brightman or the Kroke Trio. Coleman writes operas, symphonies, chamber music, pieces for choir and solo-pieces, but also filmscores.

Review:

For their 30st band anniversary KJ came together in their original lineup and present themselves less compromising than ever.

Mellowness due to coming of age is not Jaz Colemans kind of thing. Beside all his projects, the choir- and orchestra arrangements, compositions for others, books and soundtracks the charismatic-excentric fan of experimentation still has enough wrath to present an album with his band, that not only captures all facets of three decades of Killing Joke, but also displays the ongoing relevance of the Brits in a modern and varying way. There are influences of all periods of the band to be heard on Absolute Dissent: the raw Postpunk from the early days, Pop/Wave disco-tunes like in the late eighties, the industrial-Metal and Alternative-Rock, with which KJ have paved the way for countless bands in the nineties and that has the biggest part here, too - and with the final Ghosts of Ladbroke Grove there’s also a Dub-song. The rich guitar-work of Geordie Walker, who beside Coleman has been the only constant member of KJ has to be stressed once again: sometimes extensively supporting the strong choruses like in the title-track or in Fresh Fever From The Skies, with simple and concise hooklines in The Great Cull or staccato-like monotony in Depthcharge that reminds of Fugazis Waiting Room. Coleman adds all kinds of singing, he sounds like Lemmy Kilmister or John Baizley of Baroness at times, and then comes across with innocent melodies and delivers some the most catchy Choruses of his career. Cult-status sustained – and that with an average age of 50. 9 of 12 possible points – review by Arne Jamelle

The review sounds more like 10, 11 or 12 points to me, but these guys are known for their greediness concerning points.




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