“Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.”Bertrand Russell
Brave New World Noise From The Heart! LP (Fartblossom Enterprizes, 1987)
Brand New World – Life In A Police State
Get it here.
“Fear is a tool of control. It is fear of punishment that will keep a classroom quiet and make the teacher's job easier; it is fear of the sack that will keep the grumbling workers quiet. Fear is also an efficient controlling device. It also helps us to fulfil our roles as consumers. It is fear of life itself that keeps us spending in the arcades and typing our credit-card numbers into websites.” Tom Hodgkinson
VA Scaling Triangles LP (Eustone Music, 1981)
Sub Verse – Science Of Fear
“Anxiety suits the status quo very well. Anxious people
make good consumers and good workers. Governments and big business,
therefore, love terrorism – they adore it, it's good for business.
Anxiety will drive us back into our comfort blankets of credit-card
shopping and bad food, so the system deliberately produces anxiety
while simultaneously promising to take it away.” Tom Hodgkinson
“Terrorism has often served to break the momentum of radical situations. It stuns people, turns them back into spectators anxiously following the latest news and speculations. Far from weakening the state, terrorism seems to confirm the need to strengthen it. If terrorist spectacles fail to spontaneously arise when it needs them, the state itself may produce them by means of provocateurs.” Ken Knabb
Chemotherapy (Live at Carmel High School Cafeteria, IN 1983)
“Sounds like these guys try to play speedcore on handmade instruments; really weird. Sounds like a horrible parody of the first DRI EP. Cult or trash?“ Burkhard Jaerisch
“Totally crude and psychotic garage stuff here. They've got amazingly primitive drumming, raw guitars, and lots of super-short outbursts of madness called songs. A delight for Neos and early Half-Japanese fanatics.” Tim Yohannan (Maximum Rocknroll #9)
“Lack of proficiency in playing instruments would be a deterrent in just about any musical genre but it is exactly this 'weakness' that elevates the seven-inch to Dadaist improvisational levels, something I'm pretty sure Chemotherapy wasn't consciously aware of at the time.” Freddy Alva
Chemotherapys/t 7" (Uprising Records,1983)
Chemotherapy – Smart, Tough, And Catholic
Get it here.
“So if you enjoy music that was obviously put together in a matter of hours and sounds like the band recorded it with a Walkman whilst they were falling down a very long flight of stairs then this is for you!” Punk & Hardcore Record Sleeves
“This confirmation that, for the first time, it is possible to govern without any artistic knowledge, nor any sense of the authentic or the impossible, could alone suffice to make us conjecture that the naive dupes of the economy and the administration will probably lead the world to some great catastrophe; if their actual practice had not already demonstrated that fact.” Guy Debord
The Reactors Meltdown EP (Nuclear Waste Records, 1979)
The Reactors – Meltdown
Get it here. More info here.
“Not that I wish in any way to belittle the evils of conventional air and water pollution; but we must recognise 'dimensional differences' when we encounter them: radioactive pollution is an evil of an incomparably greater 'dimension' than anything mankind has known before. One might even ask: what is the point of insisting on clean air, if the air is laden with radioactive particles? And even if the air could be protected, what is the point of it, if soil and water are being poisoned?” E. F. Schumacher
The Mistakes Radiation 7" (Twist And Shout Records, 1981)
The Mistakes – Radiation
Get it here. More info here.
“Nuclear practices, both military and civil, necessitate a far higher dose of secrecy than in other fields — which already have plenty, as we already know. To make life — that is to say, lying — easier for the sages chosen by the system's masters, it has discovered the utility of changing measurements, to vary them according to a large number of points of view, and refine them, finally juggle them, according to the case, with several figures that are hard to convert. Hence, to measure radioactivity levels, one can choose from a range of units of measurement: curies, becquerels, roentgens, rads alias centigrays, and rems, not forgetting the humble millirads, and sieverts which are worth 100 rems. This evokes the memory of the subdivisions of British currency, the complexity of which foreigners could not quickly master, back in the days when Sellafield was still called Windscale.” Guy Debord
Fallout Fallout EP (1981)
Fallout – Nuclear Power
Get it here. More info here.
* * *
For further information, please do not hesitate to watch Robert Stone's Radio Bikini documentary.
A State Of Mind
“A State of Mind is a group of individuals working together in various forms of communication; music, literature and art. We believe in anarchism. True freedom, not one we are told to supposedly have by the state. A freedom from exploitation and oppression, the lifeline of the system. A lifeline where we control our fate, our life and minds.” Mustard Relics
Liberté? / A State Of Mind Don't Vote... Subvert 7" Flexi (Mind Matter Records, 1984)
“War is the truest expression of the state, and its most powerful reinforcement. Just as capitalism must create artificial needs for its increasingly superfluous commodities, the state must continually create artificial conflicts of interest requiring its violent intervention. The fact that the state incidentally provides a few 'social services' merely camouflages its fundamental nature as a protection racket. When two states go to war the net result is as if each state had made war on its own people — who are then taxed to pay for it.” Ken Knabb
The Proletariat Distortion Cassette (1982)
The Proletariat – Splendid Wars
“(…) the word violence comes from the Latin violare and etymologically means violation. Strictly speaking, to act violently means to treat others without respect… A violent revolution is therefore unlikely to bring about any fundamental change in human relations… Given the anarchists' respect for the sovereignty of the individual, in the long run it is nonviolence and not violence which is implied by anarchist values.” Peter Marshall
“It is true that many forms of violent struggle, such as terrorism or minority coups, are inconsistent with the sort of open, participatory organization required to create a genuinely liberated global society. An antihierarchical revolution can only be carried out by the people as a whole, not by some group supposedly acting on their behalf; and such an overwhelming majority would have no need for violence except to neutralize any pockets of the ruling minority that may violently try to hold on to their power. But any significant social change inevitably involves some violence. It would seem more sensible to admit this fact, and simply strive to minimize violence as far as possible.” Ken Knabb
The Apostles Smash The Spectacle! EP (Mortarhate Records, 1985)
The Apostles – Anarchy, Peace & Freedom
“Violence is what the police use. It's what the state uses. If we want a revolution, it's because we want a better world, because we think we have a bigger imagination, a more beautiful vision. So we're not violent; we're not like them in crucial ways.” Rebecca Solnit
“As always, war, when not civil, only freezes the process of social revolution.” S.I.
Covered Wagon Musicians We Say No To Your War! LP (Paredon, 1972)
Covered Wagon Musicians – We Say No To Your War!
More info here.
* * *
For further information, please do not hesitate to watch David Zeiger's Sir! No Sir documentary.
A Guy Called Gerald
“I was trying to keep it quiet from the dudes in 808 State, because I was still working with them but wanted to do my own thing. It was fun just slipping out of their basement and taking the drum machine. They'd be like, 'Where are you going?' I'd say, 'Oh, I'm just going home to do some programming,' then nip off to another studio. I was trying to get a tribal sound and found this sample saying 'Voodoo rage'. That was originally the title but the old sampler I was using didn't have that much memory. I just about had enough for 'voodoo ra…', so that's what it became.” Gerald Simpson
A Guy Called Gerald – Voodoo Ray (1988)
“It [Acid House] was more important than punk because it was more egalitarian. Punk in Britain, in its essence, was just a few people in London. Acid house was totally egalitarian, and quite quickly, it spread to small towns, too. It really revolutionized the country.” Luke Bainbridge
“I loved the anarchy of the early parties. It was as if all those years we spent trying to jack the system through things like punk and aggression had had no effect, and then all these kids who’d never consider themselves political were creating this revolution. It was more punk than punk ever was.” Neville Watson
Philip Glass – Pruit Igoe (Koyaanisqatsi, 1983)
More info here.
“If the social ideals of an age are to be judged by the aesthetic quality of its architecture, the last hundred years represent the lowest point yet reached by humanity.” Bertrand Russell
VA Spectacular Commodity! EP (Groucho Marxist Record Co:Operative, 1979)
“A perfectly square house, shaped like a magnified piece of brick, is justifiable in a factory building, because it is a factory building where efficiency is the first consideration. But a perfectly square house for a home to live in is an atrocity of the first order.” Lin Yutang
Television Personalities 14th Floor 7" (1978)
Television Personalities – 14th Floor
“We will leave Monsieur Le Corbusier’s style to him, a style suitable for factories and hospitals, and no doubt eventually for prisons. (Doesn’t he already build churches?) Some sort of psychological repression dominates this individual — whose face is as ugly as his conceptions of the world — such that he wants to squash people under ignoble masses of reinforced concrete, a noble material that should rather be used to enable an aerial articulation of space that could surpass the flamboyant Gothic style. His cretinizing influence is immense. A Le Corbusier model is the only image that arouses in me the idea of immediate suicide. He is destroying the last remnants of joy. And of love, passion, freedom.” Ivan Chtcheglov
VA City Walls A Southampton Compilation LP (White Elephant Records, 1980)
Exploding Seagulls – Prefab (Buildings)!
Get it here.
“Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption.” Paul Lafargue
“The claim that capitalism has delivered us from excessive toil can be sustained only if we take as our point of comparison eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and America — a period that witnessed what were probably the longest and most arduous work schedules in the history of mankind.” Juliet Schor
“In the early 17th century, a man who returned to his place of work after dinner was to be pitied, either the after-dinner man was overly devoted to labor, or else he had too much of it. Today, who doesn’t open the laptop of an evening — instead of spending time with family and friends, or reading, meditating, playing the ukulele — in order to answer work emails for a while, or put final touches on a PowerPoint report? We are all after-dinner men and women, now.” The Wage Slave's Glossary
Pregnant Neck – No Time For Breakfast
More info here.
“Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things. And it is not by any means certain that a man's business is the most important thing he has to do.” Robert Louis Stevenson
“All sorts of things suffer when work expands to fill evenings and weekends — health, for example, and citizenly participation. How can you frame an opinion on the issues if you never get a chance to read or have discussions with friends? But family — and especially children — take the worst hit. It's just not possible to be a responsible and responsive parent or spouse if your job(s) leave you with barely enough time to shower.” Barbara Ehrenreich
The Mekons Work All Week / Unknown Wrecks 7" (Virgin, 1979)
The Mekons – Work All Week
“Wage work needs to be abolished; meaningful, freely chosen work can be as much fun as any other kind of play. Our present work usually produces practical results, but not the ones we would have chosen, whereas our free time is mostly confined to trivialities. With the abolition of wage labor, work will become more playful and play more active and creative. When people are no longer driven crazy by their work, they will no longer require mindless, passive amusements to recover from it.” Ken Knabb
“I think everybody ought to quit their job and do what they want. You've got one life. How on earth can you blow that doing something you hate?” Bill Talcott
VA Cottage Cheese From The Lips Of Death LP (Ward-9 Records, 1983)
Butthole Surfers – I Hate My Job
“The great Marxist and Situationist critics of work hoped that critical theory — accurate analysis of the system’s pathologies — would change the system. The latest crisis in capitalism has shown that it will not. But a system is made of individuals, just as a market is composed of individual choices and transactions. Don’t change the system, change your life. Debord’s 'Never Work' did not go far enough. Truly understand the nature of work and its language, and you may never even think of work again!” The Wage Slave's Glossary
“Resist the call to work ever harder and longer hours. Throw your BlackBerry into the river. Unslave yourself. Hard work will not lead to health and happiness.” Tom Hodgkinson
Tronics Time Off / Goodbye 7" (Tronics Label, 1979)
