[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
F.M. Einheit and Genesis P-Orridge: “Riots / Information”
From the soundtrack to the film Decoder (1984)
Featuring a who’s-who of early 80s industrial music and underground culture, including F.M. Einheit of Einstürzende Neubauten, Genesis P-Orridge of Psychic TV, and the American writer William S. Burroughs, Decoder is a strange and powerful film from the early years of the cyberpunk movement. The plot of the movie centers on the use of music as a means of social control and disruption:
Muzak, the artificial music product created by scientists and marketing experts to increase efficiency and enhance wellbeing, irrigates men everywhere. A young punk and hobby sound mechanic decodes this music and creates an antidote to provoke disturbances not only in the burger joints where he found this music. By recruiting street pirates to spread his twisted sounds via tapes (an idea directly taken from Burroughs’ cut up manuals) the tumults turn into violent streetfighting (with real footage from Berlin’s infamous anti-Reagan riots). The big corporations can not tolerate this and engage a shady agent to stop the antimuzak movement. (Source: Karagarga)
The soundtrack of Decoder is a tour de force sampler of early industrial music, as illustrated by this track by Einheit, who also plays the film’s unnamed protagonist. At the end of the track, you can hear a snippet of P-Orridge’s prophetic monologue: “Information is like a bank: some of us our rich, some of us our poor…all of us can be rich.”
Aside from its cinematic merits, the film makes for an excellent time-capsule of the techno-dystopian depictions of the 1980s. For a great zine article providing more background to Decoder, as well as a brief clip from the film, check out History is Made at Night. More information, as well as a YouTube video of the film in its entirety, can be found at The End of Being.
Played 60 time(s).
June 03, 2011, 10:11am
