Laibach : the soul inside the machine

-Since the eighties, all your records have been on Mute records, but you released a limited edition live album in England last year, called “Volt Tour London, CC Club, 16/04/ 2007: can you tell us more?

-Ivan: It’s mainly live, as many groups are doing it, and I think it’s connected to Mute, we didn’t really got too deep into that, We’ve got the proposal from Mute asking if we wanted to do this and we said ok, let’s do it, we’ll see how it works, and that was it. A lot of groups are practically recording now almost every show, like Depeche Mode for instance, and also Neubauten. We’re not too kin to do that, but the fact is that a lot of people are really interested. For some reasons, they want to take those show recordings as a kind of memories of something.

-How did the ‘Volk’ project see the day, and what was the idea behind it?

-Ivan: Basically, we always change the pop songs into anthems in a way. Euro pop songs are kind of anthems. And then, we started to get interested in the anthems themselves, what really an anthem is. In fact, we came to the point that anthems are the biggest pop songs, the most popular pop songs, everybody know them, depending of the territories, but everybody knows the British Anthem, American anthem, they are popular outside the national territories, so they’re kind of international pop songs. The nature of anthems is basically quite the same with good pop songs, they praise the same things, pretty much. So we said ok, anthems are really THE pop songs, and we decided to do anthems in the style of pop songs.

-Do you know how those rearranged anthems were received by the governments concerned?

-Ivan: Well, we didn’t follow that. Many people have asked us that, but I don’t think politicians reacted at all. It’s really hard to say if they don’t care or not. For instance, you cannot officially change anything in the Russian anthem, but we’ve of course a lot, you can’t officially change anything in the Chinese anthem, but we did that as well, we can mix together Israeli and Palestinian anthems, so I don’t how people would react if we go there, so we don’t really know : now, we’re invited to go to the States, to do one exclusive concert in New York, and they want us to play the American anthem, they said we had to, so it’s a different reactions. But I know that Slovenian ambassador in Moscow, who is a big fan of Laibach, actually ordered hundred of copies of “Volk” album, and I think he kind of gave them to all the others ambassadors who are based there! So I don’t know!

-You recorded many covers in your career: did you like those songs or was it rather ironic?

-Ivan: Our basic position, our starting point was that we didn’t really believe in originality anymore. Originality, nowadays, in post modern times, doesn’t really exist. Every five seconds, or every second, five people have the same idea in the world, basically. Pop music, rock music is not something is not something that you should describe as original. Of course, here and there, original artists happen, but, basically, they are all referring to something which was created before. But it was a method already seen in classical music. The big composers were borrowing motives to each others, taking from each others. As long as you have a genre, if you take any genre, all songs are practically the same. Somehow, they have to be the same, otherwise, groups are not consumable. So, as nothing is original, the idea was simply to take songs, which have already some content, some meaning, and let’s play with it a little bit, we’ll see what we can do. We realised then that, basically, we did like everybody else did, but we did it intentionally, we kind of used intentionally the existing material and, in a way, we did a new original out of it, because we kind of placed it in different contexts, which was our method. So I wouldn’t say it was just ironic, but of course, in a way, we were more tempted to use songs which were kind of stupid, like “Life is Life”: so let’s change the context here, and let’s see what will come out. We were really interested, when we heard this song of Queen,

“ One reason”, which was kind of heavy song and so on, and, as soon as you turned it to German language, of course you’ve got something completely else outside of it. So we were interested in the question of context: how do you take things from one context, to one genre, to another language into another song, that was our method. Nowadays, there’s a legitimate method, everybody’s doing it, but we were one of the first groups doing this in the eighties, basically. Usually, when we do covers, we don’t really do covers, we do reinterpretations, because covers are very blatant because the way people normally do it really make no sense, because they do it to sound like the original songs, so when we do covers, we do reinterpretations, and we usually take those songs to inspire us, because they kind of fit on the record. In a way, we don’t think that anthems, which we did for the “Volk” album, are really covers, because the way we made them. We let ourselves being inspired by the original anthem, but songs are then totally different.

-And do you work on new material?

-Ivan: Very soon, it will be a new record, call “Laichbach Kunstfugue”, a reinterpretation of the “Kunstfugue” by Johan Sebastian Bach, and it will be available in several formats: CD, DVD surround and vinyl also. But it’s a kind of side project, no a major project. But we’ve already started to work on a major record, which, we hope, might be available in the end of the year, but I don’t think so, because we’re also working with a German composer, a friend of us, Christian, on a reinterpretation of Wagner’s Parsifal, as special event. We hope it will be on record too. But if it’s good only, if not, we’ll forget about it.

-You released several DVD, but you promised more: so, what do you have in store?

-Ivan: Yes, a new DVD is coming out very soon now, a concert made in our hometown, based on “Volk”, recorded by TV cameras. And then, there’s two more things waiting to be release, two old historic films from early eighties: “Victory under the Sun”, “Predictions of Fire”, and other stuff waiting, but the situation at the moment in not too good for releasing DVDs because of the state of the music industry falling down, but we’ll see what happen.

-On stage, the show is impressive, and total: music, lights, and projections of images, dancers: will this tour mainly concentrate on “Volk” or will it embrace your past records too?

-Ivan: “Volk” is the main topic, but we’re going to do some songs from the previous albums.

-This idea of total art is close to NSK: is it still alive and well?

-Ivan: NSK is a state now, we kind of turned it to a state, and so we’ve got mainly citizens lately, of lot of new citizens from Africa, mostly from Algeria: somehow, they discovered NSK State!

-You never played in Africa?

-Ivan: Not yet, but if we go there, we’ll surely have some audience! Well, NSK state is not working as an association anymore, but a lot of diverse people, not only necessary artists, have NSK State passports. Certain people are actually very close to promote this utopian idea of NSK State, they should go to special status of NSK ambassadors: so this is something which maybe will happen in the future.

-Slovenia joined Europe in 2004: do you feel European yourself? Do you prefer NSK, I guess?

-Ivan: We also feel European! We like Europe, but we are not ‘eurocentrics’, because you always limit yourself to much. Europe is fine. But it’s not the only thing in the world.

-Are you still attacked, censored, threatened by governments or organisations?

-Ivan: Censorship is happening on a certain level, still, but not only with us, because the way the market exists, the dominant market is simply censures something out. If you’re not a big seller, not heavily commercial, there’s basically a certain censorship from the market, somehow, and the entire industry works in that direction. This is also what is going to happen on the Internet pretty much, in the future. But, more concretely, we have no direct censorship now anymore, but the very last country in Europe who really gave us lots of problems is actually France, when we couldn’t play for ages, because of some ideas that we are a very dangerous group. Only lately, in the last few years did we succeed in playing some dates in Paris, and that was it.

-What bands or music did influence you when you started?

-Ivan: We never replied, because it’s too difficult for us. Our music is so diverse, from classical music to electronic and else, and what was the most important for us, in musical terms, history, art, good films, were more important for us than music itself. The whole story is more important. But some people have asked us to put together a record of influences. It will be very tough, but maybe will we do something like that, just to satisfy the curiosity of our fans. We were listening to a lot of very different music, from the Beatles to Throbbing Gristle, Neubauten later, when we released than we were quite close. For some reason, metal bands seem to love Laibach and, at some point, they were constantly harassing us with mixes and remixes, so we said why not? Good music is good music, and, even if we are not that much into metal, we’ve heard much good metal music as well.

-You were in the army in 1980: what motivated you to form Laibach?

-Ivan: It was the idea: I don’t know if you imagine, but it was very funny to see, when we were in the army, and a rock group came, dressed in soldiers’ uniforms and playing rock music for soldiers, it was a really funny situation. It was basically an army rock group, and we thought it was a very interesting idea. So, when we formed laibach, we thought that, we, in a way, were also soldiers, because we fought to present a certain idea of art. All groups had long hairs, they were wearing jeans, it was a kind of uniform too, so we said ok, let’s use uniforms too, because of that vision we had when we were in the army. So we travelled across Europe, in Yugoslavian army uniforms, playing industrial music as a kind of soldiers group, or a rock’n’roll group. But rock’n’roll sounded to us like stupid. We said let’s go like that, and we’ll see how people will react, because, basically, is not that different than being dressed in jeans and wearing long hairs. That was the idea. Everybody wanted to see it of course, and some people said that we were Nazis in uniforms, which is not true. People want to see what they want to see.

-Laibach inspired some movie directors, for “Blair Witch project” for example, and some used your music too: do you have other soundtracks or scores in project?

-Ivan: Here and there, some directors ask us to do the music for their movie. We have even been asked for Hollywood once, if we’d stay in L.A and work music there for some Hollywood movies, but, in the end, we said that if something will come out, it will, but we’re going back to Europe. If you’re not fixed in L.A, you lose the contact, so, that’s how the story goes. But, when we were there, the brother of Sting, who has an agency called FBI, wanted to represent us for the Hollywood films industry and soundtracks. We discussed, for ages it seems, in the early nineties, but we came back to Slovenia, and nothing happens afterwards. I guess FBI collapsed also. We were also close to Graham Revell, who put out SPK, we are good friends with him, even if we didn’t see him for a while now. He’s really doing well with film music in Hollywood, and actually asked us too to collaborate on some project on a certain comic film, and he wanted us to make a sort of remake of a Kiss song, but we didn’t find that very attractive, so we didn’t go on that project.

-Slovenia is your country, but is it the only place where you could live?

-Ivan: I’m sure there are some nicer places in the world, but it’s not bad, it’s a very kind of human place, and if you’re not looking for something extremely glamorous, it’s a nice place to be, because of it’s geographically well situated position, we can really seriously travel to one hour to reach Mediterranean cost and, you have islands with the Alps not far, and cities Like Zagreb and Vienna, Sarajevo and Trieste are very close. Dubrovnik is farther from Ljubljana, around six hours drive, but it’s probably one of the nicest places in the world

-After all those years, do you still have challenges? What haven't you accomplished yet with Laibach?

-Ivan: It was a challenge which basically became our life, this is what we do. The challenge remains constant to deal with the zeitgeist, we try to define zeitgeist, try to analyze what’s happening around, what is the language of communication, what is the thing behind, it’s important, I think. You can’t really grasp it if you can’t really understand it. You have to kind of correspond with time, it’s a necessity I think. It’s a challenge, and it’s also very interesting, we are like social sculptures, we go around, meet people and what we get is a very interesting interaction

Interview made in Paris, on February 14^th, 2008.

Thanks to Roger Wessier, Replica Records, and of course to Ivan from Laibach.