Laibach

Older Laibach is very dark and brooding and noisy industrial music. Best albums from that era: "Laibach", "Lljubljana - Zagreb - Beograd" and "M.B. December 21. 1984" - two latter are live albums and the first is their debut full-length album. All are easily available from Mute Records' sublabel Grey Area.

Newer Laibach is more in the pop-mockery vein. "NATO" is all-cover album, covering Europe, DAF, Pink Floyd, Status Quo and many others. "Let it be" is full cover (except the title song) of The Beatles album with the same name. "Opus Dei" is bit more industrial and gloomy and with more original songs. Excellent covers include, however, "Life is Life" by Opus and "Geburt einer Nation"; "One Vision" by Queen, cleverly highlighting the fascist overtones in the original song. The lyrics have not been changed much, only translated in German and presented so it sounds like Nazi propaganda song. Excellent work.

Laibach as a group were founded in 1980 in Trbovlje, a small Slovenian mining town. The exact name 'Laibach' is a German word for Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, used by the Nazi regime in World War II when occupying Slovenia and by the Habsburg dynasty, in the times when Slovenia was a part of the Habsburg empire. It was probably meant, by choosing this name, to underline the influence of Germany on the Slovenian state, that it is more historical than most people know, and just to provoke, because of the WWII connection that was quite bizarre, even if the communist regime in Slovenia was one of the most tolerant.

In these times, Laibach were quite a more an avant-garde group than ever, releasing paintings and books, and doing musical appearances, but maybe for that reason, most of the few concerts they performed in the early days of the 1980s were banned or interrupted by the Slovenian police. Ten days after one of them, a concert in Zagreb on December 11. 1982, Tomas Hostnik, one of the founders and the lead member of Laibach, was found dead.

Laibach's popularity started to grow, they took a heavy militaristic image and in 1984, they recorded and released their first tape, with a group called Last Few Days.

Shortly after that, they released their first official album - Boji/Sila/Brat Moj. In 1984, they joined with Irwin and Scipion Nasice Sisters to create the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), an organization that in the present times exists as a virtual state (a state in time), does exhibitions, performances, theatre performances, release books and are in general very strong and influentive artistic and philosophical group. Since then, the popularity was steadily growing as they produced the key albums like Nova Akropola and Opus Dei, and the world was still more and more shaken by the provocative image and concept of Laibach, mostly misunderstood. In the NSK-Kinematikon movie called Predictions of Fire, about Laibach and NSK itself, some philosopher develops a thought that Laibach do not come with any answer, but they are the question mark on the stage and people must make the answer themselves. That is in my opinion the most accurate definition of Laibach's philosophy.