Lebenden Toten-Cataleptic Noise Contamination CS (2008)

The Fourth of July is one of the few annual occasions upon which I will post things political on Drug Punk-for my problems with the genre of anarchopunk, read this. I'm not fetishizing apolitical apathy, but rather tacitly acknowledging the inherent silliness of protest music. Anyway, enough blabbling; last year it was Tragedy's best record ever, this year it's a 2008 tour cassette from Portland's finest.

The tracks on here are nothing radically different from previous and future LT releases: savagely distorted dbeat misery, with contorted, frantic drumming and guitar that sounds like electrodes sparking just before they hit yr neuron receptors. Noise punk has been trendy lately, but Lebenden Toten is the only band that can hold their own against the originators of the genre like Disorder, Confuse, Gism et. al.: the band is incredibly tight (playing this fast is an art form unto itself), and there's nothing superfluous in any of the songs. Chanel's lyrics cover a variety of topics, but can be summed up pithily: late capitalist society is a cancerous body too atrophied to kill itself, and instead keeps itself going on the productive energies of us all. We built it, why don't we destroy it?

So throw this on, and melt yr brain on fireworks or distortiontildeafness, it's yr choice. I'm reblogging this from Robert's most excellent blog, Terminal Escape.

No Thanks fanzine, issue 7

I'm very happy to announce that issue 7 of Mike Thrashberg's zine, "No Thanks" (formerly "No Thanks//Fuck Everything") is now available c/o Drug Punk. No Thanks, along with DX's Distort, is probably my favorite current English-language 'zine.

This issue features a lengthy interview with Lebenden Toten; an Antisect retrospective; a re-print of the final Los Crudos interview; and a whole lotta other sweet shit.

We're also distro'ing past issues, including my personal fave, issue 3, featuring an interview with Dan from Distort fanzine, and interviews with The Brat and Deskonocidos.

Those in the US, send $3 to me at:
Joe Figliulo
PO Box 12740
Santa Barbara, CA

Peeps abroad-the shipping cost varies by country, so email me and I'll get back to you w/how much it costs.

Lebenden Toten-Near Dark LP (2009) [or, Winter in America]

 *Edit, 12.23.12: Reup'd the file. Get it here. *

"Of course there is hope, all the hope in the world. Except not for us."-Kafka, ca. 1923

"it comes late at night/without warning/it's near dark..it's near dark"-Lebenden Toten, "Near Dark," 2009

So a decade ago the CIA engineered simultaneous attacks on "civilian" targets, and ~3,000 people died. Who gives a fuck. This is nowhere close to the ~500,000 children whose deaths the U.S.A. directly enabled via medical and food sanctions on Iraq from 1991 to ~2001.
  But I do give a fuck, if only because I have to live under the  consequences of this post-modern Reichstag fire. While things have become inestimably worse for Afghans and Iraqis, conditions in the USA since 9/11/01 have become unbearable, too. The gutting of what small welfare state existed in this country, pre-Ronald Reagan. The beginning and continuance of 2 full-scale (Afghanistan, Iraq) and many small-scale (Pakistan drones, Phillipines "counter-insurgency," the bin-Laden assassination) wars, the rise of a violently nihilistic, extreme-right wing party, the ascent of a corporate oligarchy. The knee-jerk, violent hatred of non-white immigrants. The planned assault on public education and the Supreme Court.
It's not that the U.S.A. was a great country before 9/11/01. But since all of my teenage-to-adult-life has been spent under the sign of the Twin Towers, this has become my frame of reference.

   So I bring you Lebenden Toten's Near Dark LP. Eleven years ago, I would have said that the ideas this LP expresses were conspiracy theories: a military-corporate dictatorship of the U.S.A.; the presidential elections as a reality TV show. All of this, a joke in 2000, is reality now. Personally, like Adorno, I still sometimes feel "...shame that there is oxygen to breathe in hell." But mostly I just don't care anymore.