SPK

music mole also says Leichenschrei...

my vote goes to Information Overload Unit, mainly for the skin removing first track

those early 12" singles look great, everything after 83 looks pretty scary...

Then there's Decompositiones 12" - very interesting stuff, sorta dark, warm, tribal and apocalyptic, nothing ever sounded quite like it.

Then there's the single, 'Metaldance' (not the album version or the 12"!!! Get the 7" single only!!!) - just brilliant, if cheesy.

Then there's a variety of bootleg live recordings from around the same time if you can find them.

Then there's a rare M-squared single (I think it had two tracks, 'Dance' and 'chamber Music', cannae be bothered to google, sorry) as SoLipsiK. This one's interesting as it has Neil Hill, in Australia, but not Graeme Revell who was in the UK at the time. It's bizarre and actually very good in a twisted, atmospheric electro pop vein - very M-Squared.

After that, take a huge jump through their attempt to write pop (Machine age Voodoo onwards) until you get to 'Zammia Lehmani (songs of Byzantine flowers)' (not sure of the spelling of that one) which is just as ornate, pretentious and atmospheric as the title suggests and definitely worth your time if you like sountracky, arty ambience. Finally there's The Insect Musicians, made entirely using insect sounds and samples - mental and very good, quite musical really.

But yeah, as bulbs said, Leichenschrei is for me the pick of the bunch. what a f***ing record, I'm still digesting it.

I actually thought that Digitalis Ambigua, Gold and Poison was pretty good transition away from the industriadance that they had done before, into Revell's more soundtracky stuff. Last half of the album was great.

Saw SPK on the "Machine Age Voodoo" tour: they did the material from that LP, then came back out, turned the strobes on and the volume up, and did a flat-out industrial set which climaxed with Revell throwing an oil drum at us.

We were so happy.

S

Never released, sadly, as far as I'm aware, was Revell's piano interpretations of scores by outsider artist (ooh don't you hate that phrase?) Adolf Wolfli. I heard some of it on the radio - it was great stuff. There were plans to release it on Deutsche Gramaphon, as I recall... nothing appears to have come of it.

The Adolf Wolfli tunes are/were available on LP and CD as Necropolis, Amphibians, & Reptiles.

I like Zamia Lehmanni almost as much as Leichenschrei - very different but just as rewarding with repeated listens.

I saw him play with Chris & Cosey in Chicago around '87 and C&C blew him off the stage. That happens when you just play along to your CD.

i picked it up for a buck in a thrift store and noticed it on the wall of a local record store for like 50$

wheras information overload unit was recorded in a shithole squat somewhere in london if memory serves me rightly

http://www.baader-meinhof.com/timeline/1970.html

February, Heidelberg
A young psychiatrist working at Heidelberg University gets fired. Dr. Wolfgang Huber has angered the university officials with his unorthodox therapy methods. In response to his firing, Huber's patients, mostly students, occupy the offices of Huber's hospital director, who ultimately agrees to keep Huber on.
Huber's radical psychiatric thesis is this: his patients are indeed sick. But their sickness is the product of Capitalist society, and the only way to cure them is to foment a Marxist revolution. Huber's patients organize themselves and the Socialists Patients Collective (SPK) is born.

?

ok well that's a yes then

http://www.baader-meinhof.com/resources/terms/spk.html

"SPK"
Sozialististisches Patienten Kollektiv or
Socialist Patients Collective

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Patients'_Collective

The Socialist Patients' Collective (in German the Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv) also known as the SPK and the Patients' Front (in German Patientenfront), or PF, was a leftist German patients' group of the late 1960s/early 1970s fighting against medicine and doctors as enemies of the "patients' class", seeing capitalism as the reason for illness and trying to see "illness as a weapon" against capitalist society.[1]

yeah, that's where they got their name. all the early SPK stuff is a conceptual argument for psychotic's rights

then they started doing alternate versions of the acronym like surgical penis klinik

then the head of the klinik tried to give me syphillis by wiping his cock on my sandwich

IIRC one of the original members was a psychiatric nurse and another was someone who had been institutionalized? there used to be a pretty good interview on-line. will google 4 u.

here it is

http://undergroundmusiclibrary.blogspot.com/2005/12/spk-interview-1980.html

one of the main reasons 'information overload unit' made a greater impression on me than 'leichenshrei' is because of those liner notes on patient's rights in the booklet of the Grey Area CD reissue. I didn't catch the reference, or know that there was a Baader-Meinhof connection

I think of that sandwich cockwipe story every time SPK comes up in shuffle now btw

it is a great moment in music history.

leichenschrei will always be my fave, they sound totally in control of the material, even though the music is a complete surrender to mental malady & ego dissolution, a bad trip made flesh. crazy is the new sane.

Leichenschrei's great. I can't remember why I bought it back in 1984 since I wasn't listening to anything remotely like it at the time. (As proof, here are the 3 records that 22-year-old me bought at Midnight Records in NYC on 3/16/84: SPK - Leichenschrei, The Thompson Twins - Into the Gap, and the Rhino compilation The Best of the 1910 Fruitgum Co. and Other Bubblegum Smashes.) I'm guessing I took a flyer on it sight-unseen based on a Trouser Press review.

Zamia Lehmanni is really beautiful; lush, melancholy orchestral/soundtrack music over factory ambience and such, with nary a 1983-1984 period dance beat in sight.

Is Graeme Revell on any of the first 3 albums (Information/Leichenschrei/Auto)? I was under the impression he joined after that and essentially inherited the name SPK after everybody else left.

revell was there from the start so yeah he'd be on all three

Damn them and their ever-changing pseudonyms!

my fave spk is actually not an spk record at all.. the solipsik 45 ne/h/il did for m squared

Bloody hell here's a list of his soundtrack work :

Film :
Dead Calm (1989)
Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990)
Till There Was You (1990)
Spontaneous Combustion (1990)
Child's Play 2 (1990)
Deadly (1991)
Until the End of the World (1991)
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992)
Love Crimes (1992)
Traces of Red (1992)
Body of Evidence (1993)
Boxing Helena (1993)
Hear No Evil (1993)
The Crush (1993)
Ghost in the Machine (1993)
Hard Target (1993)
The Crow (1994)
No Escape (1994)
Street Fighter (1994)
S.F.W. (1994)
Tank Girl (1995)
The Basketball Diaries (1995)
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie (1995)
The Tie That Binds (1995)
Strange Days (1995)
Race the Sun (1996)
From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)
Fled (1996)
The Craft (1996)
The Crow: City of Angels (1996)
Killer: A Journal of Murder (1996)
The Saint (1997)
Spawn (1997)
Chinese Box (1997)
Suicide Kings (1997)
The Big Hit (1998)
Deep Impact (1998)
Phoenix (1998)
The Negotiator (1998)
Strike! (1998)
Lulu on the Bridge (1998)
Bride of Chucky (1998)
The Siege (1998)
Idle Hands (1999)
Bats (1999)
Three to Tango (1999)
Buddy Boy (1999)
The Insider (1999)
Gossip (2000)
Pitch Black (2000)
Red Planet (2000)
Attraction (2000)
Calle 54 (2000)
Titan A.E. (2000)
Blow (2001)
Double Take (2001)
Don't Say a Word (2001)
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)
Human Nature (2001)
Collateral Damage (2002)
Below (2002)
High Crimes (2002)
Open Water (2003)
Out of Time (2003)
Freddy vs. Jason (2003)
Daredevil (2003)
Walking Tall (2004)
The Chronicles of Riddick (2004)
Assault on Precinct 13 (2005)
Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous (2005)
Sin City (2005)
The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D (2005)
Goal! (2005)
Harsh Times (2005)
The Fog (2005)
Æon Flux (2005)
Marigold (2006)
Grindhouse - segment Planet Terror (2007)
Bordertown (2007)
Pineapple Express (2008)
Street Kings (2008)

Television and video :
Bangkok Hilton (1988) (mini-series)
Down Came a Blackbird (1995)
Tomb Raider (1996)
Dennis the Menace Strikes Again! (1998)
Bats Abound (1999)
Frank Herbert's Dune (2000) (mini-series)
Anne Frank: The Whole Story (2001)
CSI: Miami (2002)
Legends (2004)
Call of Duty 2 (2005) (video game)

rich bastard

Streetfighter lol

Wow I really got put off by Machine Age Voodoo - been listening to Leichenschrei & Auto Dafe and this is good stuff

This is one of the finest pieces of industrial punk music ever put on wax.

http://www.brainwashed.com/common/images/covers/ir0011.jpg