SPK

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Not sure if there's a thread - the search engine gets narky with less than four letters.

Anyway, enjoyed what I've heard on the radio and one track on a noise/experimental comp. (second a-chronology: 1936 - 2003), where do I begin with albums? There's a place that has a fairly decent selection of the out-of-print vinyls.

Sasha on a different PC, Thursday, 4 November 2004 00:18 (twenty years ago)

Leichenschrei

bulbs (bulbs), Thursday, 4 November 2004 00:24 (twenty years ago)

SPK - Auto Da Fe

music mole also says Leichenschrei...

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

(Jon L), Thursday, 4 November 2004 00:26 (twenty years ago)

http://home.pi.be/~spk/spkdiskography.htm

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

(Jon L), Thursday, 4 November 2004 00:30 (twenty years ago)

bulbs OTM.

Rockist_Scientist (rockist_scientist), Thursday, 4 November 2004 00:35 (twenty years ago)

That's about how it goes. SPK went weirdo synth-dance in '83. Wasn't a real successful turn.

Xii (Xii), Thursday, 4 November 2004 00:35 (twenty years ago)

haha i saw them one time industrial with breaking bottles for percussion and swinging chains and then next year it was all floaty japanese cloth.

bulbs (bulbs), Thursday, 4 November 2004 00:42 (twenty years ago)

the discogs entry is weird...why has john murphy got a line through his name?

bulbs (bulbs), Thursday, 4 November 2004 00:44 (twenty years ago)

"breathless" is a top tune, as is the not-really-SPK 7" single by SoliPsiK on M Squared..

the surface noise (slight return) (electricsound), Thursday, 4 November 2004 00:51 (twenty years ago)

Information Overload Unit, Leichenschrei, and the early stuff collected as Auto da Fe - all good stuff. The best industrial noise of the time, or so I think, barring Whitehouse perhaps.

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.

the music mole (colin s barrow), Thursday, 4 November 2004 01:05 (twenty years ago)

he wiped his cock on my sandwich

bulbs (bulbs), Thursday, 4 November 2004 01:35 (twenty years ago)

Ah yes. I forgot that bit.

the music mole (colin s barrow), Thursday, 4 November 2004 01:42 (twenty years ago)

"Leichenschrei" seemed brilliant when I first heard it - but I was so much older then etc. Never really rated anything else I've heard. Odd, however, that Graeme Revell progressed from "he wiped his cock on my sandwich" to working in Hollywood with apparent ease.

Dadaismus (Dada), Thursday, 4 November 2004 13:48 (twenty years ago)

leichenschrei, metal dance and zamia lehmani are my picks. 'in flagrante delicto' from zamia is gorgeous. like dead can dance but better.

stirmonster, Thursday, 4 November 2004 14:05 (twenty years ago)

I can't really listen to "Industrial" music anymore, seems so silly and immature to me now - apart from Throbbing Gristle.

Dadaismus (Dada), Thursday, 4 November 2004 14:07 (twenty years ago)

"Breathless" is wonderful.

The Ghost of Dan Perry (Dan Perry), Thursday, 4 November 2004 14:39 (twenty years ago)

I caught up with SPK around the time of Machine Age Voodoo and thought it was fine...dancy pseudo-industrial stuff that was at least as passable as most of the other stuff being fobbed off by Nettwerk (not quite as good as Severed Heads but at least as passable as Single Gun Theory, say, if not moreso).

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.

Sean Carruthers (SeanC), Thursday, 4 November 2004 15:45 (twenty years ago)

"Leichenschrei" is just astonishing. It's an integrated production, rather than just an experimental scrapbook, which puts it head and shoulders over much of the industrial music of the time.

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

Soukesian, Thursday, 4 November 2004 19:58 (twenty years ago)

He took a girls ear off with a swinging chain in Sydney. I am of the belief they once threw severed Pigs Heads too.

Sami Jheryylkanyga, Thursday, 4 November 2004 21:39 (twenty years ago)

They also once set a member of the audience alight.

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 music mole (colin s barrow), Friday, 5 November 2004 02:53 (twenty years ago)

wow! the paper trumpet guy! I owned it. It had an amazing mini booklet with a bunch of his (wolfli's) pencil drawing's. I totally remember Revell saying there was so much to be interpreted from Wolfli's scoring. He kinda made up his own.

cs appleby (cs appleby), Friday, 5 November 2004 06:50 (twenty years ago)

except I don't recall piano as part of it. It was more like a Stapleton surreal thang. I think he was actually involved in it.

cs appleby (cs appleby), Friday, 5 November 2004 06:53 (twenty years ago)

one year passes...
revive.

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.

sleeve version 2.0 (sleeve testing), Monday, 9 October 2006 19:08 (eighteen years ago)

is this one rare?
http://home.pi.be/~spk/leichenschreithermidor.jpg

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$

jaxon (jaxon), Monday, 9 October 2006 19:15 (eighteen years ago)

There are different pressings, I think that one is the Thermidor version. Probably less common than the Normal Records reissue, which is the one I have.

sleeve version 2.0 (sleeve testing), Monday, 9 October 2006 19:23 (eighteen years ago)

is that leichnschrei ? i have the side effekts version.
trivia : that was recorded on severed heads mixer.

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

frenchbloke (frenchbloke), Monday, 9 October 2006 20:21 (eighteen years ago)

two years pass...

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.

?

Milton Parker, Saturday, 6 December 2008 00:18 (sixteen years ago)

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]

Milton Parker, Saturday, 6 December 2008 00:43 (sixteen years ago)

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

Edward III, Saturday, 6 December 2008 01:29 (sixteen years ago)

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.

Edward III, Saturday, 6 December 2008 01:33 (sixteen years ago)

here it is

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

Edward III, Saturday, 6 December 2008 01:36 (sixteen years ago)

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

Milton Parker, Saturday, 6 December 2008 01:55 (sixteen years ago)

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.

Edward III, Saturday, 6 December 2008 02:09 (sixteen years ago)

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.

Hideous Lump, Saturday, 6 December 2008 05:10 (sixteen years ago)

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

thereminimum chips (electricsound), Saturday, 6 December 2008 05:21 (sixteen years ago)

Damn them and their ever-changing pseudonyms!

Hideous Lump, Saturday, 6 December 2008 05:23 (sixteen years ago)

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

thereminimum chips (electricsound), Saturday, 6 December 2008 05:23 (sixteen years ago)

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)

Matt #2, Saturday, 6 December 2008 09:10 (sixteen years ago)

rich bastard

thereminimum chips (electricsound), Saturday, 6 December 2008 09:18 (sixteen years ago)

Streetfighter lol

Brad Overturf (gnarly sceptre), Saturday, 6 December 2008 11:48 (sixteen years ago)

six months pass...

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

Colonel Poo, Wednesday, 1 July 2009 13:42 (fifteen years ago)

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

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

sandcat dune buggy attack squad!! (leavethecapital), Wednesday, 1 July 2009 20:34 (fifteen years ago)


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