SPK - Machine Age Voodoo

Let's explore the more overtly political side of Industrial. The first two SPK albums are real industrial noise, but their third album is  industrial synthpop.

Industrial music has a few characteristic traditions: the heart of a band is usually a guy with a sequencer, acronyms are intentionally undefined (coming up with funny interpretations is actually part of the fun), and there's very little indication if any particular idea or topic is serious or ironic.

SPK is New Zealand musician Graeme Revell's journey from industrial noise, through political/philosophical synth pop dance music, to a further career in film scoring (and you have definitely heard his music if you've seen a movie in the last 20 years. Machine Age Voodoo is the first completely synth-pop oriented album, intentionally commercial but built on a definite industrial foundation.

Lyrically, you might feel very uncomfortable with the overtly socialist/communist mindset, and that's actually the point. A lot of the music i throw at you is actually much more intellectually complicated that you might think. The real message is "we feel this way as a reaction to the way we perceive what you are doing."

The ideology of the actual Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv (the German organization, not the band) is fascinating, crazy but fascinating. Deriving from Marxist economic theory and French Existentialism (specifically Sartre), the SPK was founded on the notion that Capitalist Industrialization is the cause of modern physical/mental illness, and that illness is thus the defining characteristic of humanity. We define ourselves by our characteristic illness and should therefore weaponize illness to fight against the spread of  Capitalist greed. Not surprisingly, western medicine in general and Doctors in particular are seen as the ruling class, poisoning us and attempting to eradicate the evolution of our inherent diseased nature.

Obviously, that's a simplified description of the complex theoretical context and you should go read about this fascinatingly bizarre school of thought yourself.

The point of SPK (the band) was psychological disorientation. Original collaborators quit, killed themselves, died from their own health problems, etc., but Revell's turn to commercialized dance music is no less disorienting. The restrained female voice, extolling deadpan propaganda over jaunty but emotionless electronic grooves can be quite disturbing, and that's the point. It's a crazy extremist half of an even more crazy and extremist argument, and you're still watching that fight play out on TV right now 40+ years later. You've probably picked a side of that argument, and got mad at your friends and coworkers last week because you disagreed about some part of it. You might, and i say this lovingly, be just as bat shit insane as everyone else.

You know as well as i do i lean diagonally to the left, and that's much different than running toward the center with a pickax in one hand and a malaria blanket in the other.

Musically though, this stuff is really fun and interesting and enjoyable.

Next