We are time

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Notes

1. Monroe, “Unsere Geschichte.” Monroe's writings on Laibach and NSK have now been published as a book. Alexei Monroe, Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK, Short Circuit Series (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2006).

2. This divinatory aspect of collage techniques was also a key feature of William S. Burroughs’ conception of the cut-up, the idea being that by cutting into the present in the form of newspaper articles and other textual materials, the future leaks through. Burroughs advocated applying these techniques not only to textual material but also to film, radio and other media forms, believing this would be the most effective way to short-circuit and subvert consensual reality. Bearing in mind the strong influence of Burroughs on industrial music and punk counterculture more generally, it is certainly probable that this was a much greater influence on Laibach than Attali's book.

3. Cf. Massumi and Dean, First and Last Emperors 79.

4. See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 91–96 and Deleuze, “Plato and the Simulacrum” in The Logic of Sense 253–65. Laibach themselves invoke this latter text of Deleuze by referring to their own music as “a copy without an original.” See “Unsere Geschichte” 11.

5. This point is underlined in Monroe, “XY Unsolved” 2–3.

6. It is possible that this title is also a reference to the most well-known song of the 1980s experimental avant-punk group The Pop Group, which shared with Laibach a deconstructive engagement with popular music through a reworking of their repetitive rhythms, in The Pop Group's case through a political reinvention of funk.

7. For example the beginning of the track samples Slovenian hunting horn melodies that begin both “Die Liebe,” from Nova Akropola (1985) and “Opus Dei,” from the album of the same name.

8. This theme is developed in Monroe, “Laibach: Made in Yugoslavia.”

9. In this regard it is instructive that NSK also has a department of practical philosophy, which in a style reminiscent of the detournement practised by Lautréamont in his maxims constructs esoteric philosophical discourse out of found material – re-treating the waste products of the history of philosophy in a similar manner to the way in which Laibach reprocess discarded musical styles.