Riot Sounds
I saw Atari Teenage Riot last night.
Last show on this tour. Possibly last show ever.
Carl Crack is dead, so he obviously wasn't there.
Hanin Elias buggered off a decade ago, so filling in her vocal parts was Nic Endo.
Which was a little strange at first. Nic Endo dancing around and shouting. Of the four or so previous times I've seen Nic Endo onstage (twice with ATR, twice with Alec Empire) she has maintained her sphinx like silence, Kanji painted poker-face peering over a table of boxes, hands moving over the buttons and knobs, never breaking a sweat.
Maybe seeing her bouncy-shouty-dancey side (as opposed to her glarey-stony-button-pushing side), was a good reminder that you can never assume that you know someone just because you're familiar with their stage persona.
Anyways, as far as last gigs go, it was a blinder.
Listening back to their 90's material the crude beats and sloganeering becomes more apparent. But for an Australian kid coming of age in the 90's, ATR was a reminder that electronic music wasn't just something made by pretentious nerds, and banging four-on-the-floor kicks weren't just something for rickety hippies to dance to in forests.
It could be raw and aggressive and it could be performed with enough force to terrify the fat self-satisfied hippies of Byron Bay. It could mean something.
ATR made records with the crudest equipment and they told everyone how they did it. In the liner notes of one of their albums they apologised for using a slightly-above-entry-level sampler.
Maybe their revolution never happened. Maybe they were always going to follow the narrative of self-destruction, maybe ATR was at best a sonic suicide bomb.
(and at worst a cherry bomb down the toilet of late nineties electronica)
Maybe they were ultimately guilty of packaging and selling rebellion. Maybe their anti-capitalist polemics would have had more weight if Alec Empire hadn't spent so much of the last fifteen years looking like a Calvin Klein model.
ATR did have their faults and incongruities.
But they inspired me to start making aggressive music again. Their sampled thrash riffs drew me back to metal at a time in my life when I was listening to Swing, Ska, Californian Skateboard Punk and Drum'n'Bass.
(talking to Nic Endo after their Byron Bay showin 1998, she asked me if I was in a band in Brisbane. I told her I was, but it wasn't like ATR, it was soul music. She told me she was in a soul music band in Berlin).
Even before I discovered Dillinger Escape Plan and Refused they were a reminder to me that you don't have to follow the rules other people lay down for you, you can make your own.
And that is worth something to me.
Last show on this tour. Possibly last show ever.
Carl Crack is dead, so he obviously wasn't there.
Hanin Elias buggered off a decade ago, so filling in her vocal parts was Nic Endo.
Which was a little strange at first. Nic Endo dancing around and shouting. Of the four or so previous times I've seen Nic Endo onstage (twice with ATR, twice with Alec Empire) she has maintained her sphinx like silence, Kanji painted poker-face peering over a table of boxes, hands moving over the buttons and knobs, never breaking a sweat.
Maybe seeing her bouncy-shouty-dancey side (as opposed to her glarey-stony-button-pushing side), was a good reminder that you can never assume that you know someone just because you're familiar with their stage persona.
Anyways, as far as last gigs go, it was a blinder.
Listening back to their 90's material the crude beats and sloganeering becomes more apparent. But for an Australian kid coming of age in the 90's, ATR was a reminder that electronic music wasn't just something made by pretentious nerds, and banging four-on-the-floor kicks weren't just something for rickety hippies to dance to in forests.
It could be raw and aggressive and it could be performed with enough force to terrify the fat self-satisfied hippies of Byron Bay. It could mean something.
ATR made records with the crudest equipment and they told everyone how they did it. In the liner notes of one of their albums they apologised for using a slightly-above-entry-level sampler.
Maybe their revolution never happened. Maybe they were always going to follow the narrative of self-destruction, maybe ATR was at best a sonic suicide bomb.
(and at worst a cherry bomb down the toilet of late nineties electronica)
Maybe they were ultimately guilty of packaging and selling rebellion. Maybe their anti-capitalist polemics would have had more weight if Alec Empire hadn't spent so much of the last fifteen years looking like a Calvin Klein model.
ATR did have their faults and incongruities.
But they inspired me to start making aggressive music again. Their sampled thrash riffs drew me back to metal at a time in my life when I was listening to Swing, Ska, Californian Skateboard Punk and Drum'n'Bass.
(talking to Nic Endo after their Byron Bay showin 1998, she asked me if I was in a band in Brisbane. I told her I was, but it wasn't like ATR, it was soul music. She told me she was in a soul music band in Berlin).
Even before I discovered Dillinger Escape Plan and Refused they were a reminder to me that you don't have to follow the rules other people lay down for you, you can make your own.
And that is worth something to me.