How do you get back at your goose-stepping, trance-trekking fascist oppressors? By dragging your buzz-saw off it’s hook in the garage, coupling it up to a distortion pedal, feeding it through your synthesizer and assaulting the whole bally lot of them with beat after beat of throbbing hardcore ear gristle and some razor-sharp strikes to their ghastly mainstream glamour. It’s a violence you do with sound. Throw in some guitar, a little feedback, a little noise and some squealing oscillation.
It’s not been a smooth ride by any means. Son of a working-class socialist whose own father died in the concentration camps of the Second World War, Alexander Wilke grew up during the Cold War near the Berlin Wall, which he would pass every day on his way to school. Add to this a routine of terrorist atrocities, communism, demonstrations, a little break-dancing and US imports and you have one radical young man in one of the most radical places in Europe who’s only real weapon was incorporating 60s and 70s black funk into his music and forming a band called Atari Teenage Riot.
First released in Japan at the back end of 2007 on Empire’s own newly established Eat Your Heart Out label, ‘The Golden Foretaste of Heaven’ is – unlike his previous post Atari efforts – a predominantly electronic album supported by a bevy of growling guitars and icy existentialism. A cross between Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground, Gary Numan, Marilyn Manson and dirty, trashy noisy techoheadz like Berlin’s T.Raumschmiere tracks like ‘New Man’ and ‘Live Or Die’ erupt from the static like Frankenstein with a hard-on. Super-charged, dazzling, frenetic yet bristling with a swaggering and assertive pop sensibility it’s like Iggy, Bowie, Aphex Twin and Joy Division’s Ian Curtis were smelted into some wrought-iron demi-god with electric running through its veins and bile pouring out of its heart. It’s visceral, intuitive anti-glamour and brutally uncompromising to boot.
Terminal sex for the terminal identity. That’s what it is. And cool as f*ck.
ALBUM: ‘THE GOLDEN FORETASTE OF HEAVEN – OUT 28TH JANUARY 2008