"The future can’t be a creative suicide with people with no attention spans trying to rule the social networks, trying to climb to the top… it’s a road that leads to destruction," says Alec Empire at one point in his self-penned Baker’s Dozen. It’s a fittingly forthright statement from a man who specialises in forthright statements (often underpinned by visceral digital abrasion) and characterises the nature of his Baker’s, where his list of favourite albums acts as a jumping-off point for his thoughts on music at large.
Empire will be in London this Friday as Atari Teenage Riot, now comprising himself, Nic Endo and new MC Rowdy Superstar, play London’s Camden Crawl festival. The set comes ahead of the release of RESET (stay tuned to the band’s website for updates), the band’s fifth album and the first to feature this line-up of the band. It’ll also mark almost 20 years after the band released their first full-length, 1995 (later re-released as Delete Yourself!), and established the sound of digital hardcore, their raw, head-chopping meld of techno, metal and punk and fiercely politically-engaged lyrics. As formidable a sonic aesthetic as this was, it was only fitting that it should lend its name to the band’s label, and a couple of Digital Hardcore Recordings releases, Shizuo’s Shizuo Vs. Shizor and Endo’s own Cold Metal Perfection, get a namecheck here. Elsewhere in his selections, Empire leads off from discussing Winston Edwards and Blackbeard’s Dub Conference to reflect on the current state of techno, reimagines Charlie Clouser’s Saw II soundtrack as a dusty junk shop artefact and slams polished online music platforms as a "boring cemetery of data", all delivered with his customary conviction.
Not content with simply writing us his Baker’s, he’s also mixed it, putting together an ace, three-hour-plus mix of some choice cuts from his 13 selections. You can play it via the embed below, though it may be worth heading to Empire’s Mixcloud profile here so you can listen and read in perfect (dis-)harmony.
Atari Teenage Riot play the Electric Ballroom as part of Camden Crawl on June 20 and Sonisphere on July 4. Click on his image below to begin scrolling through Alec’s choices
