Industrial pop group Laibach will make history this August when they become arguably the first band to play a concert in Pyongyang, North Korea. The momentous event will be part of the group’s current Liberation Day Tour – which has seen Laibach play sold-out dates in the USA – and coincides with the 70th anniversary of the Korean peninsula’s liberation from Japanese occupation. The concerts will also be subject of a documentary, to be released in 2016. The concerts will take place on August 19th and 20th 2015. Poster below. The concerts are especially pertinent given Laibach’s 35 years of operation has seen their art explore notions of democracy, totalitarianism, collectivism and nationhood. In our Strange World Of Laibach feature, a guide to their work, they said "Already in our 82′ manifest/program we have clearly defined the principle of the (collective) work of the group (items 1, 4, 5). A group is first of all a collective mechanism where members have to leave their individual projections and frustrations aside. They have to submit, or even better – ‘exclude’ individuality in order to accept the functionality and complexity of the ‘higher’ system. In such mechanism every particle is important but it is also interchangeable. Laibach always was, and still is, an organism whose life and means of activity are higher – in strength and duration – than the goals, lives and means of the individuals which comprise it. It self-reproduces itself as an idea, and constantly mutates organically as a progressive virus." Read the full feature here.
