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Songbook #7

by Mattin

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1.
January 07:00
January 1917: More than 140,000 Russian workers strike in commemoration of the 12th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. How can we identify ourselves with a revolution from a present point of view having a historical perspective? Better Audience Targeting Cambridge Analytica Big Data scoring reaver -i wlan0mon -b 00:1C:28:6E:4F:BF -c 13 -K 1 Liberals listen to Leonard Cohen see what you think but the quieter you become the more you are able to hear A whole new level of evil wifi Hack: Hurt Core Matthew David Graham we don’t think red rooms exist Paranoia in the eyes of unreason off the normal in times of submission "If religion served as the opium of the people in the revolutionary era, conspiracy theory is crack cocaine for the age of hopelessness" Friends of the Classless Society don’t know why but I’m not convinced by the explanatory nature of confusion: self-promotion Shame for the cultural elite fragmentation in motion your world is crumbling ours is being build up fresh out of despair actions in the flesh narrow thoughts in the raw Cynicism 4.0 and a future of gold 1923: January 23th, Paris, after Germaine Berton killed Marius Plateau, one of the leaders of the French nationalist organisation of the far Right known as Action Française, she said: “I am not insensitive, and I had to overcome great reluctance before killing a human being, even my enemy”
2.
February 07:00
February 1917: On International Women’s Day, demonstrators and striking workers – many of whom are women – take to the streets to protest against food shortages and the war. The February Revolution begins with strikes, demonstrations, and mutinies in Petrograd. Bannon the lenninist Bannon the lenninist Bannon the lenninist you’ll get a real revolution! “The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive.” Lenin, The Slogans and Organisation of Social-Democratic Work War Iran War China War Islam Bannon the lenninist Bannon the lenninist Bannon the lenninist you’ll get a real revolution! Dark Darth Vader Dark Dick Cheney Dark Satan Bannon the lenninist Bannon the lenninist Bannon the lenninist you’ll get a real revolution! The State will come down The establishment will be dissolved And all your racist believes will be crushed down 2017: There is no freedom in a normative vacuum.
3.
March 07:00
March 1917: Czar Nicholas II abdicates and includeds his son. The provisional government formed. Punk meant not to get back to any origin but to explore how rotten life is in this ashtray Sexual fantasies reproduced in stereo while a subject tries to understand what it is and what is not hitting its increasingly solitary head against a cupboard full of ressentiment Conditioning our own understanding by understanding our conditioning What is this ashtray? crumbliness of hope anchored in its own self-obsession Identity as a code, that cannot be decoded voting for something that every passing day makes less sense How to believe in democracy when there is no equality? According to Bordiga, Communism did not happen in the Soviet Union Russia was indeed a transitional society but transitional towards capitalism Conditioning our own understanding by understanding our conditioning Taking hold of our own mediations but do not try it alone Historical specificity without being able to think itself historically Like being flattened into an mobile screen and you feel that your life is on the screen like after this panic attack I thought I have died and I no longer feel real Revolutionary times get swept away like ads on iPads but there is undefeated despair a fetishism for explicit cruelty while an empty obscurity creeps into what we have left Conditioning our own understanding by understanding our conditioning Science will constantly find different understandings of what we are How to politicise them in order to know where we want to go 2017: “Communism will be the collective management of alienation”. Samo Tomšič at Historical Materialism in Beirut, 10th March
4.
April 07:00
April 1917: Lenin returns from exile and arrives in Petrograd via a sealed train and publishes the April thesis. 1) The class-conscious proletariat can give its consent to a revolutionary war, which would really justify revolutionary defeatism, only on condition: (a) that the power pass to the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants aligned with the proletariat; (b) that all annexations be renounced in deed and not in word; (c) that a complete break be effected in actual fact with all capitalist interests. Fraternisation. 2) The specific feature of the present situation is passing from the first stage of frustration, owing to our unreasoning trust in the government of capitalists, those worst enemies of peace and socialism to the stage of doing something about it like realizing the potential of what we could have together if we all had access to the means of production and were able to share their benefits. 3) No support for the social democrats; the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear, particularly of those relating to the renunciation of revolution. Exposure in place of the impermissible, illusion-breeding “demand” that this government, a government of capitalists, should cease to be an imperialist government. 5) Not a parliamentary republic—to return to a parliamentary republic from the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies would be a retrograde step—but instead an open source universal justice equally distributed. Abolition of the police, the army, bureaucrats, wages, private property, the state, gender, race, classes, prisons, mental hospitals, and nurseries. 6) Socialisation of all lands in this world for the benefit of everybody. 7) The immediate destitution of all bankers and the the placing of existing banks into the Bank of the Commons. Change existing currencies into Faircoin until we abolish money as the universal equivalent and we bring about universal equality. 8) It is our immediate task to “introduce” communism, and to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the control of the “universal commune”. 9) Party tasks: (a) Immediate dance convocation; (b) Alteration of ourselves, mainly: (1) On the question of imperialism and the imperialist wars, (2) On our attitude towards the state and our demand for a “universal commune” (3) Amendment of our out-of-date minimum programme; (c) Change of the Party 10. A new International. We must take the initiative in creating a revolutionary International, an International against the social-chauvinists and against the “Centre”. I quote the words of Rosa Luxemburg, who on August 4, 1914, called German Social-Democracy a “stinking corpse”. 2017: documenta opens for the first time in Athens with the title “Learning From Athens,” in order to enable productive, educational dialogue about various forms of injustice and inequality, incorporating these concerns into its very form by sharing its contents between sites in Germany and Greece. It gets harsh criticism.
5.
May 07:02
May 1917: as the crime rates in the city soared, an uneasiness, a dangerous ill tember escalated among soldiers, workers, and, most dramatically peasants. Lost in the middle of nothing ever present without recollection but with the largest data of the past A future blank Total question mark Speculation while betting on disasters I wish all of you At least some of us I wish all of us have rebellious moments fighting over the ruins fighting ourselves to make sense of ourselves Identification DisiIdentification performance of ourselves assumptions that we accept must be part of our impossibility to think otherwise But there is still a buffer we don’t see it we don’t use it We are wrong: -in how we conceive ourselves -in how we treat ourselves -in what we are doing -in how look at the the past -in what we do for our future -in what we do with time Identification DisiIdentification performance of ourselves assumptions that we accept must be part of our impossibility to think otherwise. 2017: Don’t be a smug!
6.
June 07:00
June 1917: Russian minister of war Alexander Karensky launches an offensive against Austria-Hungary forces in Galicia, but many soldiers soon refuse to leave their trenches and return home to take part in redistribution of land. CONVERSATION: ARE WE SUCCEEDING AT DISOBEDIENCE? 2017: on the 20th of June 172 employees at Berlin’s Volksbühne Theater protest against Chris Dercon’s appointment as director. Three days later Farah, Colin and Mattin performed the last night of concerts at Volksbühne’s Roter Salon before Chris Dercon took over.
7.
July 10:43
July 1917: Women are granted the right to vote and hold office. Spontaneous protests against the Provisional Government; after the Bolsheviks unsuccessfully try to direct these protests into a coup, Lenin is forced into hiding. Alexander Kerensky becomes Prime Minister of the Provisional Government. What understanding of this world would imply its transformation? They say: we are overcoming the crisis They say: elect, elect, elect your favorite candidate. Bukharin 1915: "The state had to be destroyed as a condition of socialism. Unless it is destroyed, society would be reduced to a servile, atomised mass under the heel of the new barons of finance capital." 1 of 5 children in Germany grow in poverty Democracy today is cheap like a Facebook like 1 of 4 children in Spain grow in poverty Loot the Looters Elect, elect, elect your favorite candidate While we get Another like Elect, elect, elect your favorite candidate I like the way I look I like the way you look You make me feel so good that I forget about us Give me your creative soul, in the hope that the transcendental will become empirical and reality will transform through our imagination, keeping away the bad vibes do whatever you can to feel as if the problem is not with you Elect elect elect your favorite candidate Elect elect elect your favorite candidate Elect elect elect The Constituent Assembly elections were held in Venezuela on the 30th July to elect the members of the 2017 Constituent National Assembly.

about

Songbook #7 features Farahnaz Hatam, Colin Hacklander, Lucio Capece, Moor Mother, Cathleen Schuster & Marcel Dickhage and was recorded in November 2017 at Digging the Global South Festival in Cologne, while Europe was (still is) slowly going down. Exactly 100 years ago Europe was really crumbling. However, there was a proposition for a collective future in process. This songbook takes two moments as historical inspiration in order to rethink the present:

1) The first seven months of 1917 in revolutionary Russia.

2) The figure of Germaine Berton (pictured on the cover), the anarchist who in 1923 was accused of murdering Marius Plateau, director of the far-right organization French Action League.

In a time of war and fascism, those were two very different answers: a collective attempt at social transformation and a desperate lonely gesture. Neither response really managed to succeed to overthrow capitalism but they had a motivation and a clear way to act, something that seems to be lacking right now. If previous songbooks dealt with the tension between improvisation and song structure, between an emphasis on the production of the moment and having a conceptual framework, here the tension is produced by conflating the present with the past, and in doing so the tension between communism and anarchism is also explored. The tension between the individual and the collective is also present in the making of the record (especially in track 6, a discussion of its own objectives and degrees of success). A review of “Songbook #6” actually took Mattin as the name of the group, which puts into question what Mattin is: just another example of the fiction of selfhood.

“Songbook #7” digs into some of the most important issues today: dissolution and disappointment of the social fabric, the rise of fascism, lack of coherence in a collective vision for the future and the shortcomings of democracy in a capitalist system. These times feel like being stuck in a gif, and here the response is to look for different understandings of time and history.

If you want some musical references you can imagine one of those collaborations between Red Crayola and Art and Language if it was produced by Roberta Settels, or if Rabit was asked to do a remix of Nono’s “La Fabbrica Illuminata”, taking into account the Altoforno di Cornigliano factory’s demolition in 2005. This great line-up tries to think the present through the lenses of radical historical moments and in doing so it achieves a music both arcane and futuristic. Layers of avant-garde tradition culminate into a set of songs that go beyond themselves. In times of increasing desperation here emerges a strange record: a disintegrated manifesto exploring the truth of disagreement.

credits

released October 22, 2018

This record was made collectively by:

Lucio Capece: bass clarinet, sampler
Marcel Dickhage: voice, sampler, texts in German
Colin Hacklander: drums
Farahnaz Hatam: computer
Mattin: voice, texts in English
Moor Mother: electronics
Cathleen Schuster: voice, sampler, texts in German

Recorded live at Digging The Global South Festival
on the 2th of November 2017, Stadtgarten, Cologne

Mixed by Mattin, April-July 2018 at the Burger of Christ, Berlin
Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin

Special thanks to Thomas Glaesser and Musikfond

Thanks to Anthony Iles, Mirene Arsanios, Federica Bueti, Miguel Prado, Ray Brassier, Samo Tomšič, Lisa Rosendahl, Karolin Meunier, Paweł Nowożycki, David Bremner and Munster Records

Munster Records (Madrid)

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