First Western band set to play in North Korea
July 16, 2015
On Wednesday, the London-based record label Mute confirmed that Laibach would play two concerts in Pyongyang in front of some 2,000 people as part of a tour organized by the Norwegian cultural activist Morten Traavik, who has collaborated with North Korean artists for the past three years. Laibach is known for mixing industrial with neoclassical music and mournful vocals, and scoring various multimedia products, including video games.
"In August 2015, Laibach will become the first ever band of its kind to perform in the secretive country of North Korea, a reclusive garrison state as well-known for its military marches, mass gymnastics and hymns to the Great Leader, as for its defiant resistance to Western popular culture," Mute announced.
Traavik told the Reuters news agency that it had taken him almost a year to get permission from North Korea for the concerts. He said that Laibach, famous for performing in military uniforms at the start of their career - and accused of nationalism for employing the imagery - would take the stage in specially made costumes in a North Korean style.
"We want the audience to think for themselves," Traavik, a Norwegian director and artist "working across a wide spectrum of artistic genres and international borders," told Reuters on Wednesday.
'What Koreans need'
Playing industrial music of the type pioneered by Kraftwerk, Laibach began in 1980, taking the German-language name for the Slovene capital, Ljubljana - a reference to the Hapsburg times that preceded the independent authoritarian Yugoslavia in which the band formed. After the ritual suicide death of frontman Tomaz Hostnik in 1982, Laibach took the stage in 1983 to play the Zagreb Biennial in the capital of the Croatian republic, leaving only after juxtaposing a video image of a penis with the Yugoslav autocrat Josip Broz Tito.
"The idea to perform in North Korea was put in front of us by Norwegian cultural activist Morten Traavik," Laibach told Reuters in an email on Wednesday. "He believes that Laibach is what Koreans need at the moment and that North Korea is what Laibach need," the band added. "We gladly agreed."
North Korea has from time to time opened its borders to foreign performers. In 2008 the New York Philharmonic Orchestra performed there, and in 2014 the former National Basketball Association forward Dennis "The Worm" Rodman visited with a squad of hoopsters to put on a show for dictator Kim Jong Un and associates.
mkg/gsw (Reuters, AFP)