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17 - 28/06/2016

photo Luka Kaše
Galleryphoto Luka Kaše

For years now Malta Festival Poznań has been known as “the most musical among theatre festivals”. This year, we will have a special event as the a musical open-air finale of the 27th edition of the festival, a concert of the Slovenian band LAIBACH.

These irreverent masters of monumental Eastern Bloc retro-avantgarde return with a performance which which transgresses beyond music into the realm of visual and performative art. The open-air concert will be divided into two parts: the Polish premiere - in a special Poznań arrangement - of the newest musical project of the band, with an orchestra, choir and multimedia visualisations as well as a selection of the band’s greatest hits.

LAIBACH started working in galleries. The musicians belong to an interdisciplinary artistic collective Neue Slowenische Kunst. The seeds of this artistic movement were sown in a Slovenian working class mining town Trbovlje. In 1980, the year of Josip Broz-Tito’s death, Yugoslavia, including Slovenia, found itself deeply traumatised, war was imminent, the utopian dream fell apart. LAIBACH was founded in times when pent-up nationalisms were coming out in the open. They brought the suppressed national depressions to the surface. The artistic creation of the band, which plays with conventions and eagerly falls back on perverse pathos and irony, while astutely illustrating the political transformations of former Yugoslavia, illustrates the tangent between mass culture and the spectre of totalitarianism.

Concerts of LAIBACH are famous for their striking “nazi kunst” aesthetic. Their radical stage performance often caused consternation of the authorities, when dressed in nazi uniforms, styled as national socialists, the band bombarded the audience with Christian iconography, national symbols, marching rhythms and statuesque poses.

(…) a critical play with the baggage of totalitarian language, borne by their small Central European nation. Slovenian history of slavery and invasion, subjugation to foreign powers and regaining sovereignty is a little bit similar to what Poland went through. Thus, the similarly subversive art.
Dorota Jarecka, “Gazeta Wyborcza”

LAIBACH was the first foreign band to play in North Korea. In 2014 the National Culture Centre ordered an EP by LAIBACH recorded to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising. The band was also an inspiration for the German group Rammstein. LAIBACH’s rich discography includes the album “Volk” with interpretations of national anthems. The 2014 album „Spectre”, described as “a political manifesto in poetic form “, reveals a reinterpretation of the band’s style.

In Poznań LAIBACH will perform pieces arranged for a band, an orchestra and a choir, composed by the young Slovenian composer, Anže Rozman. The concert will be accompanied by special multimedia visualisations. Details about the finale concert of 27th Malta Festival Poznań will be soon revealed.