Chris Korda
Not My Problem, I’ll Be Dead
YYK No label DL/12”
Primitive Man
YYK No label DL/12”

New York based activist-musician Chris Korda follows up her urgent 2020 climate crisis album Apologize To The Future with two EPs exploring related issues and perspectives. Best known as the founder of the Church of Euthanasia (“the world’s only anti-human religion”), Korda has been a strong voice warning of humanity’s destructiveness since the early 1990s, and continues to present her anti-natalist, anti-capitalist views via ironic techno tracks that simultaneously go hard on the dancefloor.

Not My Problem, I’ll Be Dead flips the perspective of Apologize To The Future, setting the maddening, selfish worldviews of extreme capitalists like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to tricksy minimal techno. Like her previous album, the EP is narrated by a disembodied robotic voice, representing the often facetious voices of the elite. On “Awesome On Mars”, it parrots inane descriptions of Musk’s imagined red planet colony as though describing a suburban mall (“Unlimited credit/Free parking... a miniature Eiffel Tower/Like Vegas but on Mars”). “Baby Batter Bingo” is a takedown of modern Marie Antoinettes - from Ayn Rand to Marina Abramović - using their own words. Its second half turns a paraphrase from Trump (“I won/I won/I won/I’m tired of winning”) into a relentless sweat-soaked breakdown. At once nightmarish and euphoric, the EP reflects our accelerated, beyond-parody times.

Primitive Man takes another of Korda’s primary concerns as an activist as its stepping off point - the supposed superiority of humans over other species. The title track utilises the same robotic voice as a patronising anthropological study of a transition from primitivism to civilisation - represented by drinking beer, sniffing coke and moving to Berlin to dance to techno.

The instrumentals “K35” and “SAZ” are the kind of driving, minimal tracks that the central character may find themselves dancing to if they got into Berghain, and are made with Korda’s open source Polymeter MIDI Sequencer, a generative music making tool that creates simultaneous beats in different time signatures. The resulting shonky, complex rhythms contribute to the overall discomfort present in all of Korda’s work.

Claire Biddles