September 2020: The essential albums

Chris Korda – Apologize to the Future (Perlon)

One has to acknowledge that Chris Korda knows something about making music. Last year, this was evident on Akoko Ajeji, Korda's first album for Perlon, with its advanced polymetrically programmed polyrhythms. A big advantage of that record was that it was purely instrumental. In contrast, Apologize to the Future, again released on Perlon, offers significantly more spoken content. A hyper-artificial, clinical techno-funk serves as the vehicle for six messages, all of which boil down to the same idea: "Thou shalt not procreate." This is the commandment of the Church of Euthanasia, a sect Korda founded in 1992. As an art project, it's astonishingly one-dimensional and monothematic; Korda tirelessly repeats the irony-free credo of antinatalism in the name of saving the planet. In doing so, he is anything but naive or otherwise unworldly. It's just that his empathy for humans, and thus his own species, seems remarkably underdeveloped. "Spreading like a virus," "Cells of cancer / Killing their host," are Korda's unoriginal metaphors for human behavior. And when he demands, "Respect the future / Don’t procreate / More mouths to feed / Is the last thing we need," the vegan planet-saving mission suddenly strongly reminds us of the Nazi phrase "useless eaters." If that appeals to you, well, it probably appeals to you. Fortunately, the whole thing only lasts 29 minutes. And who knows, with the XR generation, Korda could gain a whole bunch of new fans.

—Tim Caspar Boehme

The preceding is a translation. The original language is here.