Chris Korda and the Church of Euthanasia: save the planet, kill yourself

Posted 11/22/2013 by Jark Prongo in Specials

"I think the next step from laughter is understanding the truth, so I would devote some energy to someone like that. "I would laugh with them for a while and then I would really slap them in the face with a big fish."

In the excerpt that opens the article, taken from an interview with Chris Korda in 1995, it is clear what the brilliant artist's objective is, the tool he uses for it and the precedent from which he draws inspiration. He wants to illuminate -or, failing that, help discover the truth-, and to do so he will use humor in a subversive way like Monty Python in their Flying Circus series. Hence the mention of the slap in the face with a fish, a famous sketch by the British where there is internal consensus among them for unanimously considering it the craziest thing they ever recorded. That Fish Slapping Dance by Monty Python becomes The Antihumanism Dance with the propaganda maneuvers of Chris Korda, an absolute genius who draws on countless previous movements – especially Dadaism and Situationism – to inoculate very specific messages through his music, aware that it is a perfectly valid channel for such a need.

Chris Korda, scrutinized from top to bottom with his eyes like this, can seem like anything but a complete man. In that first forming an opinion of him we would see a clumsily cross-dressed man with the beginnings of anorexia carrying one of his banners... eeeeh... let's call them "difficult", both because of the substance and the shape of the slogans. A man dressed as a woman with a sign saying "eat a fetus" or "save the world, commit suicide" seems very beautiful to us and worthy of a Nobel or a Golden TP, but we doubt that everyone has the same opinion. That's Chris Korda when he proselytizes his Church of Euthanasia, or rather, when he did it, which has been around ten years without holding concerts or performances of that nature, although he opened a blog a couple of summers ago, and he resumes his humanist anti-humanism from a theoretical and obsessive profile, since, in the manner of another great national outsider (El Zurdo), he permanently seeks allusions to his person and Church to give the answer that no one has asked of him in the aforementioned blog. Maybe in the end the good man was a little shocked.

Obviously overlooking the conceptual brilliance of The Church of Euthanasia and its glorious development via drifts by launching ourselves madly into talking about the music would be a mistake, since it does not even allow us to see where the songs that Chris Korda released came from nor would we list a few epic moments in the daily life of this very intelligent agitator, so let's get to it.

THE CHURCH OF EUTHANASIA

The cult that friend Korda founded is brilliant on many levels. In essence, it is based on a single premise stated with a forceful "you shall not procreate", which in turn is built on these four pillars: suicide, abortion, cannibalism and sodomy. Official life membership was purchased for the modest price of ten dollars, and since it was a non-profit organization, donations were accepted, which meant being able to deduct taxes. In essence that's all, although the beauty of the matter were other small details:

-it was the first cult without a temple, with a digital headquarters on the Internet, from where the aka sermons were distributed. This seems like nonsense but of course, you have to think of it.

-The actions of the Church were not pilgrimages or processions or bullshit, but crazy performances where Chris Korda appeared (accompanied by his cardinals and pastors) at any pro-life demonstration with his propaganda paraphernalia and left everyone wondering. the pine-bridge. Put yourself in the shoes of an old anti-abortion woman who sees four demented people with signs, one of them disguised as a woman, to understand the magnitude of these geniuses of agitation. What's more, in Texas they were saying "fetuses are not people, not even chickens, who cares about them?", and that is risky, wow. That the possession of weapons is legitimate there.

-The saints were quite different from those in other cults. Thus, Saint Jack Kevorkian enjoyed such distinction for practicing euthanasia on 130 patients, while Saint Margaret Sanger obtained her beatification for being a pioneer of family planning and a firm defender of eugenics.

-Like every cult today, they did not remain only concerned with the ministry of faith, but also got involved in politics. Thus, in 1995 and with the help of Lydia Eccles, they managed to create a campaign called Unabomber President that gave them some impact. Theodore Kaczynski is someone very loved and admired in the Church of Euthanasia, since his precepts coincide in a large percentage with those of the cult, although they admit that the good Unabomber did not play too well with the media's dissemination of him and his messages.

-Appearances in the press and TV were always welcome, even if they were to speak badly of them or directly mock them. His greatest milestone in this aspect was appearing on the Talk Show The Jerry Springer Show, in a special on sects and suicide cults. There they mixed Chris with a kind of jesters, each one more colorful, including a disguised gentleman. In the end Jerry gave a very Gabilondo homily - or any other television talking head, it doesn't matter - with truism reflections on the danger of these cults and the narrow line that separates a creed from a sect, something very Pilar Salarrullana, when the only danger It was essentially that, listening to that string of nonsense, ignoring the responsibility of speaking to millions of viewers, distorting and conditioning their opinion. There Chris Korda subverted everything, turning Jerry into the leader of a television cult with four little things he did during his speech. Genius.

-In the Church, advice was given to carry out the beautiful and necessary art of suicide, something that caused them quite a few problems and the occasional judicial scare, in addition to more publicity. This was settled by removing everything and linking to external domains.

The cult has its theoretical basis in anti-humanism and certain Malthusian postulates, in reality it was nothing new at its core. Now, the way of disseminating the messages, generally little or not at all pleasant for the average citizen to hear, was something else. You never really know if Chris is serious or if he is a major troll with another purpose, perhaps to get people to think, in the manner of a radicalized Bill Hicks and performer or a Jonathan Swift with an even blacker sense of humor. For the first thing, there is the support - based on data - that the Church of Euthanasia manages at all times, figures that, if taken as true, mean that everything they say in their pamphlets is read carefully; The second is inseparable from any action or word from what Chris Korda says and expresses, a little because of what we said in the first paragraph after his quote and a lot because the son of a bitch is a badass and some hilarious ironies come naturally to him. Thus, for example, we remember an interview where the classic journalist who was incisive (a Jordi Évole of life, come on, who has always been an asshole) questioned the bastion of sodomy within the role he played in the Church of Euthanasia and Chris, without flinching and reluctantly, responded that he didn't know of anyone who had gotten pregnant after being screwed by whoever it was.

As for how his presence in the media played, perhaps that is where Chris's level was seen. It had to always be agile, since the discursive scaffolding of the Church has many inconsistencies and flaws that are difficult to argue consistently. And despite this, it was impossible to catch him giving up on his uncle, wife, travelo or whatever. People never told him that his anti-humanism was humanist, which would have been nice, to see how he justified that, but rather they went directly to the easy part, to the fact that if his main slogan was "save the planet, kill yourself" How was he still alive without complying with this precept, he who was the leader. Well, he always came out unscathed in dialectical and counter-argumentative terms, sometimes in a more concrete way and other times with an excess of circumlocutions, but with irrefutable answers even by Gustavo Bueno. And that, friends, is very difficult.

The other essential discovery was using popular music as a channel to inoculate their theories, slogans and ideas, specifically through dance electronics. But let's separate his music into two types:

THE DIFFICULT RECORDS

Chris Korda had an exquisite musical education, achieved thanks to the fact that his father was an editor at Simon & Schuster and raised him in luxury. After making several moves of various kinds during the eighties - of which there is no possibility of listening to them - and interested in electronics due to having become a programmer and software developer, he officially debuted in 1994 with Demons In My Head, self-released on his Kevorkian Records label. A difficult album, KLF ambient only even stranger. A single track of 44 minutes closer to concrete music than anything else where it incorporates sounds such as a hand moving the water in a bathtub or a toilet chain being used. The nickname he gives to the piece is "industrial punishment in D minor", so you can imagine how easy it is to listen to.

Shortly after, he published Planets, now recovered on his website. A frankly unpleasant drone, with high-pitched beeps of the kind that make dogs bark and file complaints with neighbors. Fifteen minutes that, well, do what you want, but wow, we don't recommend that you listen to it.

Tarot dates from the same period as the previous two. He gets conceptual and makes a piece of 21 loops where each one is associated with a Tarot card. The son of a bitch is very careful in his explanations to assert that although everything seems random, it is not like that, although it would be better to have dedicated that space to apologizing for such shit.

And in 2003 he published what is the only interesting piece in this category that we have called difficult, not to mention fucking shit. Al Fasawz is 40 minutes of fine ambient, where the loops work simultaneously and creating a very cool drone. In theory he says that the patterns for managing the loops are determined by a program that he created specifically for the purpose, although the truth is that the story does not matter a little.

THE DANCE RECORDS

Chris Korda self-releases Save The Planet Kill Yourself on Kevorkian Records to publicize his cool slogan. An album very influenced by the Belgian sound of the early 90s that the R&S Records label had been releasing with people like Frank De Wulf. He recorded the song with someone who always accompanies him in these things when it comes to music for the track, Kevin Roche, and the b-side was an excerpt from the live version of the original, which sometimes goes on for thirty minutes. The original is a sonic bombshell that makes wise use of the genre in which it operates and the place where it will be played – North American raves, recently imported from the UK – to spread lyrics that question the lies of the leaders of Western societies. At a very basic level, very Bill Hicks again, but causing the desired effect, mental openness: in the middle of a session they sneak this in and the contrast between any cliché of the genre and that "save the planet, kill yourself" is so powerful. to leave you in shock. It is true that techno and electronics as a tool for disseminating messages have existed since the very moment it was born and that the Underground Resistance collective was much more refined in the subject, but the pretensions are very different in each of the cases.

Soon DJ Hell found the album during a tour in the US, and was able to contact Chris first to license it and release a copy on his newly founded International Deejay Gigolo Records and then to record more things for him. DJ Hell has a nose for the weird that has not been diminished at all by the amount of drug that has passed through his pituitary in the good times of the label, and he saw that there was genius and business in equal parts, since controversy was guaranteed. We are not very clear if Gigolo Records, then a risky label with quite a few anti-establishment releases (the enormous Moonraker by Foremost Poets released it shortly after, with a story almost identical to the one narrated here), was originally something so crazy about the DJ Hell's controversial desire or by simple chance, but one day we will have to clean up that image that hangs on the label of being frivolous and harmless.

In 1999, Chris Korda & The Church Of Euthanasia's debut full-length album was released, titled Six Billion Humas Can't Be Wrong. An album that began with the words "victim of leisure, consumer of amusement", almost a haiku configured based on excerpts from The Society of the Spectacle (Guy Debord). And so on all the time. The second song was called Buy, and the third was called Buy More. A festival of ironies, stratospheric sarcasm against the media and luxury collaborations with the Chicks On Speed in another of their hits, Fleshdance, a pro-cannibalism allegation that seems made by Tom Tom Club joining techno. The controversy, of course, came with the original cover, censored since it showed Chris Korda making cinnamon in a crematorium oven, and in Germany it is very ugly to remember what they themselves did a couple of generations ago. So ugly that a serious cigar almost fell on the protagonist of this story.

In the maxi of Sex Is Good, preview of the album, came World Of Hurt, an experimental electro piece where 24 people said as many words - taken from a speech by Jiddu Krishnamurti, Indian speaker and junkie seller - and these were later treated and processed. Very MEH.

In 2002 he would release a new EP on Gigolo Records, When It Rains, with four very cool and direct pieces where two of them are gems: Salt, where he makes us reflect on the little importance that human life has, and the one that gives the title to the album. artifact, with a very strange "when it rains the dirt don't go away" repeated in a loop with a rather low effect. They would all be part of his second and last LP to date, The Man Of The Future. There were half-downtempo moments, half-Anne Clark (the nihilist Nothing), continuity pieces with the sound of her first material (Desire), post-Darwinisms very much in line with the anti-technological position of Unabomber and Charlie Brooker (the piece that gives the title to the disco) and one of the greatest geniuses that music has given in recent decades: I Like To Watch.

I Like To Watch was born three months after the twin towers disaster following a disagreement between Chris Korda and Karlheinz Stockhausen's claim that it was "the greatest artistic expression ever made." Chris does not discuss this with the idol, it would be necessary, but he is dissatisfied with the fact that he omits the sexual dimension of everything, in his opinion resulting from the purely pornographic media coverage. In fact, he was the first to refer to the event in that way, and in an interview he explained everything with quotes from Wilhem Reich and his theory about how authoritarian societies are perpetuated through family cells, since Chris Korda has always defended, in line with situationism, that there is an unreal sense of freedom transmitted through the show. The fact is that the titan released a great song and a video that are a spectacle like no other. The song narrates a pajezo committed during the viewing of the float of the planes against the towers, which is settled with a symbolic cleaning of the lump on an American flag. Eleven record companies laughed after giving the initial approval for the publication of the song, with Null Records finally being the only one with the courage not to back down, a decision that honors them. Without this I Like To Watch we would not have the glorious Twin Tower of Alma-X, be careful there that some passages are almost identical. And the video is a masterpiece of editing where sequences of the impact are superimposed with sports broadcasts, Chris Korda's own masturbation (he never had surgery, he opts for gender ambivalence instead of assuming definitive roles) and facial ejaculations. and mouths taken from porn videos, in such a way that at a first level there remains that denunciation of the pornographic nature of everything through the juxtaposition of images, but the subtext is still the message that the Church of Euthanasia tries to transmit: each ejaculation in the mouths of the felatrices - and that of Chris himself on the flag - are still abortions at a primordial level, or at least adhering to that sole and main mandate of not procreating, since it is sodomy in one of its aspects, meaning, that of sex used without intentions of conceiving life. A video that can be downloaded to applaud three years in a row but that, obviously, cannot be seen on any viewing platform.

During all that time in Gigolo Chris Korda gave several concerts, including an appearance at Sónar, and he got tired of shitting on all those who included him in electroclash, not because he had anything against the genre, far from it, but because of the fact that that this simplified their proposal – with other intentions and a long-term view – and the music journalists did not stop covering themselves with glory by putting all of God in the bag. In any case, what he leaves behind is a fascinating, risky, conceptually brilliant career that is difficult to repeat. Supreme genius and one of the most important transsexuals in music along with Wendy/Walter Carlos, as well as a pioneer in the free distribution of music, since everything that Gigolo Records published was made available to anyone who wanted to download it on the website of the Church of Euthanasia.

Here you can download everything he has done legally.

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