Do not multiply!

By Arno Raffeiner

Extreme alternatives are the life of house musician Chris Korda. On her new album she also propagates a simple recipe for saving the planet: people have to go.

Chris Korda doesn't believe in the usual world-saving folklore. About a bit of flight shame, the promise to reduce your carbon footprint, or whatever else is trendy at the moment. The measures that Korda has been calling for for almost thirty years against overpopulation, waste of resources and climate catastrophe are a little less cuddly: suicide, abortion, cannibalism and sodomy. These are the four cornerstones of Chris Korda's art and philosophy of life.

Korda has been producing electronic dance music since the early 1990s. She has always used house and techno as a vehicle for her radical social criticism - alongside her own religion. In 1992, Korda founded the Church of Euthanasia, an officially registered religious community in the USA. Their main concern and at the same time their only commandment: Do not multiply! The Church is anti-natalist, i.e. it is directed against the proliferation of humanity as the greatest threat to the planet. The church members see their processions and actions in the tradition of agitprop and Dadaism. It's about fighting the absurdity of the world with equally absurd means.

Korda does this not just with her religious community and through her music, but essentially with her entire existence. Over three decades ago she was a pioneer in several socio-political fields that are more relevant today than ever: LGBTIQ movement, veganism, environmental protection. Korda was also one of the early adopters on the World Wide Web with its techno-utopian potential. Alternative models are their purpose in life.

Merciless, but with humor

Chris Korda was born in New York in 1962. Biologically she is a man, but she prefers to be addressed with female pronouns as a recognition of her fluid gender identity. As a teenager, she experienced the disco era, which had its origins in the gay subculture. With her appearance she primarily communicates that binary attributions do not fit her. If she feels like she belongs anywhere, it is the gender bending movement and a clear commitment to neither-nor.

Korda has just released a handful of new pieces of music with lots of beautifully rhyming lines. "The clock's running out and the world's in pain / And making more babies is fucking insane," it is said once - since the world is going to the dogs, it would be crazy to put more children in it. That is the core thesis of "Apologize to the Future," a collection of house-style protest songs. The focus is on a disembodied machine voice that usually delivers its messages in chorus - merciless, but not without humor. The accompanying sound is airy, transparent, lively. Yes, that's what it could sound like, the voice of future generations.

The songs of "Apologize to the Future" are once again dedicated to Korda's life theme. She herself has adhered to antinatalism and sees the only commandment of her Church of Euthanasia as a provocation. With her dogma against reproduction, she deliberately oversteps the mark in order to set thought processes in motion - in the context of concrete protest, for example with drastic art actions against abortion opponents, as well as on the dance floor. By foregoing reproduction, she ultimately underpins a goal for society as a whole: the preservation of the habitat of the human species. She accepts contradictions. Korda's most famous slogan proclaims suicide as a survival strategy. The slogan "Save the planet, kill yourself!" made it the title of a techno track in 1993.

9/11 as art porn

At the beginning of the noughties she finally achieved the feat of becoming the most hated person in the club circuit. Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 - after the deaths of almost 3,000 people - Korda released the video clip "I Like to Watch". She combined images of the burning towers of the World Trade Center and people falling to their deaths with clips from porn films. Funky beats played on the soundtrack. The Twin Towers as the double phallus of capitalism, the exploding airplanes as penetration and cum fantasies and a world that is just great to watch - that's Korda's extremely exaggerated message. At that time, hardly anyone understood this exercise of the fundamental right to artistic freedom.

Then nothing was heard from Korda for a long time. She didn't perform, didn't release any music for years, and instead developed software for 3D printers. Viewed from the distance of nineteen years, "I Like to Watch" is the prime example of Korda's activism: polemical and pointed beyond the threshold of pain, without regard to piety and reasonableness.

Her new album will no longer cause as much of a stir as it did back then. Their concerns have not become any less urgent, on the contrary. Korda explained in the run-up to her new release that she has now become something like the "Bob Dylan of climate change". A Bob Dylan who sings about social inequality, exploitation and the looming catastrophe. And has a simple solution: "Respect the future, don't procreate!"

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