Concerts

Following their successful concerts with the RTV Slovenia Symphony Orchestra in the famous Henry Le Boeuf Hall of the BOZAR arts centre in Brussels, and an expanded program which was premièred in Festival Ljubljana in 2016, Laibach launches series of new projects with symphony orchestra and choir that will be touring in next years. Like all Laibach concerts, this will be a multivisual event accompanied by stunning film projections.

Laibach is a music and cross-media group from Slovenia established on the 1st of June, 1980 in Trbovlje. The name of the band is the historic German version of the name Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana. From the begining Laibach has developed a “Gesamtkunstwerk” –  multi-disciplinary art practice in all fields ranging from popular culture to art (collages, photo-copies, posters, graphics, paintings, videos, installations, concerts and performances). Since their beginnings the group was associated and surrounded with controversy, provoking strong reactions from political authorities of former Yugoslavia and in particular in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia. Their militaristic self-stylisation, propagandist manifestos and totalitarian statements have raised many debates on their actual artistic and political positioning. Many important theorists, among them Boris Groys and Slavoj Žižek, have discussed the Laibach phenomenon both from an analytical as well as critical cultural point of view. The main elements of Laibach’s varied practices are: strong references to avant-garde art history, nazi-kunst and socialist realism for their production of visual art, de-individualisation in their public performances as an anonymous quartet dressed in uniforms, conceptual proclamations, and forceful sonic stage performances – mainly labelled as industrial (pop) music. Laibach is practising collective work, dismantling individual authorship and establishing the principle of hyper-identification. In 1983 they have invented and defined the historic term ‘retro-avant-garde’. They creatively questioned artistic ‘quotation’, appropriation, re-contextualisation, copyright and copy-left. Although starting out as both an art and music collective, Laibach became internationally renowned foremost on the music scene, particularly with their unique cover-versions and interpretations of hits by Queen, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, etc.

After the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991, Laibach continued mostly within the realm of popular music, while remaining a point of reference in terms of artistic cultural criticism. During recent years the group underwent an international re-evaluation of their artistic practice in the course of an emergence of post-structuralist views on worldwide conceptual art production. In 2006 Laibach recorded a conceptual album Volk which containing versions of 14 national anthems, including one for their art collective, NSK, which they had declared a virtual country in 1991, issuing their own passports.

With album Spectre (released on Mute in 2014) Laibach created an important step forward in their career. The group – which has never defined itself politically, but has constantly analysed politics through its work – comes across as politically engaged as never before. Spectre sounds like a political manifesto in poetic form. The music from the last album of Laibach is Also Sprach Zarathustra (2017) is based on Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical novel. 

In 2008, Laibach presented a loose reinterpretation of Johann Sebastian Bach's The Art of Fugue which premièred in Bach festival in Leipzig. Since this work has no specifications of acquired instruments and is furthermore based on mathematical principles, Laibach has argued that the music can be seen as proto-techno.

One year later, Laibach presented the project VolksWagner – an interpretation of Wagner's music in collaboration with the RTV Slovenia Symphony Orchestra and Izidor Leitinger in Gallus Hall of Cankarjev dom in Ljubljana. Laibach rewrote also pieces of other classical music composers including Gustav Holst, Ferenc Liszt or Dmitri Shostakovich.

In August 2015, Laibach became the first ever band of its kind to perform in the secretive country of North Korea, a reclusive garrison state as well-known for its military marches, mass gymnastics and hymns to the Great Leader, as for its defiant resistance to Western popular culture. Laibach’s Liberation Day’s concert coincided with the 70^th anniversary of the Korean peninsula’s liberation from Japanese colonization and its subsequent division into two enemy states, which confront each other in an uneasy truce to this day.

The concert was a great success and provoked a massive media debate around the world. The event and the whole of Laibach’s visit to North Korea was been filmed and will be the subject of the full-length documentary Liberation Day, premièred in 2016.

Laibach has created music for several theatre productions and took part in feature-length movies. In the last years the grouped performed i.a. in Queen Elisabeth Hall in London, National Gallery of Denmark, EXPO 2000 in Hannover, EXIT Festival, Theatro Circo in Braga, Sziget Festival or Tate Modern in London.

Slovenian music and cross-media group Laibach – describing themselves as ‘engineers of human souls’ – presented with a great success a multi-media show recreating moments key from their history in the early 1980s to the future, in a performance specially designed for the Turbine Hall in Tate Modern, London.

SONORA is proud to represent Laibach with orchestra projects internationally. For more information please contact Stanislaw Suchora (stanislaw@sonoramusic.eu, +48 795 655 826) or Mikołaj Bylka (mikolaj@sonoramusic.eu, +48 698 622 596).

More about Laibach: www.laibach.org

Concert dates:

09.05.2017 - K.D. Vatroslav Lisinjski, Zagreb (HR)
24.06.2017 - Malta Festival Poznań (PL)
12.05.2018 - Lublin, Kody Festival / The Centre for the Meeting of Cultures (PL)
07.09.2018 - Ljubljana Festival (SI)