The techno crowd said they were no fun. The punks sneered at their drum machines. Yet Atari Teenage Riot’s music was tied to both scenes when the band started out in the early 1990s.
Today the German group, which performs on Thursday at The Wall (這牆) in Taipei, is considered legendary for pioneering the experimental genre known as “digital hardcore,” a mash-up of punk, noise and electronic dance music.
Imagine sampled metal guitar riffs played in a loop and MCs screaming at the top of their lungs while electronic drums spit out 200 beats per minute, and you have the typically untypical sound of Atari Teenage Riot.
The band was championed by the late BBC DJ John Peel and musicians like Bjork and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. At its peak in the late 1990s, the group toured with Rage Against the Machine, Ministry, Beck and the Wu-Tang Clan and was signed to Grand Royal, the now-defunct label started by the Beastie Boys.
But the hype surrounding Atari Teenage Riot had more to do with the anti-fascist and anti-establishment stance that drove its music. The group formed in 1992 as a direct response to racial violence and political problems in post-unification Germany.
“At that time, we saw such an increase in racism,” said 38-year-old bandleader and founder Alec Empire in a phone interview earlier this month. “The neo-Nazi scene was growing bigger. We really started the band to fight that.”
Thus came Atari Teenage Riot’s first single, Hetzjgad Auf Nazis! (Hunt Down and Kill the Nazis), a response to an incident in the northern German town of Rostock, where right-wing youths attacked and burned down an apartment complex that housed more than 100 foreign asylum seekers, many of them Vietnamese immigrants.
The specter of racism raised by this event hit home for Empire — his grandfather died in a Nazi concentration camp — and it made him reflect on the apolitical rave scene that was springing up with massive parties in abandoned warehouses in East Berlin.
“Because the techno scene is more about escapism, you know — let’s go to a party, take drugs, have fun — we thought we can’t really agree with that lifestyle anymore if in the real world, if you have all this stuff going on,” he said.
For Empire, the euphoria surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall faded with the emerging economic problems of a newly unified Germany.
“[These] totally different countries clashed together and the reaction of a lot of people was they were looking for extremes, politically, because they saw that the system, the idea system of capitalism, didn’t quite work out for the majority at that time,” he said.
Empire remembers those days in Berlin as characterized by “extreme violence” on
the streets, with fights “where there would be 200 skinheads on side and 200 punks on the
other side.”
As for the music, Empire wanted Atari Teenage Riot to reflect the turmoil he was seeing. “For us it was like, OK, we come from Berlin, in Germany, and we want this to sound exactly like that city, and like our generation,” he said.
The noisy, aggressive style that characterizes much of Atari Teenage Riot’s output was carefully constructed, says Empire. “People always think because it has that punk rock kind of energy to it — they think it ‘just happened,’ but that’s not the way it was,” he said. “I almost approached it like a film score or something, a lot of theory went into creating this kind of sound.”
Change must come
Atari Teenage Riot’s sound only grew harder and more distorted, and the band came to be associated with the saying “riot sounds produce riots,” which became something of a mantra for the band.
The group saw this idea to fruition on May Day 1999 in Berlin, at a demonstration protesting Germany’s involvement in NATO’s bombing of Kosovo. The scene turned chaotic and violent when confrontations broke out between police and protestors.
Atari Teenage Riot took part in the protest, performing on top of a truck. A YouTube video of the event (www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ab7Dksqfnw&feature=related) shows the group playing its signature songs Start the Riot and Revolution Action. At one point, Empire and his bandmates yell, “Fuck the police” and “Fight! Fight! Don’t take it” as scuffles break out. They were arrested after the protest.
Empire says “the context” is important when evaluating the event.
“For us it was a huge deal,” he said. “It [Kosovo] was the first time after World War II where the Germans bombed another country. And for us, Germany should not be actively involved in attack wars, that’s how we felt.”
The video of the Berlin protest is the band’s most watched clip on YouTube, and Empire sighs at some of the online comments he sees. “Sometimes you get these dumb people who think it’s a great sensation that there’s violence,” he said.
But Empire holds no apologies for encouraging protestors to engage in “revolution action.” As he saw it, the police had instigated the violence. “What a lot of people don’t know is that the video was used in court later on to bring justice to these cops who just beat innocent demonstrators,” he said.
BACK TOGETHER
In May, Atari Teenage Riot played in London’s Electric Ballroom, the band’s first show in more than 10 years. The group effectively disbanded in 2001 when a longtime member, rapper and MC Carl Crack, died of a drug overdose.
Originally the London concert was planned as a one-off event, but it went so well that the band decided to book more shows. “And now it’s like, suddenly, we’re coming to Taiwan,” Empire laughed.
The audience at Atari Teenage Riot’s show this Thursday will see and hear a mixture of the familiar and the new. Replacing Carl Crack will be Brooklyn-based MC and electronic musician CX KiDTRONiK, who has worked with Saul Williams and Kanye West. Empire says KiDTRONiK has
re-written Crack’s parts using his own lyrics, which include critical musings on US politics.
Noise and soundscape artist Nic Endo, a US-born German citizen who is half-Japanese, used to be only seen behind the sampling “machines” on stage when she joined the band in 1997. Nowadays she takes center stage, handling more of the vocal duties while Empire spends more time behind the decks.
One notable absence will be singer Hanin Elias, who was a visible force in the band and contributed riot grrl vocals. She decided not to tour with the band out of fear of damaging her voice, according to Empire.
He says the band lineup has changed often over the years, and the latest configuration is “the way the band should have been back then, but the time wasn’t right.”
Today, Atari Teenage Riot’s music finally feels “up-to-date” to Empire. “It’s 10, 15 years later, and people exactly understand now what we were talking about back then,” he said.
And so far Empire says he’s been encouraged and surprised by the crowds’ responses at recent shows.
“We were in a very dark mood [laughs] all the time,” he said of the band during the 1990s. “We saw this world ending ... now it feels more like when we started the band. People are motivated, they want to be active — this is the reaction we get from the crowd. I wouldn’t call it positive, but it’s like, let’s do something. Let’s unite and you know, we need music for these ideas. I didn’t see that coming at all.”
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