To celebrate the release of “Urge to Kill” on Rustblade Records, RETROVIRUS will bring their devastating live show to Europe in June 2015.
No Wave iconoclast and Big Sexy Noise-queen Lydia Lunch, in conspiracy with Herculean guitarist Weasel Walter (Flying Luttenbachers), fret-destroying bassist Tim Dahl (Child Abuse) and legendary skins-basher Bob Bert (Sonic Youth/Pussy Galore) are about to unleash “Urge to Kill” – the follow up to last year’s face-melting live recording by this deadly combo called RETROVIRUS.
After a series of bands followed the notably 13.13 (1982), Lydia Lunch became known for songs that were fits of alienation, neurosis, claustrophobia, paranoia. Lunch’s nightmares were the nightmares of a street girl who grew up too quickly and was terrified by life. Her decadent antics were set aside in the lengthy psychodrama The Agony Is The Ecstasy(1982), possibly her masterpiece, a cosmic and Freudian suite, a still life of the wasteland, that, musically speaking, harked back to acid-rock. That unholy liturgy led to the dejected litanies of In Limbo (1984), another slow, languid, apathetic, hallucinated torture and self-flagellation by a sinner who relished her stay in a Dante-esque hell.
Later in her career, Lunch focused on the spoken word, drawn to music mainly via collaborations and for theatrical purposes. Her vulgar, sordid, degenerate and lascivious vocals had a unique, “negative” appeal on that generation of composers.
She delved again into her depressing universe of dejected, meaningless lives on Smoke In The Shadows (2004), that resurrected the cadaver of her nocturnal languid smoky kitschy lounge noir jazz, as well as the spectre of her lifeless voice, scavenging emotions in an existential junkyard devastated by nihilism. At the same time she successfully updated her cliche to the age of rap.
Throughout her career, her sensual moaning and demonic wailing coined a new art of vocal music, and, at the same time, reinvented the stereotype of the rock hero (heroine). Lunch stands as one of the great histrionic shamans of rock music, but a completely different kind than her predecessors Jim Morrison and Patti Smith.
Lydia Lunch
Saturday, 12th March 2016 | 19:00 CET
Frannz Club | Schönhauser Allee 36| 10435 Berlin/Prenzlauer Berg
