(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

The Slovenian collective Laibach, the first rock musicians from Eastern Europe to gain worldwide recognition, have amassed an impressive body of work in the realm of avant-garde rock. While much of their music is pure showmanship of limited musical value, and many of their ideas seemed puerile, incapable of entertaining or innovating, their program remains one of the most original variations of electronic rock born in the 1970s.

Formed in 1979 in Ljubljana as Neue Slowenische Kunst, Laibach (Laibach being the German name of the city) debuted with the tapes Through The Occupied Netherlands and Ein Schauspieler, the 1984 single (for Les Disques Du Crepuscule) with Boji / Sila / Brat Moj, and another 1984 single (for Cherry Red) with Panorama and Dekret. These early works were later collected on Rekapitulation (Walter Ulbricht, 1985), or, more precisely, Rekapitulacija 1980 + 1984. These compositions present a group as theatrical as it is musical, capable of absorbing elements of jazz and classical to stage grim expressionist pantomimes, still in their early experiments with industrial and ambient music, and uncertain of electronic means, which they embrace in order to ridicule a Nazi-fascist ideology. Perspektive, Ti Ki Izzivas, Brat Moj, Smrt Za Smrt were pop songs that carried out both a sociological and aesthetic experiment.

Rejecting the abrasive and cacophonous sounds of Britain’s early industrialists and instead adopting dark, grandiose, and menacing harmonies, Laibach arrived in 1985 at the unsettling sonic universe of Nova Akropola (Cherry Red), the album that made them famous. Milan Fras replaced Tomaz Hostnik on vocals, and his eccentric vocal style became one of the band’s two trademarks, the other being martial rhythms. His monstrous tenor screams over the powerful hip-hop-like shocks of Die Liebe, declaims hoarsely over the slow, heavy workshop cadence of Nova Akropola, with brass highs that come and go.
Their method of composition, based on granite-like blocks of sound, emerges in Die Grosse Kraft, built on loops of an orchestral fanfare and press-like cadences, and in Vier Personen, whose structural core consists of the repetition of two keyboard themes (one dissonant) over which the rhythm-box and military-style samples vent. The result is a harmonically murky mixture, in which a core of military hallucinations blends with concrete music (Krvava Gruda), with piano clusters and Gregorian chants (Vade Retro), with Janacek’s "Glagolitic Mass," and with the inevitable Strauss "Zarathustra" (Panorama).

After the theater music for Baptism (Walter Ulbricht, 1987), one of their most experimental works, Laibach went through a period of reassessment. Preceded by the single Geburt Einer Nation (Mute), the album Opus Dei (Mute) opted for a more pop-oriented style, including a couple of hit covers (Life Is Life would become their biggest hit).

After a parodic reinterpretation of the Beatles’ Let It Be and the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy For The Devil, presented as programmatic works aimed at demystifying the rock star, it was time for their colossal project, Macbeth (Mute, 1990), a half-hour suite in which Laibach employs their entire repertoire of tricks.
While the thousandth version of their Wagnerian marches (the Preludium, Ohne Geld) can feel a bit cloying, and the tightly arranged brass interventions, marked by armies of timpani, can no longer add anything to a scene already overflowing with militaristic ornaments, it is the density of incidental events that keeps the listener’s attention alive. Every millimeter of groove is packed with orchestral sounds like perhaps only Shostakovich’s symphonies. Expectans Expectavos even brushes against Baroque religious music.

Kapital (Mute, 1992) avoids old pitfalls thanks to a rapid shift toward danceable cyberpunk: aside from a few residual operatic-orchestral touches (The Hunter's Funeral Procession and Entartete Welt), techno rhythms dominate (Wirtschaft Ist Tot above all). The emphasis remains the same, but the goal is far more limited. The band’s limitations emerge without mercy.

Nato is a collection of covers only, confirming the group’s creative crisis.

They remixed a famous musical on The Sound of Music (2018).