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Chris Korda’s Complex Electronic Compositions Contemplate Collapse
By Henry Ivry · October 30, 2023
Chris Korda occupies a singular space in the world of contemporary dance music. Who else has made an appearance on The Jerry Springer Show, kick-started
electroclash, released contemporary classical records, and played live
at some of the most well-regarded dance music festivals in the world?
These are just a few of the accolades that dot the CV of one of
clubland’s most mythical figures.
Korda has been one of dance music’s chief provocateurs for the last 30 years. Her first record, 1993’s Save the Planet Kill Yourself, was released, in part, to fund her project Church of Euthanasia.
The Church, run by Korda and Robert Kimberk, was, as Korda explains, “a
theatrical company at [the] height of the street actions period” in the
mid-‘90s that eventually landed her appearance on the aforementioned
episode of Jerry.
But as much attention as the Church garnered for its outlandish
proposals (the episode was called “I Want to Join a Suicide Cult”), what
is impossible to deny is how killer a club tune the record is. The
rhythms are complex and off-kilter, while the melodies have the grating
intensity of UK hardcore mixed with a disco swing. It’s this sort of
fluidity between the funky and the political that gives Korda her
magnetism, the cornerstone of both her long-ranging career in music and
politics. As she makes clear, it’s impossible to think of these two
ideas as inseparable. Music has always been Korda’s political medium—a
way for her to fight back against contemporary culture’s “escape into
solipsism,” as she puts it.
Korda got her start in music early. Born in New York City to a family
that prioritized cultural immersion, some of her earliest memories are
of seeing Led Zeppelin and the Jackson 5 at Radio City Music Hall (she
remembers, she and her mom were “the only white people in Radio City
Music Hall for The Jackson 5 in 1975”). This period in the late ‘70s,
when rock, funk, disco, and soul were all blending into one another,
remains a touchstone for Korda’s work; it’s what she describes as “the
peak of ‘odd time’ in Western music” where musicians were experimenting
with rhythms outside of traditional meters.
These early forays into the world of polymeter fomented both a
rhythmic sensibility and something more critical about culture at large.
“I’ve lived through the collapse of everything,” she says in no
uncertain terms, describing the end of Great Society legislation and the
ascendancy of Reaganomics and neoliberalism in the ‘80s. “[We’re] back
to where we were before the French Revolution. There has been a parallel
collapse in culture: people are getting dumber, the patterns are
getting simpler, and people want to be anesthetized all day. I’ve tried
to change it by bringing more patterns into electronic music.”
Korda doesn’t use a standard 4/4 template; instead, she uses complex
polymeter to achieve sprawling, fluid ends, a vast rhythmic
constellation that’s always in flux. “Dance music is extremely
conformist and tied to neoliberal capitalism,” she says. “The most
efficient and rapid way to achieve profit is to standardize consumption.
If everyone wants the same thing, it’s much easier to manufacture what
that thing is; if everyone really listens to the same music and takes
the same drugs—I associate the modern form of electronic music with the
standardization and homogenization of culture.”
Her songs will often shift rhythmic parameters throughout a single
track’s runtime. This means her records are often frustrating for DJs to
play, but that’s what she’s aiming for: “[People] complain that my
records are hard to mix, and I take it as a compliment. That’s good
news—I made something that was different and challenging: it’s a good
sign,” she says.
When she first became immersed in electronic music in the ‘90s, it
was the underground ethos, the music’s roots in Black and queer
communities, that attracted her in the first place. Korda’s exposure to
dance music culture coincided with her exploration of her gender. “In
October 1991, we had a Halloween party and I got the idea to dress as a
woman—it was in the air a bit in 1991, ‘I’m going to be a woman’,” she
recollects. “It took on a life of its own and […] everyone that saw me
[knew] it was more than a costume and encouraged me to go to groups and
find more people that were involved.” It was through this
experimentation that she discovered Boston and New York’s world of
nightclubs and experimental music more generally.
After first getting her feet wet on the dance floor, it was only a
matter of time before she started making tracks herself. Even though she
achieved a semi-pro level of success as a jazz guitarist in her 20s, it
was rhythm, rather than melody, that excited Korda the most. “I would
attract the amazement and wonder of my classmates by beatboxing before
beatboxing was even a word, but I instinctively figured it out,” she
says. Shortly after going clubbing for the first time, she bought a
Roland TR-606 in a thrift store and started experimenting with
production.
She quickly found herself at the heart of her local Boston club
scene, but also started gaining attention more widely. Towards the end
of the ‘90s, she picked up an unlikely advocate, DJ Hell,
the founder of International Deejay Gigolo Records and the force behind
the early ‘00s electroclash movement. The sort of European decadence
and hedonism synonymous with electroclash might seem a world away from
Korda’s ecological activism (something she is equally surprised about),
but it’s also easy to see what attracted Hell to her work: “I was a
founder of electroclash,” she says. “One of the key things that Hell saw
was that people were getting tired of [white labels]. What was missing
was the element of glam and celebrity, and there being something to see
and entertain. His idea was to bring personality back into electronic
music.”
Korda’s 2003 record for International Gigolo, Man of the Future,
oozes personality. The record isn’t the sort of party palliative that
many of her peers were releasing at the time. Instead, it’s a blistering
critique of a world on the precipice of a meltdown. (One song compares
masturbating to watching planetary collapse and 9/11 at the same time.)
What emerges is dance music as a vessel for something much larger than
clubbing. As Korda reflected on this time in her life, she remembers,
“It dawned on me that humanity was overrunning planet Earth like the
inmates taking over the asylum.” It was a case of “individualism
gone wrong,” she says—the harbinger of a precarious future.
Just as quickly as Korda found herself playing for larger and larger
crowds, she turned her back on nightlife. For fifteen years, Korda
didn’t release a single record. Part of this was circumstantial (this
was around the same time that the vinyl market collapsed; International
Gigolo went bankrupt in the mid-’00s), but part of it was also
political—Korda was acutely aware of how she had been playing into the
commercialization of underground culture that she so vehemently stood
against.
During that time, she worked as a software developer, but never fully
left music, still tinkering with her machines. After the passing of her
mother in 2016, though, she had a revelation. “You think I’m next; it’s
time for me to make a stand and devote the rest of my life to art; I
had a shot at making this work.” She moved to Berlin and re-immersed
herself in club culture, culminating with the release of 2019’s Akoko Ajeji for the famous purveyors of minimal and microhouse, Perlon Records.
It’s a strange and squiggly club record. Some of the tracks feel like
conventional dance music (“Ala Aye” is about as good a piano house
track as you’ll hear anywhere), but it’s also much weirder and more
complex. Melodies and rhythms change with the frequency of a toddler
impatiently turning a kaleidoscope. There is a jazz lover’s nimbleness
to the drum programming, but also synth lines that work best at an
after-party. Put on “Ra Mi” when the sun is coming through the shutters,
for example, and wait for the tear ducts to fill.
Returning to clubland after so much time away, Korda is cautious
about how the landscape has changed. Gone is the punk ethos that brought
her in, as DJs have become the homogenized background noise for people
partying. This culminated with a scathing essay she penned for The Ransom Note, critiquing
what she decried as the “DJ Pyramid,” where a “monotonous beat” has
helped enshrine “a global economic and social order.”
She pulls no punches, going so far as to take on dance music’s sacred
Berlin bastion, Berghain. “EDM is increasingly associated with
hedonism,” she says. “People feel completely empowered and ignore the
music and party and talk. If I spend a weekend at Berghain […] I feel
like I spent a whole evening watching people drink and do drugs. It
gives people a safe space where they can be themselves, but I don’t
consider this as a substitute for a vibrant political musical culture.”
Korda, though, isn’t one just to critique for critique’s sake. She’s
also looking for alternative ways to make dance music her own. Her
output since Akoko Ajeji has been prolific. She’s released five
full-length records that run the gamut from groovy microhouse to one of
her most poignant releases to date, Passion for Numbers. The
latter is a piano record that she wrote without a piano, making, as she
described it, “kinetic sculptures” that build from her algorithmic
approach to time and sequence. It’s striking for its unadorned beauty.
All of this has led up to her most recent releases, two mirrored
records that feel like the distillation of everything she’s been working
towards for 30 years. 2020’s Apologize to the Future
is an album-length screed written, as Korda puts it, from the
perspective of the Greta Thunbergs of the world—those deeply concerned
with climate change. Composed of nursery-rhyme-like couplets, Korda
takes aims at everything from noise-canceling headphones to “a sperm and
egg lottery won by a fuck.” Setting this to some of her funkiest loops
makes the tracks all the more effective; Korda is willing listeners to
get lulled into a sense of dancefloor complacency before she jerks them
back into reality, either with a jarring lyric or a change in the
track’s meter.
2023’s Not My Problem, I’ll Be Dead
reverses the perspective, imagining climate change from the perspective
of the 1%. Touching on synth-pop and French filter house, drawing
lyrical inspiration from the unlikely pairing of Donald Trump and Emily
Dickinson, the record is the embodiment of the hedonistic solipsism that
Korda has been critiquing for so long.
Korda isn’t under any illusions that her music is going to
single-handedly reverse climate change. What she does want to do is
force people to ask questions. “How do we change the culture this big
and this fundamental? How do we make culture less superficial?”
For her, one way to start answering these questions is to make music
itself more challenging and, in the process, instill a sense of social
cohesion back into the underground. “In order to solve climate change,
we will need solidarity; we need the one thing that we can’t seem to do,
which is agree, and the goal needs to be humanity becoming a
long-living species. We are having a reality moment,” she explains. “We
can’t be special snowflakes. People are retreating from reality—I
understand why people want to escape from reality, but it’s not
constructive.” And, hopefully, hearing a Korda track in the club is the
necessary shock to the system that might make you just that little bit
more conscious.
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