The Gospel of Chris Korda: a techno-punk preacher for civilization on the brink of collapse
Text by Hannah Ongley
NOTE: This article is derived from a more extensive email interview.
Nearly 30 years after founding the anti-natalist Church of
Euthanasia, Korda remains environmentalism's most controversial figure.
But she’s only trying to save humanity from itself.
“Suppose I told you that a huge asteroid is headed straight for
Earth, and that in a few days, all plants and animals—including us—will
be vaporized, leaving only bacteria, insects and fungi…
“What would you spend your last few days doing?”
Apocalypse theory is Chris Korda’s way of saying we need to wake the
fuck up now. I’d asked what informed the elegiac tone of her new album, Apologize to the Future,
a dystopian synthesis of rap and robotics inspired by all the ways
humans are destroying the planet. The asteroid, Korda explains, would
only make the human extinction process faster and more egalitarian,
granting painless vaporization to all—the reality is an increasingly
inhospitable planet, with future humans suffering for our crimes. “Human
beings are poorly equipped to respond to slow-moving threats caused by
our own behavior,” Korda says. “I expect future generations will resent
us bitterly while they’re picking through the rubble of society.”
This subject matter is nothing new for the techno artist, software developer, and environmentalist enfant terrible;
who became notorious in the ‘90s when she established the Church of
Euthanasia—and its infamous slogan, “Save the planet, kill yourself”—to
preach the merits of antinatalism through four pillars of suicide,
abortion, sodomy, and cannibalism. (The one commandment all members were
bound to obey was “Thou Shalt Not Procreate.”) But on Apologize to the Future,
the message is written from the perspective of future generations,
voiced earnestly by a chorus of robots. It’s a tougher pill to swallow
without the seditious irony of the CoE’s incendiary détournement stunts.
“‘Save the planet, kill yourself’ was macabre humor,” Korda assures
me. But it feels gravely prescient decades after Korda was promulgating
the message—via bumper stickers—at the 1992 Democratic National Convention, or on a 1997 Jerry Springer
episode titled “I Want to Join a Suicide Cult.” America has only just
survived a 2020 Presidential Election that repeatedly devolved into
candidates arguing about whose fracking plans are the most epic. We’ve
now entered an “era of pandemics” brought on by rampant deforestation, industrialization, and overpopulation. And as liberal senators from the Wildfire State refuse to acknowledge child activists
backing a Green New Deal, it’s hard to argue Korda’s claim that
“condemning your precious spawn to a nasty, brutish, and short existence
on a wrecked planet is beyond selfish.” The real suicide cult, we’re
discovering, is neoliberalism.
Apologize to the Future manifested over the course of a
decade, during which Korda developed the custom sequencer technology the
album was composed on, drawing on her classical music training and a
long career in software engineering. “As a child I was fascinated by
machines and occasionally disassembled them, to the great annoyance of
my parents,” she recalls. “My teenage years were more turbulent than
average but in college I had a great stroke of luck: In order to avoid
writing term papers, I took an introductory course in computer
programming, and unexpectedly discovered that I had a gift for it.” She
wrote her first music software as an accompaniment for her jazz guitar,
programming it to improvise solos, before discovering polymeter through a
MIDI sequencing software called DOS Cakewalk.
Korda grew up in New York City, and it was on a childhood trip to the
Museum of Modern Art that she first discovered the work of Thomas
Wilfred—a pioneering light artist who built highly sophisticated
mechanical sculptures, collectively dubbed ‘Lumia,’ that produced
spectacular displays of kinetic light. “He made phase art long before
the term existed,” Korda says. She describes her immaculately precise
polymeter sequences as the musical equivalent of Lumia; while her
machines are virtual, they use the same principle of interference, or
phase shifts, to generate variety by repeating a pattern. In some of
Korda’s compositions, it takes millions of years for the pattern to
repeat. Understandably, she feels a great deal of affection towards her
machines. “I have spent much of my life designing, constructing, and
debugging invisible machines,” she says. “I care for my software
inventions the way other people supposedly care for their children. In
the virtual world, I’m godlike. I create and destroy hierarchies, stop
time and routinely travel to the past or future. I actually prefer
machines to people in many ways.”
Machine music has long been a tool of resistance and a sound of new
frontiers. Detroit’s techno pioneers harnessed their immediate
post-industrial surroundings to imagine techno-utopian futures of robots
and space travel; an otherworldly sound that spread to Berlin’s first
nightclubs when the Wall came down and the Cultural Revolution was
sparked. But Korda’s new album comes as the techno scene experiences an
existential crisis of its own. Due to the pandemic, clubs remain closed
for the foreseeable future, and recent uprisings have forced musicians
to reckon with an age-old tension between resistance and raving. In
Korda’s hometown of New York City, amid historic anti-police brutality
uprisings, techno’s associations with hedonism have sparked backlash
from both media outlets and local organizers. Particularly amid a
pandemic, it’s not easy to keep track of where the line is drawn between
resistance and irresponsibility.
“The music of my youth was often explicitly political, but the Reagan
years put a stop to that,” Korda recalls. “Of course exceptions could
be found, particularly in hardcore punk, rap, and avant-garde, but the
1980s arc towards superficiality was unmistakable. For me, the first
signs of a counterforce were ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and ‘Cop
Killer.’” Korda accepts that techno is associated with hedonistic
pleasure and pure escapism, but says it needn’t be limited to that, and
historically it hasn’t been. She points to the sharply political lyrics
of techno pioneers Kraftwerk, and specifically their album Computer World,
a masterpiece of pro-technology sentiment and sound that feels deeply,
palpably human to this today. Even Korda’s anomalous 1994 hit “Save the
Planet, Kill Yourself” has a close relative in “Sterilization,” released
in 1997 by Detroit’s Dopplereffekt—a futurist electro-techno act led by
Gerald Donald of Drexciya. The track is a thumping critique of racial
hygiene and selective breeding which contains only six words: “We had to
sterilize the population.”
“Rap is a more likely avenue for political music because it’s
lyric-driven,” Korda says, but “any style of music can be political if
there’s the will to make it so.” While techno often relies on an absence
of lyrics, there are countless examples of artists using lyrical
sparsity to extraordinary effect—including Carl Cox’s remix
of Korda’s 1994 hit “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself,” on which the call
to “explain, explain, explain, explain, explain, explain, explain” (why
your leaders deny that the planet’s ecosystem is failing) builds to an
insistent intensity until the beat inevitably drops. Gerald Donald of
Dopplereffekt has championed also the political potential of purely
instrumental music, which speaks through data structure, tempo, and
repetition. “Usually we associate a particular set of tones, rhythmic
patterns and timbres with certain emotions, conditions, ideas or
environments,” Donald told Electronic Beats
in 2013. “For example, a very rigid pattern and rapid percussion
sequence can give the aura of a totalitarian state, as can industrial
music. All music structure is reflective of its surroundings.” (The
cover of Dopplereffekt’s 1999 album Gesamtkunstwerk, on which “Sterilization” appears, features the hammer and sickle of communist proletarian solidarity, which Donald describes as an homage to the ideal political concept.)
Apologize to the Future sees Korda forge her own heady
fusion of techno and rap music. On the track “Overshoot,” the polymeter
creates a twitchy, danceable syncopation over which the robot children
spit mechanical rap bars, lamenting, “It’s my future on the line / While
you bitches shop and dine / I didn’t ask to be born / Into a disaster
porn.” The robot rappers also have a sly sense of humor and a knack for
weaving pop culture references into their political banter. “Remember
the film Titanic? How that rich dude was such a dick?” they ask
in monotone before the music pattern reaches a peak, offering a
pleasantly chaotic respite from the not-so-easy-listening chorus. Other
tracks echo the soothing, seductive time signatures of space-age healing
music, with lyrics delivered like extra-terrestrial meditation mantras.
“Science starts from the assumption that our senses are easily
fooled,” Korda explains of the relationship between her obsession with
machines and her anti-industrialist ideology. She notes that Galileo
wouldn’t have been able to decode the skies without the technological
advances that made telescopes possible, allowing humans to radically
augment our vision, and touts the potential of intelligent machines to
build a more enlightened world. “I’m pro-technology because I’m
pro-knowledge and pro-civilization. I don’t romanticize our prehistory,”
she says. “For countless millennia we were childlike morons cowering in
caves. For all its faults, civilization is the only strategy that leads
to anything interesting. If it kills us all, so be it. It was worth a
try, and at least it wasn’t boring.”
The anti-procreation messaging of Apologize to the Future is
still militant and still radical. But if it doesn’t incite the same
outrage as it did in the ‘90s, it’s likely because many of us seem to
agree—for myriad reasons—that “making more babies is fucking insane” in
today’s climate. The US birthrate is the lowest it’s been in three
decades; most of us can’t afford to have babies even if we desperately
want to, assuming we want them to have a reasonable chance at life. In
this respect, Korda’s logic isn’t really out of line with liberals and
leftists who point out the hypocrisy of anti-abortion ‘activists’ being
pro-life only until the baby is actually born. Korda only takes things a
step further by maintaining that you can’t relinquish responsibility
after the kid graduates college. If environmental destruction continues
at this rate, student debt might be the last thing on our children’s
minds.
“The biggest change is that I have more sympathy for humans now,”
Korda says when I ask how her politics have changed since the ‘90s.
“Many of the biological attributes that helped us to survive our
prehistory are now counterproductive, but that’s hardly our fault. Any
intelligent species would be tempted to throw an extravagant party and
burn all of its resources at once.” The Church of Euthanasia itself had a
quiet internal reckoning in the ‘90s; with members deciding they
harbored sympany for, rather than anger at, humans. And throughout the
2000s, Korda continued to publish e-sermons and news clippings on the
Church’s website, though nothing that drew as much attention as
counterattacking an abortion clinic protest with signs reading “Eat a
Queer Fetus For Jesus,” or setting up a suicide hotline to coach people
through the process of self-annhilation. (“It’s been a disappointment to
me that no one’s actually killed themselves and then had their parents
sue us,” Korda said in one interview published on the Church’s press page. “That would actually punch through the media shield.”)
Today, Korda and the Church’s climate-focused culture jamming and
punk performance art have their most obvious echoes in Extinction
Rebellion’s civil disobedience actions—but while XR demonstrations have
certainly attracted controversy and attention, the group has been mostly
welcomed by elite media. It’s difficult to think of anyone now
riotously crusading for the avant-garde art of détournement, as
a worthy cause in itself, quite like Korda and the Church of Euthanasia
did. Taking cues from the Situationist International and Dadaism to
newly grotesque (and hilarious) heights of spectacle, the Church made
plenty of headlines in its early years, though you could hardly call its
members media darlings. In their eyes, all press was good press. “I’m
inspired by Dadaist art, but I wouldn’t call it a strategy. Art
shouldn’t be confused with political tactics,” Korda says. “The best art
exists for its own sake and doesn’t serve the goals of anyone but the
artist. I don’t make art in order to change people’s behavior, and if I
did, I would be very disappointed.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Korda doesn’t fear death—“that’s part of the
deal”—but she finds the impermanence of one’s artistic legacy very
difficult to accept. “My work will probably be unknown in the future,”
she says. “Because a wrecked planet certainly won’t include archives or
websites, and eventually won’t include human beings either.
“The hardest thing to face is the realization that all of humanity’s
hard-won progress—our predictive explanations of phenomena, our mastery
of tools and technology, our dazzling cultural achievements—will all be
reduced to a thin layer of oily rock. That’s a heartbreaking tragedy. We
stand on the shoulders of giants, and their story is what gives my life
meaning. It’s a terrible paradox that the same qualities that make us
interesting and worth saving—our insatiable curiosity, our desire to
master and transform our world—are also our undoing. It seems unfair.
But who said evolution has a happy ending? The creative process consoles
me. Achievement is its own reward.”
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