Chris Korda: The Bob Dylan of Climate Change

By Arno Raffeiner September 10, 2019

Chris Korda became known in the 1990s with two electro albums on DJ Hell's Gigolo label. Not only were their idiosyncratic songs visionary, but also their emancipated, open handling of their identity as a transgendered person, as they characterized themselves. With Terre Thaemlitz, Korda was the first artist to make her trans-identity a theme in the techno scene. At the same time, she was also a scandal-monger; Korda shocked people with her own religious community, the Church Of Euthanasia. Their radical slogan "Save the planet - kill yourself" has developed unexpected relevance today, in view of the impending climate apocalypse. After a 15-year hiatus, Chris Korda is back with an album on Perlon. Arno Raffeiner met the musician in Berlin.

Some people spend a week a year going plastic-free. Others sail across the Atlantic on a sailing yacht. Most people cultivate a little bit of flight shame while booking their next weekend trip. Chris Korda is not into all the trendy world-saving folklore. When it comes to disaster prevention, she prefers abortion, Dadaism and the abolition of 4/4 time. And she has been doing so for over 25 years. But first things first.

For the person who is at times the most hated person in the techno circus. Shorts, a low-cut top, and a baggy jacket over it. Her hair is short and a little thin in places, her nail polish is pink and gold, and her need to communicate is clearly heightened. In the middle of Korda's almost two-hour lecture on polymeter and antinatalism, a young woman comes to our table. She just wants to say how great she thinks Korda's outfit is, especially the earrings. Korda is delighted: "See? That's exactly why I want to move to Berlin!"

Korda was not always as well received everywhere as she was on this summer evening in Berlin's Prinzessinnengärten, a place where alternative models of living for urban space are being tested. Alternative models are Korda's life's work. She was once considered a walking provocation. Today the standard reaction is more like: Chris who? For over 15 years there was neither new music nor scandalous news from her. At the end of the 90s and the beginning of the 00s, the two were practically synonymous.

In a league with Stockhausen

September 11, 2001 is porn. The World Trade Center is the double phallus of arch-capitalism. The exploding jets are penetration and cumshot fantasies. And the world is just horny watching it.

That was the message of "I Like To Watch," a video clip that Korda published on the Internet shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That is, after the deaths of almost 3,000 people and the collapse of a world order. Korda edited images of the burning WTC towers in New York and bodies falling to their deaths with money shots from porn films, and the soundtrack included funky beats and lines like: "That plane-shaped hole really gets me hot." Hardly anyone at the time understood this exercise of the fundamental right to artistic freedom.

Viewed from a distance, "I Like To Watch" is the prime example of Korda's activism. Polemical and pointed beyond the pain threshold, without regard for piety, reasonableness or other old conventions. At least in the same league as Karlheinz Stockhausen's statements on 9/11 as the greatest work of art of all time, maybe even a step above. "It was super extreme, I recognize that," Korda says today. "But I'm not ashamed of it." Nevertheless, she disappeared a short time later.

In 2003 she released the album The Man Of The Future, which defined the progressive rhetoric of techno somewhat differently. In the title track, a euphorically high-pitched voice sings: "Those who cannot adapt must be destroyed." Korda also adapted herself by mothballing the desktop computer she had toured with for live performances and doing away with herself as a love-hate club icon, at least temporarily. She no longer released music or played gigs.

Suicide as a survival strategy

Korda's place has always been in between. With her music, art, software and activism, she primarily communicates that conventional binary attributions do not work for her. If she feels she belongs anywhere, it is to what she calls the "gender bending movement". "The willingness to occupy the middle, not to be ashamed of being neither-nor - that is extremely important to me," she says. She does not want to make any rules about how exactly she should be addressed. She finds that too normative. She sees it more as a question of respect and politeness when she is addressed as a biological man with female pronouns. And as a compliment that she is as happy about as the spontaneous comment about her earrings.

"Playing in Poland dressed as a woman was damn risky and almost cost me my life."

Korda was born in New York in 1962. She now lives in a suburb of Boston, but has been thinking about leaving the USA for some time. If Donald Trump is elected president for a second time in November 2020, she will definitely do so, she explains, and asks if anyone knows of a vacant apartment in Berlin. Apart from the local scenes in Detroit and Chicago, the American music business never played a role for her anyway. But she stood out all the more on the dance floors of Europe.

She performed in drag, which caused quite a stir in the minimal seriousness of the time. "I risked death often enough, even on tour in Europe," she says. "Performing in Poland dressed as a woman was damn risky and almost cost me my life. I was doing cross-dressing and gender-bending long before it was in any way accepted or safe. It was brave. It had to be done. And that's why I still do it today."

Korda saw electronic dance music as the ideal vehicle for her radical social criticism. At the same time, she brought a touch of showbiz back to the clubs with her dresses and wigs. It was a perfect match for DJ Hell's International DJ Gigolos and the ensuing electroclash wave, like the fist for Schwarzenegger's biceps in the label's logo.

When her first Gigolo album "Six Billion Humans Can't Be Wrong" was released in 1999, Korda had already had a life as a software developer, female impersonator and founder of a religious community. Korda is still the Reverend of the Church of Euthanasia. The religion's credo is as simple as it is contradictory: suicide as a survival strategy. In 1993, Korda made the slogan "Save the planet, kill yourself!" the title of an agitprop techno smash, which she initially released herself and which only gained wider audiences a few years later.

The Church is antinatalist, so it is directed against the multiplication of humanity as the greatest threat to planet Earth. Church members see their protests and processions in the tradition of Dadaism: the absurdity of the world is fought with equally absurd means. Suicide, abortion, cannibalism and sodomy are the four pillars with which the Church fights against overpopulation and thus ultimately for the preservation of the habitat of the human species. "These options are optional," explains Korda, because the Church only has one command: Thou shalt not procreate.

Further than Steve Reich

Korda herself has followed the commandment. "The Church is more relevant than ever," she says. Despite this, she was not particularly active as a reverend for a long time. For the past 15 years, she has spent most of her time developing software for 3D printers. In addition, she worked on her own, unconventional sequencers and other open source tools. Now she is releasing new music again on Perlon, and a concept album at that: Akoko Ajeji, overflowing with polymetric euphoria, without any controversial messages.

Korda made a prominent comeback appearance for the Boiler Room in DC-10 in Ibiza. Seth Troxler announced one of his "favorite artists ever." She stood next to him in a silver, glittering sequin dress with a bright blue wig. During her set, Korda was careful to touch the bulky laptop in front of her as little as possible. Instead, she danced a fairy dance and practiced lip-syncing to the melodies of her old tracks. A charmingly irritating performance. "My show was a hit," says Korda, "there's a lot of talk about it."

As a teenager in New York, Korda experienced the disco era, which had its origins in the gay subculture. She was a pioneer in several sociopolitical fields that could hardly be more relevant today. Korda was also an early adopter of the LGBTQI movement, veganism, and the World Wide Web with its techno-social potential. Now she is returning with this agenda to a scene where queerness and diversity are common buzzwords and labels and DJs may also be thinking about their ecological footprint. Korda could hardly fit in better. But can she contribute something significantly new? She has no doubts about that. She speaks of her new album and the concept behind it as a revolution.

Korda was already working on the idea in the 1990s: polymeter. Each track of a piece follows its own meter based on prime numbers. The individual elements are constantly shifting relative to one another, allowing the overall sound to constantly morph and mutate. Korda cites Steve Reich as a role model for her method. But there is more to it than the works of the contemporary composer, she says. "Steve Reich didn't take the method as far as I did. And he wasn't particularly interested in making music that was easy to listen to. I find a lot of his work quite difficult, not particularly accessible."

Strange tempos for strange times

Akoko Ajeji is Yoruba, Korda translates the album title into English as "Strange Time". Strange tempos for strange times. The press information for the album contains no biographical information, but a series of bare facts about the individual tracks. For example, for "Ala Aye" it says: "The polymeter repeats itself after 118,731,810,156,960 beats (around 1.7 million years)." Anyone who attributes such longevity to their art must have a fairly positive attitude towards the future, despite all evidence and all activism.

Korda does not see this as a contradiction. The idea of transcending the human perception of time through art has always fascinated her. "Geological timescales are an antidote to the current confusion and fear of the future," she explains. "When the extinction of humanity seems plausible, when we are surrounded by climate chaos and the people fleeing from it, when we feel that civilization will collapse because of this crisis and degenerate into fascism, then there is something very comforting about such a calculation of time. I think that's the connection between the ideology behind the Church of Euthanasia and my interest in extreme timescales."

Everything on Akoko Ajeji is time and rhythm. The sound design is clearly of secondary interest. The sounds have to be as clear as possible, explains Korda, so that the polymetrics really come into their own. This means that the album sometimes sounds like a vigorously shaken sack of MIDI preset fleas. The music seems complex, but not difficult. It is playful, sunny, humane. And: purely instrumental. Korda is saving the big social criticism for a while. A new EP under her spiritual battle name Church of Euthanasia has already been produced.

"It's even more politically charged than before," Korda says. "I've become the Bob Dylan of climate change. There are lyrics all about antinatalism, economic inequality, the extinction of humanity. As dark as it gets and definitely with the potential to scare people." Korda gives a taste: "Rich people are dumb / I hope they succumb / In expensive cars / Or condos on Mars."

"Akoko Ajeji" was released on September 6th, 2019 on Perlon.

The preceding is a translation. The original language is here.