Black Pig Liberation Front started 1997-1998, when poetic terrorist Tariq Zayid, sound assassin DTorrs, and electronica explorer Anna Glebova-Soudekina were asked to give a performance at The Meer Dan Woorden Festival in The Netherlands based on Tariq Zayid''s book Black Pig (Hozomeen Press) containing several sections of Tariq Zaiyd's ongoing life-long pig text. They have toured extensively across
… the United States and Europe and occasionally play festivals. Black Pig Liberation Front is an ever-evolving collective creating zones of free, ecstatic, erotic, and experiences of terror. While they create situationist spectacles and soundscapes, it is literature (text) that started everything and provided an opening, or a compulsive, even convulsive, entering into the body of the poststructuralist / postmodern position of artist as one fragment within a realm of interpretations.The group is opposed to meaning as a manufactured set of manipulated representations instead of open interpretations. By following these patterns of thought a sound evolved. Black Pig Liberation Front uses a playful desire to rebel and repel. A play between the exoteric and esoteric, between wonder and decay, between a winter doing battle with a summer.The ensemble are involved in the avant-garde scene, working with everyone from Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, Mike Watt, DJ Spooky, Stanza from London, numerous DJs, noise artists, DJ dance beat shows, the slow groaning controlled sensual feedback we use to play galleries and intimate spaces. The collective began with literature we began and it is with literature, and its re-coding, that continues to create their fetishistic output of literature, performance, and spectacle. Following Roland Barthes' ‘Death of the Individual Artist’ they choose to complete their entry into Collectivist Art ideals. No personality, no individual identification, but group dynamics, dissolving lines between performer and performance, reader and writer, event and life.Poet Gerrit Lansing said: "history, philosophies, politics, patterns, technology, sociology, and impact of sound in art. Emphasizing that "none of the arts is entirely mute," the spectacle surveys the potential equality of aural and visual in the artistic hierarchy, the influence of aurally on various forms of art and cultural thought (and vice versa), the fluid boundaries between the concepts of noise and music, and Western vs. Eastern definitions of the voice. Black Pig Liberation Front covers everything from the poetry of Diane di Prima and texts of Bataille, the films of Bunuel, the compositions of John Cage, and the paintings of Jackson Pollock to dripping water and body sounds.The first part of their name comes from the William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Valley of the Black Pig”. As a note, he included an important commentary on the black pig: "All over Ireland there are prophecies of the coming rout of the enemies of Ireland, in a certain Valley of the Black Pig, and these prophecies are, no doubt, now, as they were in the Fenian days, a political force ...and with other old Celtic boars and sows, one sees that the battle is mythological, and that the Pig it is named from must be a type of cold and winter doing battle with the summer, or of death battling with life.’ It is this Yeatsian concept that gave the collective the first part of their name, Black Pig, the mythical rebellious meaning behind it gives the group the attachement of an organization finding new means of exploring perception and deconstructing aesthetics.Black Pig Liberation Front is an expanded and anonymous-membered poetic terrorist collective. A transgressive theatre, always focused on text, sound, beats, and presentation, in our interchange of energies and as principal form of communication. Members revolve and mutate and we always have a strong line-up, most especially now. Each a participant without hierarchy, just a script we may have written for open interpretation. They release music, publish books, manifestos, situationist events, and subversive actions without violence.Using an arsenal of electronics, both digital and analogue; including Soviet oscillation machines, numerous circuit bent machines and boxes, hand manipulated 1970s rebuilt reel-to-reels, processors, d-beams, anything that can be used to create the gesture of sound required at the moment. The Nobel nominated poet Ron Whitehead has written: "Black Pig Liberation Front is the most innovative band on the planet. Nobody on earth does or even comes close to doing what they do on stage. The word experimental doesn't come close to labeling or identifying them. They are the avant-garde cosmonauts diving headfirst into the unknown to fearlessly explore the unseen unheard they are the lightning bolt shaman creative warriors standing between worlds receiving messages translating them into music /word/ poems/ songs/ dance/ rhythm/ heartbeat.They dwell in space measure space with time and Black Pig Liberation Front adds the alchemical real magic rhythms that save us from the death of mundane life."meer
