ATARI TEENAGE RIOT – LIVE AT BRIXTON ACADEMY 1999 (DIGITAL HARDCORE RECORDINGS)

ATARI TEENAGE RIOT – LIVE AT BRIXTON ACADEMY 1999 (DIGITAL HARDCORE RECORDINGS)

This is a painful and legendary live album for all the wrong reasons.  In many ways this is the sound of a band committing career suicide as they opened for Nine Inch Nails at London’s roughest mainstream venue.  As the story goes the set came at the end of a very long, exhausting and draining tour.  This was their final night and all they could do was make a statement of how they were feeling and transfer the state onto the audience.  Sure this was a belligerent thing to be doing but sometimes it is all you have, all you feel like do and cannot help but feel a certain degree of contempt to your situation and those around you.  Had I been there at the gig I may have felt anger and disappointment but taken as a historical piece/recording this is truly an amazing piece of work, truly uncompromising and in the same league as Metal Machine Music as a polarising gesture and release.

Right now this is my number one album to annoy my neighbours with.  I do not derive an inch of enjoyment from listening to the disc, its all about the sonic and noise pollution, about freaking people out and making them feel miserable and uncomfortable.  People do such things in everyday life using a variety of measures and methods, I just happen to play really horrible sounding “music”.  You can’t spell “antisocial” without spelling “social”.

Ultimately I guess this release is mainly about cutting off your nose to spite your face, to express you current emotional state using an element of sacrifice that contorts the listener to a state of unknowing voyeur.

That’s twenty six minutes and forty seven seconds of my life I won’t be seeing again.

Go fuck yourself.

Thesaurus moment: hate.

Atari Teenage Riot

Digital Hardcore Recordings