I'm finished...the girls are laughing in the back seat...the driver
anxiously tries to reach the town
through a snowstorm for the next show... The Merc accelerates...
nearly 200kph...we're almost there.
I don't take off my sunglasses,they
shouldn't see if I am sleeping or
listening.
I don't want to be forced to laugh with them...Outside...infinity...
I begin to ask myself if the past is overtaking, or if it is my own future?
What would happen if we just came off the motorway now?
The starlight arrives with us even though the stars died a long time ago... Of course I've forgotten where I will be tonight, it really
doesn't matter.
I must distance myself from everything...the intrigues, the money....
Otherwise it could soon destroy me...I turn the music up louder...
Some people only understand their own defeat... I'm all to conscious that I'm fighting
in the wrong setting...I don't want recognition by a pseudo-intellectual elite - they are, after all, only the small head of the techno-dinosaur...The world has become more powerful than the sound.
Before anyone has time to feel anything, an interpretation is forced upon them.
I have never felt as sick as I do now...this generation... all the possibilities of technology have been kicked back onto the old track. You have lost your chance...
you all took part...
It's the end and it's only just starting!
I can see my mirror image in the window...
I'd better fasten my seatbelt, It's getting too fast, there must be ice on the road.
I would die for a girl" But not for this!
Death and vision are not easy to get through... The overfeed of information produces a trance.
A passive state of mind. And it seems it could go on forever...
I don't want to think back to Berlin.
I always thought of the label as a movement, not as a perfection of the old. Now I believe I was the only one of them who did...
This tour has shown me much...
Mille Plateaux is simply not DHR... At this moment it's not about sharing your energies with others, other musicians and everyone who comes to the shows.
This is more like judging everything in capitalist terms.
It seems they had only been waiting for this special kind of defeat.
It is three years ago that my first album appeared on Mille Plateaux.
...the end of the 12-inch waste... And now a part of me has died. It's always tragic...
Once upon a time we were innocent...'Les Etoiles Des Filles Mortes'.
Take my five albums away from this context and they appear exactly as they were meant to: euphoric and positive.
Body and soul can not be separated...and music, when constructed according to a theory becomes artificial and lifeless.
A simulation must strike as authentic, otherwise it fails...
Outside it's so dark that the ride seems stationary...Have we stopped? But the driver still stares fixedly at the road ahead. Soon I've made it...Soon I am out!...
A psychic-prison...it was never this bad before. Psychedelia is very intense but very fragile...
The emptiness afterwards seems like a cage...
I will make these final performances the same way...
There are a few in the audience who feel what I feel. This gives me courage, although I know
I will not have any support.
I will set up a new label: GEIST.
The first release will be a compilation of tracks form the Mille Plateaux records together
with a few other unreleased pieces from the same period.
No "Best Of..." but rather "Best for...".
We drive into the city. The lights are getting closer. We get slower, both girls are already asleep and somehow I can feel a little bit of that excitement coming up in me...
Alec Empire
(somewhere between Berlin and Vienna - end of January 1997)
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MILLE PLATEAUX YEARS
1994 - 1998