Interview With Laibach On Techno-Feudalism, Digital Tribalism And Spectator Complicity

Transmission 289: Interview with Laibach

Laibach are a Slovenian collective who emerged from the industrial ruins of Trbovlje in 1980, at the exact moment Yugoslavia’s unifying myth collapsed with Tito’s death. Their formation was not an artistic choice but a response to pressure, political vacuum, social tension, and the limits of punk’s simple rebellion. Where others offered anarchism, Laibach constructed something more unsettling: discipline, ambiguity, and symbols that authorities understood as threats before audiences grasped them as art. For over four decades, they have operated as both mirror and scalpel to European trauma, totalitarian aesthetics, and the mechanics of power. Their method, appropriating the visual language of authority, the sonic weight of industry, the empty grandeur of propaganda, has made them impossible to categorize and equally impossible to ignore.

Title: Yom Kippur
Artist: Laibach
Release Date: 2025-10-23
Genres: Art Rock, Avant-garde, Contemporary Classical, Electronica, Experimental Music, Industrial Music
Description: Laibach's Ivan Novak discusses Gaza requiem 'Yom Kippur' with Palestinian choir, spectator complicity, and 21st century trauma. Out October 23.

With the release of ‘Yom Kippur’ on October 23, 2025 through NIKA Records, Laibach commemorate the Gaza peace agreement while confronting the world’s complicity in watching genocide as spectacle. The single unites a Palestinian children’s choir recorded in Beirut with Austria’s Kinderreich choir, creating what the group describes as “a requiem dedicated to the innocent victims, but also directed toward the perpetrators and all those who have watched from the sidelines.” The song uses the Jewish Day of Atonement as a framework for collective responsibility, refusing to sentimentalize suffering or reduce children’s voices to political mascots. It continues a 2025 singles series that has included ‘Alamut’ and reinterpretations of Foreigner and Billie Holiday, allowing the group to respond surgically to contemporary crises rather than waiting for album cycles.

In this conversation, Ivan Novak addresses the decision to frame the Gaza conflict through Yom Kippur’s symbolism, the challenges of uniting separated voices, and the 21st-century traumas Laibach now confronts: techno-feudalism, digital tribalism, algorithmic control, and a civilization that judges everything but understands nothing. Their work draws equally from Brutalist architecture, medieval iconography, and surveillance aesthetics, constructing a cold clarity about guilt, fate, and the architecture of belief. 

Official website

Looking back at Trbovlje in 1980, what was the specific event or idea that started the actual formation of Laibach?

It wasn’t a single event, but a pressure point. Trbovlje in 1980 was a collapsing industrial myth – a landscape of abandoned certainties. Laibach emerged the moment we realised the system had reached the point of no return. The early ’80s were a fracture line. Yugoslavia had just lost its unifying myth with Tito‘s death, Slovenia was testing the limits of its autonomy, and Trbovlje was a pressure cooker of labour unrest, political suspicion, and industrial decay. At the same time, a sharp, restless subculture was erupting across the country – provocative punk scene, alternative theatre, student radio, an independent intellectual scene, underground newspapers, magazines, and DIY art. It wasn’t glamorous; it was raw, improvised, and frequently censored on sight. Laibach emerged from this collision: a political vacuum, social tension, and a scene hungry for something harder, more structured, and more ambiguous than simple rebellion.

“We proved fatal mostly to the punk scene itself, which relied on a naïve pursuit of simple pleasures and political anarchism.”

What were your biggest challenges in the very beginning? Was it censorship, lack of equipment, or public misunderstanding?

All of it at once. But censorship came first, because the authorities reacted faster than the audience. Lack of equipment forced us to turn limitation into style. Public misunderstanding was inevitable – we designed it that way. The real challenge was surviving long enough for everyone to realise we meant it seriously.

What was the reaction of the existing local music scene in Slovenia? Did you find any support, or were you immediately seen as a threat?

Mostly suspicion. Parts of the punk and alternative scene were curious, but many felt threatened because we didn’t play by their rules. Our sound and our attitude were different: too organised, too symbolic, too disciplined – yet also intensely aggressive and chaotic at the same time, and therefore harder to digest. Some supported us quietly, a few openly, but most preferred to wait and see whether we were a joke or a danger. In the end, we proved fatal mostly to the punk scene itself, which relied on a naïve pursuit of simple pleasures and political anarchism.

“Lack of equipment forced us to turn limitation into style.”

“Yom Kippur” (The Day of Atonement) is a deeply significant and sacred Jewish holy day. Why did Laibach choose this specific concept as the framework to address the Gaza conflict, especially for a song released to commemorate a peace agreement?

First of all, Laibach dedicates the song to all the victims of the Gaza conflict, especially to the tens of thousands of children who have been mercilessly killed or maimed in this war, as well as to the child victims of all wars.

The song was actually created half a year ago, but our English label kept postponing its release, so in the end we issued it through another label in Slovenia. Yom Kippur is not a celebration of politics – this day of meditation and reflection speaks of personal and collective responsibility, of repentance, and of the possibility of a new beginning. The burden of the genocide in Gaza – guilt, trauma, and unatoned violence – will mark generations, not only on both sides of this long-lived and seemingly insoluble conflict, but far beyond them. Yom Kippur leads us toward a moral and spiritual perspective on the conflict: the idea that no one is innocent, that communities must confront their own shadows, and that peace can begin only when repentance is sincere. We used the symbolism of Yom Kippur not to comment on Judaism, but to place the conflict within the oldest human ritual of confronting what we have collectively done – and allowed. It is, therefore, a day of atonement for all of us; Gaza will need many such days.

“Techno-feudalism replacing capitalism, digital tribalism replacing nationalism… Where the 20th century had propaganda, we now have personalised reality.”

Your statement says the song is for victims but also for “sideline” observers. Who are these observers, and what “repentance” are you demanding from them?

The “sideline observers” are all those who watch the genocide as a spectacle – governments, media, influencers, and ordinary people who turn tragedy into opinion quarrels, entertainment, or an identity issue. They too must face repentance: they must acknowledge and become aware of their own complicity in a world where violence becomes popular content, suffering a political accessory, and moral clarity is replaced by slogans and hashtags. In the context of Gaza, we all must confront our own passivity, our selective outrage, and the comfort of distance. Atonement begins when we, the spectators, stop pretending we are innocent.

What were the political and emotional challenges of uniting a Palestinian children’s choir (recorded in Beirut) with the Kinderreich choir for this song?

The challenge was not technical – it was symbolic. Bringing together voices separated by history, borders, propaganda, and trauma is always risky. Every sound carries its own weight; every child’s voice carries an entire narrative of victimhood and hope. Emotionally, the hardest part was treating both choirs not as flags, but as human beings. We refused to sentimentalise them or turn them into mascots of suffering. They had to stand as equals – not Palestinian sorrow on one side and European innocence on the other, but a single, fragile chorus of a generation inheriting a conflict they did not create. Politically, we knew some would accuse us of appropriation, others of taking sides, and others of not taking sides enough. That is inevitable. But the point was to build a temporary space where their voices could coexist, even if their worlds cannot. That is the only real meaning of “Kinderreich” – a kingdom of children that the adults have already failed.

“I fear the triumph of noise over meaning, certainty over doubt, and spectacle over memory.”

As Ivan Novak, after 40+ years in this project, what frightens you personally about the world today, separate from the collective “Laibach” analysis?

I fear the triumph of noise over meaning, certainty over doubt, and spectacle over memory. And I fear that we are becoming a civilisation that judges everything but understands nothing. Everything else – wars, crises, even collapse – we have seen before. What is new is the speed at which we forget why anything matters at all.

Is this series of singles leading to a new album, or do you now prefer singles for a more immediate response to world events?

In principle, singles allow us to respond more quickly and surgically to the temperature of the world – to intervene in real time rather than wait for the album cycle to catch up. But these singles are also tectonic plates moving toward a larger body of work. There is a new studio album coming next year – we recorded it already in the first half of this year, and it is now waiting for its release window.

“We are becoming a civilisation that judges everything but understands nothing.”

What non-musical visual art movements inspire your music nowadays?

Brutalism, because it tells the truth without decoration. Constructivism, because it believes in structure when the world believes in chaos. And contemporary surveillance aesthetics – satellites, CCTV, algorithmic diagrams – because they have become the new iconography of power. We also return often to medieval art: not for nostalgia, but for its cold clarity about fate, guilt, and the architecture of belief.

You’ve always drawn on 20th-century European trauma. Are you seeing new, 21st-century historical parallels that Laibach feels compelled to explore?

Yes – the 21st century is generating its own trauma at industrial speed. The new parallels are clear: techno-feudalism replacing capitalism, digital tribalism replacing nationalism, algorithmic control replacing ideology, permanent crisis replacing historical cycles, and global spectatorship replacing political responsibility. Where the 20th century had propaganda, we now have personalised reality. Where it had borders, we now have firewalls. Where it had dictators, we now have systems that no one really controls – yet everyone obeys. Laibach will explore these forces because they shape the new citizen: monitored, distracted, outraged, and endlessly entertained. It is the updated version of the same old human alienation.

Photos courtesy of Laibach

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others