Laibach Perform Landmark Concert in North Korea

The Slovenian industrial group Laibach have become what appears to be the first Western pop group to perform live in North Korea. Last night, the collective performed at the Ponghwa Art Theatre in Pyongyang. According to various reports, their set featured songs by the Beatles (“Across the Universe”) and Europe (“The Final Countdown”), plus music from The Sound of Music, a traditional Korean folk song, and more. Below, you can watch footage of the show via The Guardian and The New York Times.

The BBC quotes Simon Cockerell, who manages an agency that provides tours to North Korea, as saying: “[The crowd] seemed to really enjoy it. It wasn’t an audience pulling faces of distrust or confusion. Everyone sat in their seats the whole time and there wasn’t really any clapping along or singing along, but then that’s the norm at concerts here anyway. I imagine most of the people there really had no idea what to expect, but the whole show seemed to be well received.”

Laibach are set to play another show in North Korea on Thursday. 

As Douglas Wolk wrote in his review of the 2014 album Spectre, Laibach is “fundamentally a performance-art project, with a single barbed joke they’ve been repeating for over 30 years: observing how art becomes a tool of totalitarianism, and pushing it as far as it can go in that direction. Their work is deliberate kitsch—music for stomping around in jackboots, slickly polished and martial, drawing on imagery and slogans from both Communist and Fascist history.”

With the performances in North Korea, Laibach seem to have reached a kind of pinnacle of what they have been working towards for the past three decades.

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