Laibach announce new album ‘Wir sind das Volk (ein Musical aus Deutschland) – check a first track: ‘Ich will ein Deutscher sein’

(Photo by Valter Leban) Out on March 25 on Mute is an all new Laibach album, “Wir sind das Volk (Ein Musical aus Deutschland)”. The record will be available on digital platforms as well as a deluxe CD format with extensive sleeve notes. A double vinyl edition will follow on June 10.

The album collates music from the acclaimed theatrical production “Wir sind das Volk” (“We are the People”), which premiered at Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) theater in Berlin on February 8, 2020. Two more shows were performed before the production was halted due to the pandemic. In 2021 Laibach opened the Klagenfurt Festival with a Slovenian version of the same production and performed two more sold out shows at Ljubljana’s Kino Šiška.

Performances will resume in March 2022 at Berlin’s HAU with more confirmed for Zagreb, Ljubljana, Hamburg, Maribor and in the Cultural Capital of Europe, Novi Sad. Full details will be announced soon.

Here’s already the video for “Ich will ein Deutscher sein”.

About the “Wir sind das Volk” theatrical production

“Wir sind das Volk” is based upon the writings of Heiner Müller (1929-1995). Laibach’s own association with the theater began in 1984 when they composed music for Heiner Müller’s “Quartet”, a play that was presented at the Slovenian National Theatre in Ljubljana. The following year they met Müller in Berlin who suggested that they collaborate. Müller went on to use Laibach’s music in a production, but the collaboration never happened until the head of the International Heiner Müller Society, Anja Quickert, proposed a posthumous project based on Müller’s texts.

Laibach explain: “We followed Heiner Müller’s own strategy of cutting and rearranging the material, taking his text and putting it into another context, rebooting it with music, in order to drag the audience into it or alienate them from it. Music unlocks the emotions and is therefore a great manipulative tool and a powerful propagandistic weapon. And that’s why a combination of Heiner Müller, who saw theatre as a political institution, and Laibach, can be nothing else but a musical.”

Quickert goes on to say this: “This project finally brings together what should have happened a long time ago: Laibach and the German playwright and poet Heiner Müller together. The myth of the nation cannot be buried as long as ghosts undermine its foundation. ‘Dialogue with the dead must not be interrupted until it is revealed which part of the future was buried with them.’ Welcome to the abyss of the nation!”