The musical program of this year's 30th Jubilee Festival, Grad Teatar, will be opened on Sunday at 21.30:XNUMX p.m. by the most famous Slovenian band "Lajbah", which will hold a concert on the stage between the Old Town churches.
According to the selector of the music program, Milena Lubarde-Marojević, "Lajbah" is a band that, since its founding in 1980, until today, uses the language and means of art to talk about current sociological and political issues.
"Their original musical style, the way of combining audiovisual media in performances, recognizable attitude towards the terms 'retro' and 'avant-garde' (they invented and defined the historical term 'retro-avant-garde'), propaganda manifestos, the concept of de-individualization, have always made them more of a project than musical composition. And their performances are engaging, conceptual performances in the truest sense of the word. Whether it is the engagement in the political reality of the SFRY in the 80s, or the strong anti-war and anti-globalist manifesto of today's Europe and the world, 'Laibach's' position in art and culture has long been a symbol and a point of reference for everyone who identifies with the art of rebellion and the idea that the essence can still be reached through it," Lubarda-Marojević told "Vijesti".
With her last album "Spektra", as she added, "Lajbah" once again "reinnovated" itself into a newly born, but still polished and solid, formation.
"And, as it usually happens, the group is questioning all rigid and cemented interpretations (and prejudices) about themselves, their music, intentions, philosophy and ideology. It was written about 'Spektra' that it 'literally sounds like a political manifesto in poetic form'. In August 2015, 'Lajbah' performed in Pyongyang, as the first foreign band ever to visit North Korea. The performance in Budva on July 3rd is part of Laibach's 'Sound of Music' tour and will feature part of the program from Pyongyang, including some covers of songs from the famous musical 'Sound of Music'. Of course, the band will also perform some older songs, including 'Now You Will Pay' and 'The Great Divide' from the album WAT from 2003 - in which, even then, in its own way, it dealt with the emigrant crisis and the problem of refugees in Europe and the Middle East," she stated.
"Lajbah" is a trans-media group from Slovenia created on June 1, 1980. in Trbovlje. The name of the group is the German version of the name of the Slovenian capital Ljubljana. Since its inception, "Lajbach" has been developing a "gesamtkunstwerk" - a multidisciplinary approach to art, which includes areas from popular culture to several types of fine and graphic art (in the form of collages, photocopies, posters, graphics, paintings, videos, installations, concerts and various performances ). From the beginning, the group was associated with and surrounded by controversy, causing strong reactions from the political authorities of the former Yugoslavia, and especially from the authorities of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia. Their militant stylization, propaganda manifestos, and totalitarian statements have fueled various debates about their actual artistic and political position. Many important theorists, including Boris Grojs and Slavoj Žižek, have discussed the phenomenon of "Lajbach", from an analytical and a critical cultural point of view.
The main elements of the diverse practice of the "Lajbah" group are: strong references to the history of avant-garde art, the National Socialist and Socialist Realist style of their visual art, deindividualization in public performances (an anonymous quartet in uniforms), then conceptual proclamations, and strong sound performances on stage - which are mostly called industrial (pop) music. "Lajbach" practices collective work, rejecting individual authorship and establishing the principle of hyper-identification. In 1983, they invented and defined the historical term "retro-avant-garde". From a creative point of view, they questioned citation, appropriation and recontextualization, as well as copyright. Although they started as both an artistic and a musical group, they became internationally recognized especially on the music scene, especially with their unique arrangements and interpretations of the hits of the groups "Queen", "Rolling Stones", "Beatles"...
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