About Technoburlesque: Image Snatchers 3
The Feminalz present the third part of the Technoburlesque: the subversive electrocabaret with elements of ex-Yugoslav pop culture and playful queer feminist humor. The doors to the disco club, to the new eighties and the old noughties, to modern trap and contemporary schlagers are wide open again. The songs are based on individual acts from the performance Image Snatchers, produced by Institute Emanat, which has been running since April 2013 and has been performed over 60 times. Image Snatchers are a proof that a performative variety show that is responsive to the trends, resistant to social norms and cynical towards normality is a form of social commentary that is very much alive. And so for the third time we have decided that the show deserves a repeatable consumer product.
The adaptations, remixes and the original club music for Image Snatchers show are developed by Luka Prinčič (ex-Nova deViator, Deviant Funk …) together with new and regular members of The Image Snatchers: DeeDeeVoid, Musée-Cunt, GlitterAid and, as songwriter, Gospod Magdalenca. The reshuffled team of The Feminalz present themselves with five new tracks and deliver what they are best at, a mix of instrumental club hits and verbose, text-based songs, which function both as performance acts and as repeatable recordings. The subversive note of the album becomes obvious through a juxtaposition: the remakes of the disco hits “I’m Every Woman” by Chaka Khan and “So Many Men So Little Time” by Miquel Brown become farsical if set beside GlitterAid’s trap song “Gucci gučí” and parodical when set beside the electro theme of “Neodvisne ženske Pt. 1” (Independent Women Part I). The third musical portrait of Image Snatchers is rounded off by the remake of the Yugoslav schlager song “Nogometna utakmica” (Football match) by Beti Jurković.
About Luka Prinčič and The Feminalz
Luka Prinčič has been there for all things musical in Image Snatchers since the beginning. He develops the soundtrack for individual acts in cooperation with the rest of The Feminalz, a collective of transgender entities that express their choreographical and performative acts in the technoburlesque show. Image Snatchers is designed as a corporeal study of (pop)art forms that walks the thin line between entertainment and critique, satire and tragedy, music and dance, feminism and strip-pleasure, ending the fourth year of unstoppable transformation. The music is sometimes used as a readymade and an important reference to a specific past era, scene or its vibe. Lipsyncing makes an appearance too, and so do electronic bootleg edits or remix tracks. Popular songs are sung live, sometimes with lyrics changed to various degrees, whereas at other times completely original music is made by the collective. While the show is gathering more and more reputation on local stages in clubs and halls (Club Gromka, Old Power Station – Stara Elektrarna, Cankarjev dom, Maribor Theatre Festival), the collective’s music derivatives have delivered a considerable number of music hits. In 2014 the first five songs were released as Technoburlesque: Image Snatchers EP with the hit song Cica-San (Baš me briga). Four years later the second part followed, Technoburlesque: Image Snatchers 2, with the song Vrtnice (Roses), a poetic but outspoken take on dismissive attitudes towards artists in contemporary politics and public life in general.
“Technoburlesque is a mute comedy of the body that mocks the rigidity of social roles. It uncritically appropriates, copies and glues together femininity, masculinity, family relationships, machismo and other degenerated social roles that are unrighteously considered normative. When Image Snatchers totally expose themselves — and remove their social dresses layer by layer — they do not find the essence, but realize that the essence is nothingness, and the performed travesties the opium that makes living bearable. This amusing play in cross-dressing and their behavior are a result of great sexual and bodily liberation from social bonds. Satisfied in the eclectic noise of media images they stretch popular snap-shots and bite them to their unheard-of forms that provoke bursts of laughter or despair. Image Snatchers don’t seek meaning but pleasure. Because pleasure is the hedonistic polish with which they smeared everyday objects and made something exceptional out of them. Technoburlesque is an intersection of (program/cybernetic) code and subjectivity; a laying bare of the physical and emotional body indivisibly bound up with the information matrix of contemporaneity.” Ida Hiršenfelder, more at https://emanat.si/si/produkcija/tatovi-podob/
Tracklist
Credits
Luka Prinčič · music, production, arrangements, mix
GlitterAid · words&vocals on Gucci gučí & Neodvisne ženske Pt. 1
DeeDeeVoid, Musée-Cunt · words&vocals on Neodvisne ženske Pt. 1
Gospod Magdalenca · words on Neodvisne ženske Pt. 1
Aaron Goldbody · keyboards on So Many Men
Samuel Aubert / OpenMastering · mastering
Tina Ivezić · design
Maruša Hren · USB booklet, printing, bookmaking
Andrej Pervanje · production assistant & promotion
Luka T. Zagoričnik · production assistant
Sabrina Železnik · promotion assistance
Thanks to all Image Snatchers performers for almost 10 years of the exciting and challenging process of creation that made me make music I never would think I’d do and for teaching me the value of humour.
City of Ljubljana · financial support
Radio Študent · media support
Availability
Limited edition USB Booklets and digital album (with “Name Your Price”) are available from May 26th through our Bandcamp shop at https://kamizdat.bandcamp.com.
Some rights reserved under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0) licence. More at www.creativecommons.org/licences.
Production · Emanat
