GENOCIDE ASSOCIATION demo 'Sonik Lobotomy' 105 tracks, 1983.

Question: Is that true that back in the days, even before starting Earache, you had a "band" who consisted in you shouting over Crude S.S., Raw Power, B.G.K. loops from their songs that was called Genocide Association? From: larshaarman@hotmail.com

Answer: Yes that was my "band" in the early 80's, I arranged and assembled a collection of riffs looped from other HC punk bands' demos, and then myself and my buddy Dave from local punk hopefuls Verbal Warning would shout - mostly short quickfire slogans- over the songs. The idea was to create our own multi-song demo because we were in awe of bands like say Mob 47 or DRI's first seven inchers with dozens of tracks on them, and I wanted to join in the fun, and do something similar but with a whopping 100+ songs.Lack of money or skill on an instrument thwarted our attempts to form a real band, so I resorted to what the early hip hoppers were doing with turnables, 'scratching' and so creating new music by sampling/looping others. The story was explained on the Shit-Fi website a few years back.

Nowadays you'd call it sampling, but afforable samplers did'nt exist back then! It was done on home hifi equipment, using a cassette tape-to-tape machine, the songs were crafted and stitched together, riff by riff, play/record/pause, change tape, repeat. It was a real labour of love, the process took months, then when the instrumentals were finally done, we'd roll the completed tape for a final time, with a mic plugged into the hi fi, and shouted lyrics over the top, live, to make the demo complete.

The bands looped were at the very cutting edge of the best hardcore punk, which was a seriously underground pursuit at the time, and include faves like Terveet Kädet, Crude SS, Urban Waste,BGK, Raw Power, Kansan Uutiset, Impact Unit, Riistetyt- if you were tape trading with me at the time, these were the bands I was massively into.I think even Minor Threat got sampled/looped into the mix aswell, they were the nearest to a huge band in that early 80s punk scene. I recall adding them to make it plain that this was a spoof demo, but even with recognisable, mega-famous riffage included, not many people at the time figured out how it was created. It remained a mysterious demo and band, and thats the way we preferred it.


Genocide Association did break cover and actually played one show though- supporting Black Flag no less,- the line up was Myself and Dave (Verbal Warning) on shouts, Kalv (Heresy) bass, Tim (Skum Dribbluurz) Guitars and a drummer i cant recall. We just played random noise. Note the long set list on the mic stand ha ha!

The first person to get a copy of the final demo tape with sleeve etc was a mate called Johnny Barry who was running a local fanzine at the time- we figured he'd be taken in by the spoof and sure enough he proclaimed it the best, fastest demo of the issue, and that really was as far as we had hoped to take it, we found a bit of fame in our local scene, and that was good enough for us. Interestingly, Johnny ended up becoming label manager for a time at my label Earache in the early 90's.

Looking back, the whole idea and concept behind the band's music- was pretty much a precursor to the Earache label I would form a few years later.

Heres a few tracks :
GENOCIDE ASSOCIATION demo 1983 by digearache