Reality is brutal, harsh, and cold. And full of violence. About 20 minutes later, when I found a diner near the hotel, I looked at the TV screen on the wall, but I had my eyes on the entire room and the entrance. The sound was off. Luckily. Because the faces there were empty, and I wondered how many more channels it would take for people to realize that a book contained more substance than the hundreds of thousands of hours that flickered into their heads every day on hundreds of channels across the world. The state wasn’t making it any better by regulating the great nothingness. Everyone seemed to be getting sucked deeper into the black hole. If you’re not allowed to talk about reality, then lies will define life. And eventually, that destructive energy breaks through. And that is certain. Anyone who’s ever taken a punch to the face knows what it feels like to suddenly be wide awake and clear-headed and to instinctively fight back against what wants to destroy you. 1998 was a time when I felt that every single day. And even today, I can still remember exactly how that felt and the knowledge that came with it. Originally, the music was supposed to be released as a kind of 20-minute single for the album. But I decided against it. We had long since crossed the line. And the ideas in art were no longer warnings, they were being lived out. Drugs. Meaningless sex. Violence. Blood. A cycle that led to a constant state of frustration and boredom. Frequencies are “read“ and understood through hearing. And they shape you. They make you think in new ways or at least differently. That means you perceive the information from the outside world differently than before. I stood at a point where I had to make a decision. And to this day, I don’t know if I made the right one back then. The end was coming closer. The track Not Enough Acid was meant for the A-side of the vinyl. The Global Holocaust (Extended Version) for the B-side. There was symbolism in that: Drugs were never enough for people. Most would keep going until their health gave out or they died. That was the rave on the surface. The individual dissolves into the collective and disappears. And then there was the flip side of the coin: The past in this case, the extermination of millions of Jews by the National Socialist state. As a reminder that another Holocaust could happen again at any moment. Would national borders prevent something on that scale? Looking at it from today’s perspective, those 20 minutes of music feel like an evolution of the album DJ6666 feat. The Illegals. And the precursor to the 2001 double album Intelligence & Sacrifice. This wasn’t the idealistic energy of Atari Teenage Riot. This was about what it feels like when all idealism has completely abandoned you, and you are staring at the destruction caused by bad and faulty ideologies. The atmosphere in the music reflects where I stood back then and how I saw the world. Three years before 9/11. Five years before the Iraq War. And 25 years before October 7, 2023, when Palestinian terrorists from Gaza stormed the border into Israel and slaughtered hundreds of people at a music festival in such a bestial way that my subconscious kept pulling me back to how, in 1998, I felt the Holocaust’s impact everywhere in its shadow. All of it fueled by the numbness of the ‘silent‘ majority, which is never actually neutral but hypocritically applauds film stars who only stand on award show stages because of government funding, taxpayer money, and then use those stages to preach against Israel and, like the National Socialists, call for boycotts against Jews. NGOs that profit from crises and worsen them so they can continue to be funded. I reject all of it. Maybe it was the right decision back then not to release this music. Maybe now is a better time. Alec Empire