SELECT : October 1992

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Just in case you're wondering, the name was taken from one Socialistsches Patienten Kollektiv, a Baader-Meinhof inspired mental patients terrorist group. This gives some idea of their standing in the early '80s sub-Throbbing Gristle fringe of noise extremists - get yourself a disturbing moniker, profess an obsession with Nazi Death Camps, mutilation and car crashes, use stills of same for back projections at gigs and album sleeves and voila! - an Art statement, purporting to "observe" these horrors and confront weedy middle-class preconceptions with them.
Musically 1980's, 'Information Overload Unit' is a terminally uninspired drab noise that history should relegate to half-baked art toss.
'Leichenschrei' from 1982 comes complete with voyeuristic photos of apalling facial disfigurements - what a bonus - but it's a gutwrenchingly powerful extension of Cabaret Voltaire's early racket.
From the evidence of those two, no one would have bet their shirt on mainstay Graeme Revell becoming a succesful soundtrack writer - he's currently scoring for the new Michael Douglas movie having completed the music for the latest Madonna film (really). But 1986's 'Zamia Lehmanni', full of eerie seductive choirs and strings, shows him moving towards this more lucrative future.

Dave Morrison