“Coal Is Bread!” (2012)

Arhiv Arhiv Last updated 11 June 2026

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik

Location: Velenje / Muzej premogovništva Slovenije / Slovenia
Concert date: 19.10.2012
Attendance: 200
Ticket price: €35.00 / €45.00

The underground section of the Muzej premogovništva Slovenije has reopened, now reinforced, renovated and expanded. In a former mine tunnel, which was part of the upgrade and is now open for tourist tours, they came up with something special for the occasion. They set up an improvised hall with a wooden stage, draped it with curtains and lit it with a few modest little lamps. A concert is on. And not just any concert. Once word got out about who the chosen act was, tickets vanished at the box office in no time. In the end the organizer added a third show to the schedule, and there was even talk of putting concerts on for the Saturday too, 20.10.2012. And the name? Laibach! A name that says it all in this context. The mine is the cradle of Laibach: Trbovlje, 1980. A crazy combination. 200 people packed in rows on benches set up in two lines along the tunnel. So! You ride a lift more than 120 years old 200 m below the Earth’s surface, stroll through the oldest shaft of the coal mine, all the way to »Ligi« – the part of the shaft named after the mascot of Šalek coal mining. That’s also where the acoustic space with the stage stood.

Interest in the event was huge, to say the least. Despite the heavily inflated prices, which hit a hefty €35.00 already in presale, the organizer had to add a third concert, scheduled for half past ten in the evening. So Laibach played three shows in a single day. Each show ran 35 minutes, which adds up in the end to the running time of a classic concert spectacle.

For this event Laibach incarnated in a special lineup. Half of it was made up of the two founding members, who committed the original sin together, Dejan Knez (bass guitar, vocals) and Ivan (Jani) Novak (programming, projections, keyboards, vocals), plus members of the newer version of Laibach, Saša Vollmaier (keyboards, programming) and Dejan Jamnik (keyboards, programming).

In a performance titled »Kohle ist Brot« (Coal Is Bread), Laibach took us straight back to the cradle of their beginnings, where the legendary show at Križanke at the Novi Rock festival in Ljubljana in 1982 can’t be forgotten (by the way, in the audience that night was also the man who helped the band take its first steps, the legendary Igor Vidmar of »Š.K.U.C. Ropotov«). So the guys kicked off with the trio that opens the live album capturing that show, »Ljubljana – Zagreb Beograd«, namely Unsere Gescichte, Rdeči molk and Siemens. Almost fifteen minutes of psychedelic industrial thriller, in which the quartet piled up spine-chilling layers of sound, stacked in complete disharmony against one another, enough to give the »unprepared« serious pain, the kind of »aural cerebral hemorrhage«. Every now and then these merged into a single tone, but mostly they beamed off each in its own direction. A true retro sonic chaos, a provocative paean to the total industrial punk avant-garde of days long gone, which is today recognized as a cult part of Laibach’s art, but which back then was the cogwheel of an intellectually calculated rebellion that ran into far too many intriguing situations under the old regime, and even got them banished from the country. Zmagoslavje volje is followed by Smrt za smrt (both taken from the album »Rekapitualcija 1980-1984«), where Knez demonstrated for the first time why there’s a microphone on that stage too. Amid the whole Laibach presence, what this time also seasoned the feeling of a cult being reborn, after a long while, was Knez’s »log«, which serves as a bass guitar.

A stiffened machine that pecks and demolishes without mercy. The quartet’s faces expressionless, dull as dishwater in that respect, but where Laibach’s artistry is concerned an essential part of the merciless march of thunderous, metallic-cold malice. In Boji and Mi kujemo bodočnost (»Laibach«,1985) Novak grabs a megaphone, which amplifies the deathly spell of Dejan Knez’s dictating quotations, which in their self-repetition work like mass hypnosis, a parody of what the »beloved leaders« of totalitarian systems once exploited to win the obedience of the people. All of it still »sunk« deeper into the singular, one-of-a-kind figure of an original musical image of chaotically provocative musical excess! Thirty-five minutes of spectacle backed by the classic visuals of the Laibach show, the famous video projection content tied to the time of the band’s birth. Plenty of meaningful parallels keep this legacy alive today in its message and expression. The question is whether Laibach in their artistic vision still dare to be that provocative and defiant toward the current state apparatus today, and to stick their middle finger high in the air at it with a new, refined parody. Finding inspiration for something like that these days wouldn’t really be hard. But that’s another story. 35 minutes. As if they had never been gone. The unique Laibach world worked perfectly once again. Unique and unrepeatable. The event was also backed by a special live stream online!

Besides the Laibach concerts, the day was marked by other ceremonies on the program. The underground section of the museum was officially opened with the presentation of a statuette of St. Barbara to Laibach by the chairman of the board of Premogovnik Velenje. In the upper, above-ground rooms of the museum, the exhibition »Laibach Kunst – Glűck auf« has been open since September and will be on view at the Muzej premogovništva Slovenije until November 18, 2012. The exhibition is backed by a special documentary film about Laibach. The opening of the exhibition in »Ligi« was also accompanied by a performance by the Pihalni orkester Premogovnika Velenje, which reworked Laibach songs in its own interpretation, the most recognizable ones from the middle and later periods of the band’s career, and which, on 19.10.2012, played a special set in the outdoor part of the mine.

So it was a varied and one-of-a-kind day in the history of Premogovnik Velenje and the Muzej premogovništva Slovenije, and let’s hope the site remains a place for similar commemorations tied to the unique musical essence of Laibach in the future too.