This is a live video of a Lydia Lunch performance commissioned by the "Festival des Masochismus" in Graz, Austria, in June 2003. It was filmed by transgressive artists Josep M. Jordana and (gun collector, criminologist) Marc Viaplana. For those of you blessed and cursed enough to catch Lydia's throttling spoken word performance at the EMP Sky Church a few years back, when she showed some vintage fucked up old footage of her early damage with Teenage Jesus and the Jerks as well, this would be a wonderful introduction to her psychosis-inducing anti-pop.

Lunch has been using her dark sexuality and fierce intelligence to make confrontational art for over two decades, and once even spit on me at a performance in a Seattle club that no longer exists. She's covered most the realms of literature (novels, confessionals, plays) and art, and worked with members of Sonic Youth, The Birthday Party, Swans, and many other scary noisy types. (Yes, I deserved to be spat on — I didn't wash that cheek for weeks.)

For the indie-pop fan, this collection of grunting, pounding horror rock by all-star underground anti-heroes like Nels Cline and others from bands such as Godflesh, Foetus, and Unsane, featuring Lunch singing and screeching and humiliating the audience over the top, might seem like a total nightmare. But this DVD is a wonderful way to capture the span of Lunch's harshly-cathartic career (it stretches from her Teenage Jesus years and into her various other bands like 8 Eyed Spy and 13.13). Seeing her wicked, wonderful energy firsthand will prepare you for when she returns from Europe later next year and no doubt targets Seattle again (I hope, I hope — and plead and whine and beg.)