Korpses Katatonik was a musical solo project of Zoe DeWitt during the years 1982 and 1983. Unlike DeWitt’s later project Zero Kama, the work of Korpses Katatonik remains entirely within the realm of electronic music and shows an uncompromising experimental style comparable to that of other industrial bands like Throbbing Gristle, SPK, or Cabaret Voltaire. Like many other exponents of industrial culture Korpses Katatonik was inspired by dark psychiatry, pathological abnormalism, necrophilia, and other types of paraphilic aberration. These served as a metaphor for the dark side of a dehumanized society that seeks to maintain control by the suppression of anything that could be regarded as dark, sinister, deviant, or unpleasant from the viewpoint of popular mass culture. As a means of escape from this totalitarian pressure – thus a statement by Korpses Katatonik – there remains only self-destruction, murder, or the withdrawal into catatonic schizophrenia.
Korpses Katatonik’s first release was a Nekrophile Rekords cassette entitled subklinikal leukotomy aphrenia spasmophiik lyssophobo asphyxia sinister lethal anorex. The titles on the album were: shatok, schmertzlabor, enzephallik mortuor, nekom, kcok transzlant, kaltfleisch corporor, skarzisko and okzipital slash. The terminology of psychopathological disorders was used by Korpses Katatonik in a subversive way for its own poetic value and many of the rare vocals and track titles (as for example shatok, enzephallik mortuor and kaltfleisch corporor) were taken from writings of patients of Viennas famous psychiatrist hospital in Maria Gugging (dissolved in 2007). The title skarzisko refers to a national socialist concentration camp in the polish town Skarżysko-Kamienna.
The upcoming influence of occultism within the postindustrial underground of the 1980s is finally reflected in the last track of Korpses Katatonik, Choronzon, which was published on the Nekrophile cassette compilation The Beast 666. This track, which refers to a ritual performed by Aleister Crowley and Victor Neuburg in the desert Sahara in 1909, anticipates the strong occult implications of Zoe DeWitt’s musical follow-up project Zero Kama.
In 2012 all recorded tracks by Korpses Katatonik have been released under the title Oeuvres complètes by the Viennese label Klanggalerie. Currently, the remastered album is reissued on IFP on VINYL, CD, TAPE, and ultra-limited collectors box.
Recorded in 1982 by Michael Zoe Dewitt (synth, guitar, voice, tape loops) and mixed at the Institute for Composition and Electroacoustics at the University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna (Wiener Konzerthaus studios). First published as audio cassette NRC01 on Nekrophile Rekords in 1983. Remastered by Zoe Dewitt for Infinite Fog Records in 2022.
Millions of dead humanoids walking your streets, remote-controlled Cadaver. The functions of the body, which are considered the highest definition of life, are nothing more than a sign that the totalitarian systems of political control are working as usual. In fact, Death, your own essence of the progress of civilization, came the moment you accepted your terms. Poison injections and 1800-volt circuit, as well
as three isolation cell torture chambers are waiting for you if you don’t want to. For the glory of Masz Murders and Terror Liaisonz, there can be nothing but bones and skulls. Burnt holes of the psyche and dezpar.
In the same way that Corpus Sosial conceives Death, psychic and physical Disorder from the public consciousness, it itself is nothing but the unification of all this. And since the main characteristic of his propaganda bloc is to say the exact opposite of what he really represents, and to use Death, the last argument of all oppression, as an extensive lever, the most effective methods of the operation of expelling the stick will be equally with inverted strategies for choosing the current reality and gathering information to create artificial Malfunctions, as well as to use and fight off Death, multiplying its signs in order to increase the semantic value as an offensive counter-propaganda event. A reverse policy cannot and will not be a policy. Offensive subversion is not so much the destruction of the leading organizations as the actual ignoring of them by organizing one’s own body. It’s a reversal of your dictated reward/punishment law.
