A project without a public author, moving from London to Yugoslavia to Prague, whose 12" The Knife opened Staalplaat's SP series.
Autopsia presents itself as an art project rather than a band: a body of music and visual work with no named author, which brings in people from other professions for each piece. Its own history begins in London in the late 1970s and continues through the art centres of the former Yugoslavia in the 1980s; since 1990 it has been based in Prague. The early work came out on about a dozen cassettes, among them a self-released tape in 1985 and others through Produkcija Slovenija and, in the United States, Sound of Pig.
In 1989 Staalplaat opened its SP catalogue series with Autopsia's 12" The Knife (SP 001). The CD Death Is the Mother of Beauty (1990) followed on the Staaltape line, most of it recorded at Studio One of Radio Novi Sad in late 1988 and early 1989. Through the 1990s the German label Hypnobeat, with Gymnastic Records in London, carried the catalogue: Wound (1991), Requiem Pour un Empire (1992), Kristallmacht (1993), Humanity Is the Devil 1604–1994 (1995) and Mystery Science (1996). One composition was used on the soundtrack of Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book (1996).
Staalplaat gathered the 1990s tracks on Colonia (2002). Old Europa Cafe issued The Berlin Requiem (2006) and Damnatio Memoriae (2017), the latter built from a 2016 sound installation for the Museum of Fine Arts in Split. Much of the later work, including the films Factory Rituals and Karl Rossmann Fragments, has come out on the project's own Illuminating Technologies.
The visual side has had as much attention as the music: a monograph from the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina in Novi Sad (2012) and Alexei Monroe's book Thanatopolis (2016).
I keep Autopsia at Tier II: a forty-year project that runs from the London cassette years through Yugoslav art spaces to Prague, and the first number in Staalplaat's SP series.
VAGO · c. the Anthropocene