Moment Of Terror Is The Beginning Of Life
2’8” x 4’7”, 2023
Most people are familiar with the billionaire industrialist Koch Brothers, but this explores the little-known history of their father who built that fortune. Fred Koch did not come from money. Those billions came from Fred’s relentless quest for success, and he spent the 1920’s and 30’s building oil refineries in places his competitors wouldn’t go, like Russia during Stalin’s first five-year plan. He was recruited by a shadowy agent for Nazi Germany named William Rhodes Davis to build a refinery in Hamburg called EuroTank, and met personally with Hitler to receive his permission to build it. EuroTank provided much of the fuel for Hitler’s Luftwaffe and as such was a frequent target of Allied bombing raids; some of those bombing plans and photos of the factory are incorporated into this piece. At various times, prisoners from Auschwitz were brought in to repair the factory after these bombings. Fred Koch later became a founding member of the far right John Birch Society, an organization that furthered paranoid conspiracy theories about communist agents infiltrating all elements of American society; excerpts of his book A Business Man Looks At Communism and his correspondence with J. Edgar Hoover are also incorporated into the piece. The bombed-out remnants of Europe post-WWII were a major influence on the early industrial music scene, which sought to explore the devastation for meaning, or the lack of it, so I took inspiration from that movement in the composition and title (a paraphrased quote from Altered States included in the liner notes of Front 242’s Front by Front).
2’8” x 4’7”, 2023
Most people are familiar with the billionaire industrialist Koch Brothers, but this explores the little-known history of their father who built that fortune. Fred Koch did not come from money. Those billions came from Fred’s relentless quest for success, and he spent the 1920’s and 30’s building oil refineries in places his competitors wouldn’t go, like Russia during Stalin’s first five-year plan. He was recruited by a shadowy agent for Nazi Germany named William Rhodes Davis to build a refinery in Hamburg called EuroTank, and met personally with Hitler to receive his permission to build it. EuroTank provided much of the fuel for Hitler’s Luftwaffe and as such was a frequent target of Allied bombing raids; some of those bombing plans and photos of the factory are incorporated into this piece. At various times, prisoners from Auschwitz were brought in to repair the factory after these bombings. Fred Koch later became a founding member of the far right John Birch Society, an organization that furthered paranoid conspiracy theories about communist agents infiltrating all elements of American society; excerpts of his book A Business Man Looks At Communism and his correspondence with J. Edgar Hoover are also incorporated into the piece. The bombed-out remnants of Europe post-WWII were a major influence on the early industrial music scene, which sought to explore the devastation for meaning, or the lack of it, so I took inspiration from that movement in the composition and title (a paraphrased quote from Altered States included in the liner notes of Front 242’s Front by Front).