Suicide Pact Techno Love Songs Are the Best Kinds of Love Songs

the handbrake
penetrates your thigh
quick - let's make love
before we die

These immortal lines, taken from The Normal's classic "Warm Leatherette" and based on J.G. Ballard's novel Crash, are explicitly about fucking someone you love while you die in a car crash, hopefully achieving orgasm right at the moment the pleather interior melts onto your genitals and burns them off. (I'm extrapolating a little but really not much.) As we celebrate this day of St. Valentine (martyred circa 269 CE), what better anthem could there be about the intersection of love, sex and death—it even comes with a cheerful modern twist.

Of course, this is the stuff human souls (and songs) are forged from—when the primal urges of Thanatos, the death drive, become entangled with those of his brother Eros, the love drive. The form reaches all the way back to Greek myth—the tale of Orpheus attempting to rescue his love from Hades could be said to be an OG version.

Post-Freudian history has seen a proliferation of these sorts of psychic and aesthetic explorations of the darker side of romance. Songs like Suicide's "Frankie Teardrop" explore the "murdering your wife and kids in a fit of passion" side of the problem, while Blue Oyster Cult's timeless "Don't Fear the Reaper" took a little bit more of a PLUR approach: we're all gonna die, baby (just like the "40,000 men and women every day" that he sings so impossibly quickly), so we might as well go out while we're still in love. "We can be like they are" goes the lyrics—"they" being Romeo and Juliet, the archetypal lovers of the Western tradition.

Today, things are a little different. Suicide pact-worthy love songs are composed to the 4x4 rhythms of techno; the lyrics of Blawan's "Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage" will point your thoughts in the right direction should the soaring synths and crushing percussion of Dettman & Klock's "Dawning (Revisited)" prove insufficiently inspirational.

Science has thankfully finally shown that there is nothing that opens the portal to the pure release of Thanatos' hedonistic embrace more perfectly than dark fucking techno played by a very good DJ in a very dark room, and God made Berghain to make this research available to the public.

It is not by accident that Berghain is built above a sex club, and that Orphx, one of the originators of the form, took their name from Orphic myth. For it is Thanatos, the death drive, that picks apart the reasons your poor brain constructs to go home "now," and instead cheerfully convinces you that perhaps you should have "just one more drink—maybe a Club Mate."

There's something about the dark pulsations that makes Thanatos' entreaties all the more enticing. The consistent untze untze untze reminds one that underneath all time and space and love and pain there is just… vibration.  And while 70s rock tunes like "Don't Fear the Reaper" can speak to the problems of life, death, and happiness, it's not that easy to dance to, which is obviously kind of a problem for humanity.

What the world needed was to hear these words, spoken by a computer, to a storming techno beat—so that's what we did.

Nihiti's next LP, Empirial, is coming soon.

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