SPK

More than one band has used this name.

1) SPK, formed 1978 in Australia, was a 1980s industrial and noise music act once featuring Graeme Revell who later went on to compose soundtracks for film and television, most notably the incidental music for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

The meaning of the SPK abbreviation is unclear and has changed: sometimes it was given as Surgical Penis Klinik, other times Sozialistisches PatientenKollektiv. The most notable works of SPK are the early works, Leichenschrei and Auto Da Fe. SPK's early music is best described as disturbing and psychologically disorienting, in line with their nihilistic, subversive philosophy. Live performances included truly disturbing video backing (some of which was issued in two videos, "" and "Human Postmortem: Two Autopsy Films"), trangressive performances with animal carcasses and other usually successful attempts to make the audience very uncomfortable. The group issued radical manifestos, such as "The Post-Industrial Strategy", which appeared in RE/Search's Industrial Culture Handbook.

Later releases were more synth pop-oriented than industrial. Notably, the 12" Metal Dance/Will to Power incorporated industrial percussion into a dark synthpop song; their Auto-Da-Fe includes other early fusions of synth and industrial. With 1984's Machine Age Voodoo, the band furthered their "Metal Dance" style (notably on High Tension and Junk Funk, titled Machine Age Voodoo in the US), but also proved surprisingly capable of writing poppier material like With Love From China. As a whole, the album is far from the band's calculatedly disturbing past, but it anticipated the Wax Trax/Nettwerk dance-industrial sound of the late 1980s. Machine Age Voodoo remains an under appreciated synth/dance album that has yet to appear on CD.

Later the group moved into electronic orchestral work, with Zamia Lehmanni - Songs of Byzantine Flowers actually being very beautiful music, highlighted by In Flagrante Delicto, which would be used in the film Dead Calm, thereby marking the beginning of Revell's soundtrack composing career.

Following the mediocre Off The Deep End 12" in 1986 (although the B-side, Kambuja, is a moving political track about Cambodia), Revell teamed up with another singer, Katrina Hayes, for Gold And Poison, the first side of which featured synth-dance tracks (notably the excellent, moody single Breathless, and the dumb but catchy Mouth to Mouth), the B-side remixed a few tracks from Zamia Lehmanni and added a great anti-nuclear track, White Island.

1988 saw SPK's final release, a horrible "live" album called Oceania: In Performance 1987. Much of their pre-1984 work was reissued on CD by Mute's Grey Area imprint during the 1990s.

Graeme Revell has now all but expunged SPK from his CV; he barely acknowledges his musical past in interviews.

2) S.P.K. Svi Panduri Kopilad - (A.C.A.B. in Croatian) anarho_punk band from Split, Croatia.