Missing Foundation
| Missing Foundation | |
|---|---|
| Origin | Hamburg, Germany |
| Genres | Industrial |
| Years active | 1984–92, 2012-Present |
| Labels | Restless, Dais Records |
| Members | Peter Missing |
| Past members | Mark Ashwill Chris Egan En Esch Sascha Konietzko Florian Langmaack Jim Moffitt Adam Nodelman Chris Tsakis Vern Toulon |
Missing Foundation was an industrial music and performance art project active in the late 1980s and early 1990s and led by Peter Missing. Their live shows were notorious for sparking civil disobedience (including the occasional riot) and causing serious damage to venues at which they performed, and they were in fact banned from some cities entirely. The group was also infamous for their "The Party's Over" graffito of an upside-down martini glass, and was heavily involved in the Tompkins Square Park Riot in August 1988. While the band disbanded in the early 1990s, a small anarchist social movement continued to exist under the same name for several years thereafter.
The earliest incarnation of the group, which was founded in Hamburg in 1984 by Peter Missing, included Sascha Konietzko and En Esch of industrial act KMFDM, who were only with Missing Foundation briefly before going their own way.
After Missing moved back to New York City in 1985, he started a new version of the group, and the line-up became more stable, with a core group of Missing, Florian Langmaack, Chris Egan, and Mark Ashwill. The band's second album, 1933, was released in 1988, when the band's social unrest fomenting activities began to increase dramatically. The group's upside-down martini logo had been spray painted all over the East Village that year. At a show in mid-1988 in New York, the group doused oil barrels in kerosene and set them on fire, then rolled them into the audience, causing major damage to C.B.G.B.'s, the club where they were performing. In a July 31 protest, one of the band members was arrested. A week later, Missing helped organize another initially peaceful protest at Tompkins Square Park, which grew violent after the band performed a concert. Some cities began banning the group from performing for fear of similar destruction to their venues.
The group's biggest cultural impact, other than their disruptive live performances, was the creation of their infamous "The Party's Over" image of an upside-down martini glass, which became a symbol for political and social dissent. The logo was part of a major graffiti campaign in New York's Lower East Side during the band's existence. An accompanying phrase, 1933-1988, was added as a way to draw comparisons between contemporary New York and the Weimar Republic. The group was accused of Satanism by a WCBS-TV news during the height of their influence.
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