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PARIS

Metallica to release Bataclan live album for attack victims

Heavy metal giants Metallica on Wednesday announced a live album recorded at the Bataclan in Paris, with proceeds going to victims of the November 13 attacks at the club.

Metallica to release Bataclan live album for attack victims
Metallica frontman James Hetfield. Photo: TASSO MARCELO/Scanpix
The CD — entitled, in reference to France's national motto, “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, Metallica! – Live at Le Bataclan. Paris, France – June 11th, 2003” — will come out on April 16 for Record Store Day, a growing annual event that promotes independent music stores.
 
The album features a recording of nine songs performed at the Bataclan by Metallica, who had played three gigs in Paris in one night at clubs much smaller than the band was accustomed to as part of a promotion for its album 'St. Anger'.
 
Metallica said all profits from the album would go to Give for France, an initiative under the Fondation de France philanthropic group that raises funds for survivors and families of people who lost their lives in the tragedy.
 
Ninety people were killed on November 13 when Islamist extremists opened fire at a Bataclan concert of California rockers Eagles of Death Metal, the deadliest of a series of coordinated attacks around the French capital.
 
Organizers of Record Store Day, a US-based initiative that has gone global and is known as “Disquaire Day” in France, said they planned to highlight the connections between US and French “music-loving humans” for the 2016 edition.
 
While Metallica's live album will be out on CD, Record Store Day has largely tried to highlight the resurgence of vinyl, with many bands releasing special records to be sold at independent stores for the occasion.
 
Metallica — named 2016 Record Store Day “ambassadors” — also plans to put out boxed set reissues of the band's 1983 debut album 'Kill 'Em All' and follow-up 'Ride the Lightning'.
 
The boxed sets will each include vinyl, CDs, a DVD and a hardcover book from the band, considered the pioneers of the dark and aggressive subgenre of thrash metal.
 
Lars Ulrich, 52, the California-based band's Danish-born drummer, said he spent his formative years browsing records at the Bristol Music Center in Copenhagen.
 
“As music becomes available either through only the Internet or in gigantic airport-size retail stores, it is more important than ever — actually vital — that all us fanatics continue to bring to light the importance of records, and to support to the maximum of our abilities the independent record store outlet,” he said.
 
Metallica has said it will release a new album this year or early next, the band's first since 2008's 'Death Magnetic'.

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TERRORISM

Danish ‘martyr’ exhibit reported to police

A Copenhagen art exhibit planning to portray two of the Brussels suicide bombers and one of the Paris Bataclan attackers as "martyrs" was on Monday reported to police for encouraging terrorism.

Danish 'martyr' exhibit reported to police
The exhibition will feature Brussels Airport bomber Ibrahim El-Bakraoui and other terrorists. Photo: Public domain
In an exhibit partly inspired by Tehran's Martyrs' Museum, a Danish group of artists plans to include brothers Ibrahim and Khalid El-Bakraoui, who detonated bombs in the deadly Brussels attacks on March 22nd, and Foued Mohamed-Aggad, who blew himself up at Paris music venue Bataclan on November 14th.
 
The installation will have the look of a museum, using images of the “martyrs”, replicas of their belongings and plaques to explain who they are.
 
The suicide bombers will be featured alongside historical figures considered to have died for their cause, such as French heroine Joan of Arc and Greek philosopher Socrates, said Ida Grarup Nielsen of artist collective The Other Eye of The Tiger.
 
“A guide will talk about Foued Mohamed-Aggad and the events at the Bataclan, during which the room will also be [filled] with sound and light,” she told AFP.
 
The story would be told “more from his point of view,” she said.
 
The El-Bakraoui brothers would not be included in the guided tour but photos of them and replicas of their belongings would be put on display, including a black leather glove believed to have been worn by Ibrahim El-Bakraoui to conceal a bomb detonator.
 
The exhibit is scheduled to go on display from May 26th until June 10th in a former abattoir in Kødbyen, Copenhagen's trendy Meatpacking District.
 
The venue is home to a theatre group whose artistic leader, Christian Lollike, courted controversy in 2012 by staging a play based on the manifesto of Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik.
 
“Our exhibit is really about describing the term 'martyr' from as many different angles as possible and through history,” Nielsen said.
 
Everyone is “the hero of [their] own story,” she added.
 
Danish gunman Omar El-Hussein, who killed two people in twin attacks in Copenhagen in February last year, would not be part of the exhibit since it was unclear whether he had been willing to die for his beliefs, she said.
 
The 22-year-old was killed in a shootout with police hours after killing a security guard outside the city's main synagogue.
 
A local member of the ruling Venstre party, Diego Gugliotta, on Monday reported the event and its organisers to police for “encouraging terror”.
 
Portraying international terrorists as heroes could push some people to “take the last step and join a terror organisation,” he wrote on Facebook.