System of a Down Announce Arena Tour Commemorating 100th Anniversary of Armenian Genocide
No, System of a Down aren’t releasing a new album. No, drummer John Dolmayan is not completely off his rocker. Today we finally learned what the drummer’s cryptic Tweets of late have been about, and it’s a tour.
The “Wake Up The Souls” arena tour will be an international trek, although a brief one: it’ll cover seven shows in seven different countries, culminating with the band’s first ever performance in Yerevan, Armenia. That’s significant, of course, because all four band members are of Armenian decent, and the tour will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Says a press release:
April 24th, 2015 marks the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, an attempted extermination of the Armenian people by the Ottoman Empire. A century later, System Of A Down refuse to let the victims and lessons learned be forgotten.
As pointed out in a recent Forbes op-ed piece by Jano Boghossian, the atrocities committed in 1915 marked and traumatized all subsequent generations of Armenians both in the small remaining homeland, and the far-reaching Diaspora. “Victim groups have no need for a justification of memory,” wrote Boghossian, “but they do need justice.” System Of A Down’s landmark tour will see them take the call for truth to Germany, France, Belgium, Netherlands and Russia. The group, whose four members are all of Armenian descent, have lost family members and history to the Genocide and have worked tirelessly over the years to promote awareness. In April 2009, Tankian made a short video urging President Obama to honor his campaign pledge to properly commemorate the Armenian Genocide. The group made headlines in 2013 after a concert at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles saw Tankian asking the packed-house crowd to imagine a government that remained silent on the Holocaust, as many did regarding the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian genocides.
Dates below. More info here.
04/10 London/UK @ Wembley Arena
04/13 Cologne/Germany @ Lanxess Arena
04/14 Lyon/France @ La Halle Tony Garnier
04/16 Brussels/Belgium @ Forest National
04/17 Amsterdam/Netherlands @ Ziggo Dome
04/20 Moscow/Russia @ Olympisky
04/23 Yerevan/Armenia @ Republic Square
