John and I seem to have the same edition of Heathen Earth. Isn’t that sweet?
Cracking piece from K-Punk on the industrial debate.
Great analysis of the typology of industrial music.
On Whitehouse:
“As for whether they are a joke group, it seems to me that they are and they aren’t. And it’s a particularly disturbing joke…”
This gave me pause. I’ve never given any thought to the idea that Whitehouse should be taken seriously. K-Punk seems to be suggesting that there’s actually some real content in Whitehouse. Good god. Does this mean I can’t take the piss out of them at random any more? Shit.
> ‘Power Electronics’ strikes me as a better label than industrial for them.
I’ve always loved the term Power Electronics. Trips really nicely off the tongue. It would be a really great combination of Tackhead’s Housebuilding, Orbital’s Impact USA and Psychick TV’s Unclean. I wonder if anyone’s done anything like that?
John as ever cannot distinguish between product and consumer. Much of Killing Joke’s audience were goths. Some of Coil’s audience were goths. None of Joy Division’s audience were goths, at least until the record was over. But Killing Joke weren’t goths. They were a speedfreak heavy metal band without the guitar solos and better taste. Neither were Coil or Joy Division goths. They both had a certain dark glamour, but they weren’t Sex Gang Children, or The Nephilim.
John is of course a closet goth and is deeply embarassed about it.
M-Dubs: For Real
Two copies.
Mix.
Fucking hardcore.
Acid Strength Industrial
I’d put the On-U project under some other heading.
Granted, I’m pushing things a bit here. But among all the industrial people I ever knew, On-U was crucial.
> And Neubauten.
Eh? They were on some bizarre. They were the weirder, Berlin counter-part to Test Dept. They dressed in overalls and took bnuildings apart with drills. They used to clock on and off and call each other “mate”. You don’t get any more industrial than that.
There’s a sort of industrial sub-genre of power-tool-weilding non-musicians — Test Dept, SPK, almost no-one else. There was a piece on the Tube about them and everything.
> And 23 Skidoo.
On Fetish records, same as TG later on. Part of the industrial funk sub-genre, with 400 Blows, Chakk, Hula, and the Ohio Players. No, I’m pretty sure they’re industrial, especially early on, before the went really good when Sketch from Imagination joined.
It was Imagination, wasn’t it? Someone correct me.
It wasn’t Freez was it? Christ, I hope not. Good single and all that but nothing compared to the lush electro-soul-dub brilliance of Imagination.
> And Joy Division.
Ah. Now this is tenuous, I have to admit. There IS a link but Joy Division are a genre unto themselves really.
> And Colourbox.
Now, I’m convinced ColourBox are intimately connected with all things industrial. But for the life of me I can’t remember why. Maybe it’s just my imagination. Just an Illusion. (Wow, that Imagination riff is really beginning to hit hard now…)
> And Cabaret Voltaire.
No way are the Cabs NOT industrial. They were mates with Gen right from the early days (1975 or thereabouts) and I’m pretty sure he put out an early tape album by them.
I saw Steven Mallinder at the Moloko gig here a couple of months ago and he did say, “Do tell anyone you know online that we were actually an industrial band”. Actually, he didn’t, we talked about Sheffield nightclubs instead.
> As for Lee Perry and Miles Davis!
Errrr yeah. It’s a conceptual link, rather than anything the, errr, artists themselves would have been aware of.
> it becomes a “greyer area”, greyer still with Killing Joke
Yeah, what genre are Killing Joke?* They’re not really industrial. They’re sort of post-punk aren’t they? Except, like the Stranglers, who I also like, they’re more prog-punk. Concept albums with short songs and distortion. Without sounding that much like Hawkwind.
* Are groups singular or plural? I’d have thought that, like companies, they should be singular, but no-one does it that way, not even the quality broadsheets. And what is the noun for whether a noun is singluar or plural?
Oh, you’re right, there were lots of roads into acid house and ecstasy, and the industrial one is just the one I think about most. But there’s a big lineage there between industrial and acid — so far as I can tell the early Clink Street raves had a healthy contingent of people who had been into industrial / electronics, Onu-U, and dub. (I spoke at the funeral of one of them and talked about what he’d told me about it, FWIW.) And the Clink Street scene was important in fuelling the interesting, dark side of acid and what came after.
> there are similar moments when a whole range of interlocking factors suddenly click into position and
> produce a monumental reorganisation. “The Great Vowel shift” for one. It’d be a really cool project to
> do a “Pre-Energy Flash” tome, kind of like the Star Wars prequel, to Reynolds’s dance music book
That’s a really cool concept. I’d be interested in that kind of book.
How much common ground was created through ecstacy!
Reynolds on nu-dancehall:
dancehall’s kind of the default desperation option for the mainstream and hipsterati alike, isn’ t it? It bubbles on pretty much same level of greatness year in year in out, and folks tune into when they’ve got no other options and the springs of vibe have run dry…
Well, yeah. It makes MTV more listenable down the gym. It’s nice to have some OK dancehall rhythms in the charts. But of course we “real reggae fans” (why does this remind me of recidivist Neil Young fans?) are weary and wary of the chart’s suck ’em in and spit ’em out production line recuperation.
So what? It’s just a sign of dance music’s shrinking market, driven by changing demographics if I remember my Monitor report correctly. First dance got mixed up with r’n’b to expand its market, now its dancehall. You can tell how desperate the dance music industry is by how good Trevor Nelson’s show sounds. No more is Soul Nation wall to wall sugar-pop faux-soul; now he can mix in rougher sounds (he’s been championing “the reggae sound” all this year) and grab more audience on the back of dance’s increasing ecumenism. The house and techno audiences are shrinking and being mixed with the r’n’b audience and Nelson’s a winner in this situation. (Did you know he used to be a door to door salesman, or should that be in-home representative, for pensions and financial services? The boy knows how to grab an opportunity.)
What next? Country?
“I’d like to be able to be kinder about Industrial music”: Edited highlights of a private email to Matt TWANBOC
Why? Most of it’s SHIT!
> I want to hear music which is primarily a sonic experience. Only bits and pieces of “Industrial” music I’ve heard have managed to transcend this.
You mean most of it’s not very good music?
Hmmm. Does the listener need to know about the philosophical framework to enjoy the music? I can’t answer that. For me, I liked (some of) the sounds, but I liked the whole package of music, philosophy and art. Some of the records that weren’t about music so much as transcendence were good, like How to Destory Angels, and some of them weren’t.
And anyway, personally I question how hard the demarcation line is around what is and is not industrial. I reckon I can factor in Tackhead, most of Bill Laswell’s stuff, most of Scratch’s stuff, lots of Tubby, Miles Davis, lots of acid house as being part of industrial. All of them have as much to do with what I and I think a lot of other people thought industrial was about as someone like The Normal. So it’s hard to say what you’re enjoying just as a sonic experience and what you’re enjoying for transcendance.
I think industrial was adept at co-opting outsiders with the right vibe, especially since there were usually just three degrees of separation between the co-optees and the core groups. For example, you can go: Laswell->Burroughs->TG (and everyone else); or Lee Perry->Adrian Sherwood->Mark Stewart (et al). Of course, if you go looking, that’s what you’ll find — but part of the point of industrial music was that it tried to reveal how your subconscious constructed meaning from music, and lead you to musical synchronicities. Very hermetic I’m sure.
Of course, this argument is really just special pleading to defend the fact that so much industrial music is, without a doubt, total shit.
Nevertheless, there’s a few good tunes in industrial, from one perspective or another. Here’s a bunch of goodies that have pretty much stood the test of time:
Einsturtzende Neubaten: Halber Mensch, Yu Gung (esp the Sherwood mix of course)
Test Dept: Victory (the one with bagpipes on A Good Night Out), The Unnacceptable Face of Freedom
Psychic TV: Arcadia, The Orchids
Cabaret Voltaire: loads, but I like Sleepwalking, Sensoria and Kino a lot, off the top of my head
TG: Heathen Earth (the whole LP)
23 Skidoo: Coup
400 Blows: Moving
Foetus: The Only Good Christian Is Dead
Hmmm. Very much the poppy end of industrial then, rather than the transcendental, noise-tastic stuff. But there are so many threads running through industrial, at what track do you draw the line between what is and is not industrial? Colour Box’s Say You? Heaven 17’s How Men Are LP? (Ace album, very much under-rated, if not unknown, now.) Killing Joke’s SO36? Joy Division’s Dead Souls (or maybe Komakino)? Head of David’s Metal Texas Psychout? Scritti Politti’s The Sweetest Girl (or perhaps the dub of Wood Beez…)? They’re all connected to the industrial canon one way or another, sonically as well as by lineage.
Alright then, here’s some noisier stuff:
PTV: In the nursery
Cabaret Voltaire: War of Nerves (off 2 X 45, errrr you really need the original vinyl cos the CD version sounds a bit weak
Laibach: Die Liebe (“there’s always been a Deep Purple influence on our music” — actually there’s a great ambient version on the flip of the original Yugoslavian release)
Hmmm. It’s harder work than you’d think, picking good industrial records that would sound good to a new listener today. And fuck it, I can’t think of any more noisy ones. The real problem with them is that you can’t put many of them in mixes, which lets face it the only point of having old records…
> Some contributors have said NWW don’t belong in there.
Hahahahahahaha! That’s really funny. Where the fuck else will you put them? NWW were shite anyway. I don’t even like the Foetus ones.
I always thought Whitehouse were supposed to be a joke band. I mean it’s piss take music isn’t it? I always thought Half Man Half Biscuit were more worth your time. My mate Alan had me convulsed with laughter at HMHB lyrics on Saturday night. (errr I’m not saying HMHB were industrial. That would be ludicrous. Now, The Fall…)
I never liked Death In June’s music either, but the album covers are great. I seem to remember Fields of Rape being good, or maybe I just liked the title. Heaven Street I always thought was rubbish. Test Dept were ace. Live they were incredible. Similarly you can’t leave Mark Stewart out. 400 Blows were great cos they did funk so well — there’s always been a huge element of funk to industrial. That was obvious to me as a 13 year old getting into Cabaret Voltaire and TG.
> However I’ve heard TG, Whitehouse, Coil, NWW and Current 93 all say in separate interviews
> that they were unhappy with being lumped in the “Industrial scene”. That’s so rich!
Yes mate. But look at who they were being lumped in with? Skinny middle class white spods in the main… Can’t blame ’em. Them and dodgy goths sweating in spandex. Christ. “Forgive me for my fans.” acid house was invented as a way of getting out of the rut of industrial culture. Forget all the Oakey / Ibiza stuff, that’s just window-dressing. Acid house goes back to Matt Johnson making an album on E, and way before then Sleazy getting tricky in new york discos… this is all on the public record… somewhere…
Ace electro here!
Well it’s not really electro, it’s more subtle breaks-ish tech-house — in other words it;s dark, groovy and warm with skittering beats that aren’t too off kilter. I like it a lot. It’s from the man like Marc Dauncey and I would happily dance to it, especially with a few subtle ragga samples over the top.
Advertorialisation
One of the great joys of using a free blogging service is that one’s own artfully created and meticulously authored content is randomly recontextualised by whatever eye-wateringly awful adware is sprayed willy nilly across the top of the screen by the good people at blogspot (henceforth known as google).
So far so inevitable, and anyway as Camille Paglia once said “adverts are the best thing on television” — well they have the highest per-second costs anyway, which must mean something — or other — and at the very least it means that someone professional has been involved in making this blog page.
But it has been pointed out to me — several times, and at great length, by John Eden — that these blinking pixellated commercials are not random. Not at all, at all. Which means that the ad server looks at what you’re writing about, checks the word-hits against the list associated with their advertisers (I presume this is a meta tag forwarded by Double-Click, but who knows? Maybe it’s hand typed by Tibetan monks), and serves up a delightfully, nay refreshingly, targeted set of commercial messages to a doubtless grateful readership.
So on the one hand, blissblog is saturated with ads for music websites, record stores, and magazines aimed at “a certain type of not quite so young man”, therefore confirming Reybolds’ position as an arbiter of taste among the 30-something wannabe music nerd market (market? I suspect it’s actually a condition, given my personal experience, but we’ll let that pass). In contrast, my own modest excuse for a blog seems to promote little but minor hotels dedicated to the landscape alignments and earth mysteries massive, which is great, I feel like we’re collectively rendering a service to circle spotters.
Meanwhile, I am perturbed to note that John Eden’s site is surrounded by advertisements for sexual prosthetics, vacuum pumps and the bafflingly titled “corrective cosmetic surgery” — I assume this is not a new service offered by Angel Stern but rather a refuge for theover-enthusiastically pierced. Of course, it’s always possible Eden’s been on the blower pimping his own tight little blog, commercial whirlwind that he is.
Nevertheless, I do wonder what you could do with some creative meta-, or perhaps that should be under-, tagging, achieved through adjusting the content of your blog. Let’s try:
RUSH LIMBAUGH
OLLY NORTH
GUNS’N’AMMO
GEORGE GILDER
combined with
SATAN’S SLAVES
EVIL MOTHERS
INVESTMENT PLAN
I will be watching my banner with interest…