Industrial music

• 1. Introduction

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  Industrial music has a reputation for noise, and in January 1984 that reputation turned physical. The German group Einstürzende Neubauten performed a Concerto for Voice and Machinery at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. They drilled through the floor, a riot followed, and the story made front-page news in England.

  That night was the loud end of a genre that borrowed from factories, tape machines and avant-garde art, and that rarely tried to be liked. It emerged in the mid-to-late 1970s as a branch of experimental music. Where did its sound come from, and who first used the word industrial for music? What did its bands read, build and provoke along the way? And how did a scene this abrasive splinter into dozens of offshoots and end up reaching a mainstream audience?

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• 2. Machines Before Music

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  In 1913, the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo published The Art of Noises, a manifesto that aimed to reflect the sounds of a modern industrial society. Over the next decade, composers and artists began to put machinery on the stage.

  On the 18th of May 1917, the Chatelet Theatre in Paris staged Parade. Jean Cocteau conceived it, Pablo Picasso designed it, Leonid Massine choreographed it, and Eric Satie wrote the music. Cocteau labeled the extra sounds trompe l'oreille. They included a dynamo, a Morse code machine, sirens, a steam engine, an airplane motor and typewriters.

  In Baku in 1922, Arseny Avraamov went much bigger with his Symphony of Factory Sirens. It used navy ship sirens and whistles, factory sirens, bus and car horns, foghorns, cannons, artillery guns and machine guns. A team conducted the performance with flags and pistols, and a specially designed steam-whistle machine helped render the Internationale and the Marseillaise as noise.

  Arthur Honegger wrote Pacific 231 in 1923, a modernist piece that imitates the sound of a steam locomotive. In 1924, Ottorino Respighi's orchestral Pines of Rome included a phonograph recording of a nightingale. That same year, George Antheil created Ballet Mécanique, scored for 16 pianos, 3 airplane propellers and 7 electric bells. It was first meant as music for a Dada film by Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger, but in 1926 it premiered alone as a concert piece.

  In a 1937 essay, John Cage separated found sounds, which he called noise, from musical sounds. His examples included rain, static between radio channels and a truck at fifty miles per hour. In practice, he made no real distinction, because he believed every sound could be used creatively. He borrowed the phrase sound organisation from Varese, and in 1939 he began a series of works that tested his aims. The first, Imaginary Landscape #1, used two variable speed turntables.

  The words industrial music themselves turn up surprisingly early. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, The Musical Quarterly used them in 1942 when it called Dmitri Shostakovich's 1927 Symphony No. 2 the high tide of industrial music. In 1972, The New York Times placed Ferde Grofé in an industrial music genre of his own, citing his 1935 work A Symphony in Steel. His instruments included four pairs of shoes, two brooms, a locomotive bell, a pneumatic drill and a compressed-air tank. None of these pieces connects directly to the later genre. The real lineage ran through the fringes of rock records in the 1960s.

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• 3. Rock's Strange Neighbors

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  In 1964, John Cale recorded a track called Loop, made of nothing but audio feedback in a locked groove. It was released in 1966 as a single credited to the Velvet Underground, a band later noted as an influence on industrial music.

  AMM, formed in 1965, was recognized in hindsight by AllMusic as a precursor. Its debut album AMMMusic, from 1967, mixed sonic assault, noise and chance sound, including transistor radios. AllMusic said that approach would reach the rock fringes in the work of industrial groups like Test Dept. Writer Alex Henderson, also of AllMusic, heard something similar in the 1969 album Orgasm by Cromagnon. He said its track Caledonia resembled a Ministry or Revolting Cocks recording from 1989.

  The Beatles touched the same territory in 1968. Their White Album borrowed from musique concrète on the track Revolution 9. Around it were George Harrison's Electronic Sound and John Lennon's avant-garde collaborations with Yoko Ono, who had been part of the New York Fluxus scene. Underground and psychedelic acts such as the Mothers of Invention, Intersystems, Musica Elettronica Viva, Red Krayola and Fifty Foot Hose were working nearby.

  Germany contributed its own strand. Kluster recorded the album Klopfzeichen in 1969 and released it in 1970, and it is now seen as an early precursor. XLR8 magazine said the early work of Cluster had a profound impact on the brainier practitioners of industrial music. Writer Alexei Monroe goes further for Kraftwerk. He argues they were the first successful artists to put representations of industrial sounds into nonacademic electronic music.

  Across the Atlantic, Alan Vega and Martin Rev formed the New York band Suicide in 1970. The Guardian later described them as equally influential on the industrial scenes that followed. The Residents, whose earliest demos date to 1969, were said by The New York Times to have presaged forms of industrial music. By the mid-1970s the ingredients were scattered everywhere. What was missing was a group willing to weld them into a single project, and one was taking shape in Kingston upon Hull.

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• 4. Throbbing Gristle

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  Beginning in 1972, a Kingston upon Hull collective called COUM staged performances inspired by Fluxus and Viennese Actionism. They included acts of sexual and physical abjection. COUM had started as a psychedelic rock group, but it began calling its work performance art so that it could obtain grants from the Arts Council of Great Britain. Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti made up the group.

  Peter Christopherson, who worked for the commercial artists Hipgnosis, joined in 1974. Chris Carter followed the next year. In September 1975 the group renamed itself Throbbing Gristle, taking the name from a northern English slang word for an erection.

  The group's first public performance came in October 1976, alongside an exhibit titled Prostitution. It featured pornographic photos of Tutti as well as used tampons, and it hung at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Conservative politician Nicholas Fairbairn declared that public money was being wasted to destroy the morality of society. He called the group "wreckers of civilization."

  That same year, the artist Monte Cazazza coined a slogan, "Industrial Music for Industrial People." Throbbing Gristle took it as the strapline for their new record label, Industrial Records. P-Orridge later explained the joke behind the word. There was the music industry, and there was the idea of churning out records "like motorcars." Earlier music had been rooted in the blues and slavery, and they felt it was time to update it to the Industrial Revolution.

  In 1978, the Swedish act Leather Nun became the first outside act, apart from Throbbing Gristle and Cazazza, to release a record on Industrial Records. Their singles eventually earned significant airplay on college radio in the United States.

  The group rejected the rock song structures linked to the punk scene and declared their style "anti-music." Rejecting rock meant rethinking the instruments, and that started with a soldering iron.

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• 5. Built, Not Bought

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  Chris Carter of Throbbing Gristle invented a device called the Gristle-izer. Peter Christopherson played it. It combined a one-octave keyboard with a number of cassette machines that triggered pre-recorded sounds. Carter also built speakers, effects units and synthesizer modules, and he modified conventional rock instruments for the band.

  Cosey Fanni Tutti treated the guitar just as freely. She played it with a slide to produce glissandi, or pounded the strings as if they were a drum. Over in Sheffield, Chris Watson of Cabaret Voltaire custom-built a fuzzbox for Richard H. Kirk's guitar. It gave the instrument a timbre nobody else had.

  The typical early sound relied on tape editing, stark percussion, vocal effects and distorted loops. Throbbing Gristle also played at very high volume and produced ultra-high and sub-bass frequencies. They hoped to produce physical effects in the audience, and they labeled the approach "metabolic music." AllMusic would later define the genre as the most abrasive and aggressive fusion of rock and electronic music.

  In Germany, Einstürzende Neubauten mixed metal percussion and guitars with unconventional instruments such as jackhammers and bones. Their stage shows often damaged the venues where they played. Test Dept, Laibach, Die Krupps, Z'EV and SPK also worked in a metal-on-metal style, with sound produced by metal crashing against metal. All of this homemade noise rested on an unusual reading list, and it was far from innocent.

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• 6. Dangerous Reading

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  William S. Burroughs was a particular influence on the scene. His recordings and writings introduced the cut-up technique, and his interest in noise as a way to disrupt societal control appealed to the early industrial musicians. In his introduction to the Industrial Culture Handbook in 1983, Jon Savage listed organizational autonomy, shock tactics and synthesizers among the genre's hallmarks.

  Throbbing Gristle's own research list was stranger. It covered cults, wars, psychological techniques of persuasion, and unusual murders, especially those committed by children and psychopaths. It also took in forensic pathology, venereology, behavior in concentration camps, and the history of uniforms and insignia. They shared this fascination with Aleister Crowley's magick with other industrial pioneers.

  Many of the first industrial musicians were interested in fascism without necessarily sympathizing with it. Throbbing Gristle's logo was based on the lightning symbol of the British Union of Fascists. The Industrial Records logo was a photograph of Auschwitz. Early performances also featured mutilation, sado-masochistic elements and totalitarian imagery. Throbbing Gristle abused the audience by aiming high powered lights at them.

  The philosophical shelf was just as crowded. SPK admired Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze. They also took inspiration from the manifesto of the Socialist Patients' Collective, which supplied their name. Cabaret Voltaire took conceptual cues from Burroughs, J. G. Ballard and Tristan Tzara. Whitehouse and Nurse with Wound dedicated some of their work to the Marquis de Sade, and Nurse with Wound also drew on the Comte de Lautréamont.

  The musical tastes behind the noise were surprisingly wide. P-Orridge kept a cassette library that included the Master Musicians of Joujouka, Kraftwerk and Charles Manson. Carter liked Pink Floyd and Tangerine Dream. Boyd Rice was influenced by 1960s girl groups and tiki culture, while Z'EV named John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix and Tibetan, Balinese, Javanese, Indian and African music. 23 Skidoo borrowed from Fela Kuti and Miles Davis's On the Corner. Those mixed influences traveled far from Yorkshire, and scenes soon took root in several countries.

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• 7. Scenes Across Borders

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  In San Francisco, performance artist Monte Cazazza began recording noise music. Boyd Rice, who recorded as NON, released several albums of guitar drones and tape loops that built a cacophony of repetitive sound. In Boston, Sleep Chamber and other artists from Inner-X-Musick blended powerful noise with early forms of EBM. At the start of the 1980s in Italy, Maurizio Bianchi shared the same aesthetic.

  Blixa Bargeld of Einstürzende Neubauten was inspired by Antonin Artaud and an enthusiasm for amphetamines. He also originated an art movement called Die Genialen Dilettanten. Bargeld became particularly well known for his hissing scream.

  In Britain, Whitehouse set out to play the most brutal and extreme music of all time. William Bennett of the group coined the name power electronics for the result. It is made of static, screeching feedback, sub-bass pulses and high squeals from analogue synthesizers, along with screamed, distorted and often hateful lyrics. It is deeply atonal, with no conventional melodies or rhythms. Steve Stapleton, an early Whitehouse collaborator, formed Nurse with Wound, which experimented with noise sculpture and sound collage. Clock DVA said it borrowed equally from surrealist automatism and nervous energy funk, body music that makes you move.

  23 Skidoo also merged industrial music with African-American dance music. When the group performed at the first WOMAD Festival in 1982, they likened themselves to Indonesian gamelan.

  Some bands tied the sound to politics. Test Dept drew inspiration from Russian Futurism and toured to support the 1984-85 UK miners' strike. Laibach began in Slovenia while Yugoslavia was still a single state. They provoked controversy by borrowing imagery from Stalinist, Nazi, Titoist, Dada and Russian Futurist sources, which conflated Yugoslav patriotism with its German authoritarian adversary. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek defended them. He argued that Laibach and their art group Neue Slowenische Kunst practiced an overidentification with the hidden perverse enjoyment beneath authority, which had a subversive and liberating effect.

  Swans from New York City shared the metal-on-metal aesthetic while relying on standard rock instruments. Skinny Puppy drew on many industrial forefathers. Once the first wave broke apart, these styles began to multiply.

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• 8. Splintering Into Everything

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  After Throbbing Gristle broke up, P-Orridge and Christopherson founded Psychic TV and signed to a major label. Their first album was far more accessible and melodic than usual industrial fare, and it used hired work by trained musicians. Later records went back to sound collage and noise, and they also borrowed from funk and disco. P-Orridge founded Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, a quasi-religious organization that produced video art. Stevo of Some Bizzare Records managed the group's commercial aspirations, and his label released Einstürzende Neubauten, Test Dept and Cabaret Voltaire.

  Around 1983, the members of Cabaret Voltaire grew deeply interested in funk. With encouragement from their friends in New Order, they developed a dark but danceable electrofunk. In 1983, Christopherson left Psychic TV and formed Coil with John Balance. Coil used gongs and bullroarers, and both Coil and Current 93 were inspired by amphetamines and LSD. Current 93 was formed by David Tibet, a friend of Coil's, alongside Douglas P. of Death In June, Steven Stapleton and Fritz Catlin of 23 Skidoo. J. G. Thirlwell co-produced with Coil and added black comedy to the mix, borrowing from lounge music, noise and film music.

  The label side mattered as much as the bands. In the early 1980s, Chicago's Wax Trax! and Canada's Nettwerk helped push the genre toward electro-industrial and industrial rock. Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher started Wax Trax!, which became a central hub for industrial rock in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It released Front 242, Front Line Assembly, KMFDM and Sister Machine Gun, while Nettwerk signed Skinny Puppy. Together the offshoots became known as post-industrial music, with ingredients from new wave, hip hop, jazz, disco, reggae, folk and new age. Some of its branches were EBM, new beat, dark ambient, neofolk, Neue Deutsche Härte, martial industrial and industrial techno.

  In the 1990s the genre broke into the mainstream. Music journalists had previously ignored or criticized it, but now it found a following among disaffected middle-class youth in suburban and rural areas. Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, Rammstein and Orgy all found commercial success. The Recording Industry Association of America certified platinum records for Nine Inch Nails, including Broken in 1992, The Downward Spiral in 1994 and The Fragile in 1999. Marilyn Manson earned the same for Antichrist Superstar in 1996 and Mechanical Animals in 1998. By then the label had grown so wide that journalist James Greer called it "the kind of meaningless catch-all term that new wave once was."

  At the far end of the family, the harshest branch kept its own course. Death industrial, a subgenre of power electronics, was first applied to artists such as Brighter Death Now, and the Swedish label Cold Meat Industry issued its releases.

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