A Prehistory of Industrial Music

Brian Duguid

INTRODUCTION

"Industrial culture? There has been a phenomena; I don't know whether it's strongenough to be a culture. I do think what we did has had a reverberation right aroundthe world and back." Genesis P. Orridge (Throbbing Gristle) [1]I've often thought that somebody really ought to write a history of industrial music.After all, there are histories of reggae, rap, and countless rock, jazz, folk andclassical histories. Unfortunately, the best books on industrial music (Re/Search'sIndustrial Culture Handbook and Charles Neal's Tape Delay) were both writtenwhen the genre was still fresh, still on the move, and neither tells us much aboutwhere the music came from. A more recent contribution to the field, DaveThompson's Industrial Revolution suffers from Americocentrism, major omissions,basic errors and from a concentration on electrobeat and industrial rock to the nearexclusion of all else. Still, this article isn't that history; that will have to wait forsomeone better qualified than I.Instead, I offer a prehistory, a look at heritage, tradition and ancestry. For all thatindustrial music set out to provide the shock of the new, it's impossible tounderstand its achievements without a context to place them in. Few, if any, of itstactics and methods were truly original, although the way it combined itscomponents was very much of its time.Before the prehistory can be properly explored, we need to know what this"industrial music" is, or was. It would be hard to disagree with the suggestion thatprior to the formation of Throbbing Gristle as a side-project of performance art groupCOUM Transmissions in late 1975 [2] industrial music did not exist; and certainlythe genre took its name from the label that Throbbing Gristle set up, IndustrialRecords. Monte Cazazza is usually acknowledged as inventing the term "industrialmusic", and the label used the name in a very specific sense - as a negativecomment on the desire for "authenticity" that still dominated music in the seventies.Very few of the groups who were initially called "industrial" liked the term, althoughfrom the mid-80s it became a word that bands embraced willingly, to the extent thatnowadays even quite tedious rock bands claim to be industrial, and the jazz / classical ensemble, Icebreaker, has even bizarrely been described as an "industrial"group. Rock and jazz groups don't waste much time worrying about the word usedto define their genre, so for my purposes I'm happy to include in the "industrial"genre plenty of artists who tried to disown the label.The groups who were released on Industrial Records (Throbbing Gristle, CabaretVoltaire, ClockDVA, Thomas Leer and Robert Rental, Monte Cazazza, S.P.K., withthe probable exception of The Leather Nun and Elizabeth Welch [3]) combined aninterest in transgressive culture with an interest in the potential of noise as music,and it's easy to see how groups like Einstürzende Neubauten, Whitehouse or TestDept can be considered to share similar interests.Dave Henderson's seminal Wild Planet article [4] presented a survey of the (mainlyBritish and European) "industrial" scene as it was recognised in 1983, but withartists as diverse as Steve Reich, Mark Shreeve, AMM and Laibach cited it wasclear even then that the borders of industrial music couldn't be clearly defined.Since then, the music has fragmented, most notably into a division betweenexperimental and dance/rock-oriented artists (or uncommercial and commercial).The popular "industrial" musicians, such as Front 242 or Ministry, draw on theelements of early industrial music most amenable to the rock and techno arenas

(sometimes this just means aggression and paranoia); the others have exploredindustrial music's relationships with ritual music, musique concrete, academicelectronic music, improvisation and pure noise. In recent times, through thepopularity of ambient music, several artists involved in this more "experimental"tradition have achieved more popular recognition than before.It's tempting to see the fragmentation of industrial music into popular and"underground" areas as just a recognition of the relative accessibility of differentmusical styles, but this would be extremely misleading. As with jazz and rock, it'sanother example of "a music of revolt transformed into a repetitive commodity ... Acontinuation of the same effort, always resumed and renewed, to alienate aliberatory will in order to produce a market" [5]. As industrial music's history andprehistory will make clear, industrial music originally articulated ideas of subversionthat go significantly beyond the saleable "rebellion" that the rock commodity offers.It was inevitable that the market would adopt only the superficial aggression andstylisms.It's clear that the label, "industrial music", is of no use in pigeonholing music, but itstill serves as a useful pointer to a web of musical and personal relationships, acommon pool of interests and ideas which every industrial sub-genre has someconnection with. The uncommercial industrial tradition has frequently been labelled"post-industrial"; in contrast, this article attempts to identify "pre-industrial" music.However, as will become obvious, there are few meaningful boundaries betweenindustrial music and its ancestors.Writing in Alternative Press, Michael Mahan attempted to define industrial music as"an artistic reflection of the de-humanisation of our people and the inexorablepollution of our planet by our factory-based socio-economic state" [6]. This is toosimplistic; if industrial music were simply anti-factory music then it would encompassany number of reactionary Luddites. Mahan at least managed to identify some ofthe genre's important musical precursors, citing Edgard Varèse, KarlheinzStockhausen, David Vorhaus, Frank Zappa and Klaus Schulze as some probableancestors. Jon Savage has elsewhere identified five areas that characterisedindustrial music [7]: access to information, shock tactics, organisational autonomy,extra-musical elements, and use of synthesizers and anti-music. By examining eachin turn, it will soon become obvious exactly what place industrial music has in thetwentieth century cultural tradition.     

       

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