A Prehistory
of Industrial Music
Brian Duguid
Introduction
"Industrial culture? There has been a phenomena; I don't know
whether it's strong enough to be a culture. I do think what we did
has had a reverberation right around the 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 and classical histories. Unfortunately,
the best books on industrial music (Re/Search's Industrial Culture
Handbook and Charles Neal's Tape Delay) were both written when the
genre was still fresh, still on the move, and neither tells us much
about where the music came from. A more recent contribution to the
field, Dave Thompson's Industrial Revolution suffers from Americocentrism,
major omissions, basic errors and from a concentration on electrobeat
and industrial rock to the near exclusion of all else. Still, this
article isn't that history; that will have to wait for someone better
qualified than I.
Instead, I offer a prehistory, a look at heritage, tradition and
ancestry. For all that industrial music set out to provide the shock
of the new, it's impossible to understand its achievements without
a context to place them in. Few, if any, of its tactics and methods
were truly original, although the way it combined its components
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 that prior to the formation of Throbbing
Gristle as a side-project of performance art group COUM Transmissions
in late 1975 [2] industrial music did not exist; and certainly the
genre took its name from the label that Throbbing Gristle set up,
Industrial Records. Monte Cazazza is usually acknowledged as inventing
the term "industrial music", and the label used the name
in a very specific sense - as a negative comment 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, although from the mid-80s it became a word that
bands embraced willingly, to the extent that nowadays 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 used to 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,
Cabaret Voltaire, ClockDVA, Thomas Leer and Robert Rental, Monte
Cazazza, S.P.K., with the probable exception of The Leather Nun
and Elizabeth Welch [3]) combined an interest 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
Test Dept can be considered to share similar interests.
Dave Henderson's seminal Wild Planet article [4] presented a survey
of the (mainly British and European) "industrial" scene
as it was recognised in 1983, but with artists as diverse as Steve
Reich, Mark Shreeve, AMM and Laibach cited it was clear even then
that the borders of industrial music couldn't be clearly defined.
Since then, the music has fragmented, most notably into a division
between experimental and dance/rock-oriented artists (or uncommercial
and commercial). The popular "industrial" musicians, such
as Front 242 or Ministry, draw on the elements of early industrial
music most amenable to the rock and techno arenas (sometimes this
just means aggression and paranoia); the others have explored industrial
music's relationships with ritual music, musique concrete, academic
electronic music, improvisation and pure noise. In recent times,
through the popularity 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 different musical styles, but this
would be extremely misleading. As with jazz and rock, it's another
example of "a music of revolt transformed into a repetitive
commodity ... A continuation of the same effort, always resumed
and renewed, to alienate a liberatory will in order to produce a
market" [5]. As industrial music's history and prehistory will
make clear, industrial music originally articulated ideas of subversion
that go significantly beyond the saleable "rebellion"
that the rock commodity offers. It was inevitable that the market
would adopt only the superficial aggression and stylisms.
It's clear that the label, "industrial music", is of no
use in pigeonholing music, but it still serves as a useful pointer
to a web of musical and personal relationships, a common pool of
interests and ideas which every industrial sub-genre has some connection
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 between
industrial 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 inexorable pollution of our planet by our
factory-based socio-economic state" [6]. This is too simplistic;
if industrial music were simply anti-factory music then it would
encompass any number of reactionary Luddites. Mahan at least managed
to identify some of the genre's important musical precursors, citing
Edgard Varèse, Karlheinz Stockhausen, David Vorhaus, Frank
Zappa and Klaus Schulze as some probable ancestors. Jon Savage has
elsewhere identified five areas that characterised industrial music
[7]: access to information, shock tactics, organisational autonomy,
extra-musical elements, and use of synthesizers and anti-music.
By examining each in turn, it will soon become obvious exactly what
place industrial music has in the twentieth century cultural tradition.
Endnotes
1. Re/Search #6/7: Industrial Culture Handbook (Re/Search,
1983)
2. TG Chronology in Re/Search #4/5 "William Burroughs / Throbbing
Gristle / Brion Gysin" (Re/Search, 1982)
3. Welsh's Stormy Weather, from Derek Jarman's film The Tempest,
was an Industrial Records single.
4. Published in Sounds, May 7 1983.
5. Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali (Manchester
University Press, 1985)
6. Welcome to the Machine, by Michael Mahan, in Alternative Press
#66 (January 1994).
7. Introduction to Re/Search #6/7, op.cit.
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