Redefining Industrial [Music/Art Movement]
SPK - Information Overload Unit [record re-issue cover] |
Difficult music for difficult times,
some might say: the recent few years have brought an appreciation for
darkness on the dancefloor and beyond.
A myriad of neighbouring and
reciprocally cross-pollinating genres: (drone, witch house and new
minimal wave) successfully removed the stigma of kitsch from black metal
and goth, but perhaps the most interesting phenomenon occurred with the
presence of openly noise and industrial-inspired artists.
Industrial and postindustrial, once movements of immense underground relevance, have spent the last 20 years in a curious niche. The artists which helped establish the movement continued to develop their careers, sometimes in a stable, reliable manner (:Zoviet*France, Nocturnal Emissions), sometimes plotting an unexpected course.
Cosey Fannit Tutti and Chris Carter |
Graeme Revell of SPK turned towards film music, Chris
Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti developed their feverish, Ballardian sound
as Chris&Cosey/Carter Tutti, while Genesis P-Orridge preached dance as ritual with Psychic TV and eventually turned
hirself into an act of perpetual identity transgression. Current 93
became an outlet for David Tibet’s multiple fascinations, ranging from
Crowley to Coptic Christianity, outsider art and Victoriana to 1970s
rock – and eventually was embraced by the ‘New Weird’ movement as an
unsung forefather.
Current 93 - Earth Covers Earth [inner gate-fold record cover] |
Meanwhile, the ‘industrial’ label was hijacked by the exalted slush of ‘industrial rock’, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, Project Pitchfork, later Ministry – which led to confusion on many levels. These artists offered in fact very ordinary, even boorish heavy rock music, enhanced by samplers and overexpressive image, far removed from the intellectual ambitions of the original industrial movement.
Project Pitchfork |
Further afield, another group of claimants to the industrial heritage appeared: the pretentious, uninformed provocateurs of martial industrial and neofolk underground, with their fancy for epic neoclassical arrangements and imagery bordering distastefully on political extremes. Last but not least, the noise and power electronics limb of the industrial legacy eventually turned into an infantile and ironically conservative loop of gratuitous violence – what Louis Pattison described as a “grimy little cult of bedroom losers playing out fantasies of murdering prostitutes on limited cassette tapes”. These unfortunate directions mercilessly bared the limits of industrial’s transgressive pursuits. Liberation and taboo-breaking proved to be a vain, disappointing destination.
Death In June - Brown Book [record cover] |
These
unfortunate directions mercilessly bared the limits of industrial’s
transgressive pursuits. Liberation and taboo-breaking proved to be a
vain, disappointing destination.
of 20th century underground movements.
Originally, industrial was not merely another rock subgenre, but a
subtler, subversive art current, rooted as much in the information war
preached by Burroughs, as well as in dada and surrealism, Antonin
Artaud, Situationists and the Fluxus movement.
Industrial artists used
music as only one of their interdisciplinary tools, all of them aimed at
provoking, disorientating, decoding and unmasking what they perceived
as oppressive, manipulative mechanisms of modern society.
The hypocrisy
of the social taboo, relationships between the mainstream and the
outcasts, postindustrial inertia was deconstructed on many levels: from
classic épater le bourgeois and shock tactics (extreme body art,
disturbing visuals, references to universal controversies –
totalitarianism, mass murder) to spiritual pursuits (ritualism, occult
and magick revival, neoprimitivism, technology as a vehicle of
meditation and trance).
Elaborate image and symbol politics, which
played a vital role in the movement, turned out to be a trap.
Once-transgressive strategies quickly became codified, repetitively
following the same, predictable routes to catharsis and enlightenment
(preferably the easiest one, shock tactics). and enlightenment
(preferably the easiest one, shock tactics). Tricksterism and elusive
masquerade morphed into buffoonery, perhaps best embodied by Boyd Rice’s
perennially-puerile stage persona.
Coil - The Snow [record cover] |
The means to escape this impasse came
unexpectedly from the dancefloor, with the works of came unexpectedly
from the dancefloor, with the works of Dominick Fernow (Vatican Shadow,
Prurient), Demdike Stare or Raime. Techno was never reluctant to embrace
industrial and noise, even back in the day – the sick, hallucinatory
raves of Psychic TV or fierce psychonautical trips pursued by Coil prove
that there existed a creative osmosis between the scenes.
Looking back
at the catalogues of Mille Plateaux or Mego, the proximity becomes even
more obvious. The main difference is redefining industrial as a purely
musical phenomenon, not an interdisciplinary strategy anymore.
Blackest
Ever Black or Modern Love-related artists “avoid form in favour of
impression, concoct sythetic wilderness in urban laboratories (…) seek
to effect physiological change rather than pursue intellectual rigour,
or depict impossible, imaginary environments of beauty or terror (…)
music that leads the listener into a shifting zone which Peter Lamborne
Wilson described as the sacred drift, a mode of imaginal travel in which
the landscape will once again be invested with meaning, or rather with a
liberatory aesthetics”, as David Toop wrote in Ocean of Sound about an
impression-oriented turn in music.
Applying this definition to new
industrial, we can read it as primarily mood-evoking music, and
therefore a variety of ambient. Deliberate aesthetical references build
an atmosphere rather. Deliberate aesthetical references build an
atmosphere, rather than serving as a mind-decoding tool or alchemical
formula. Evoking a feeling in the listener, rather than sabotaging
social structures (“That’s my aim: to make you feel something. Even if
those feelings are negative or uncomfortable” – says Dominick Fernow in
an interview with FACT; “The music that I make is about connection and
making people feel something, so I would hope that people would be able
to latch onto those very raw, human aspects, and that it could appeal to
their base inner nature” – Pharmakon, aka Margaret Chardiet, in an
interview for Pitchfork).
Vatican Sadow [tapes compilation record sleeve] |
This ‘dancefloor’s hidden reverse’ is
far from superficial wallpaper, though –it has relevance to contemporary
life: Kiran Sande mentions “urban dread” as a state of mind Blackest
Ever Black artists aim at embracing. Rory Rowan of Metamute finds a
parallel between the ominous sounds generated by Raime and common
anxieties of the austerity era. In the titles chosen by Vatican Shadow,
there lingers a semiotic play with the current political affairs,
especially post 9/11 mediaspeak (”a clash of civilizations”) media
language. But perhaps the most interesting aspect is the element of
ego-dispelling, which becomes its saving grace. The experience of
listening to Pharmakon is especially illuminating. Margaret Chardiet
deliberately steers away from online presence and speaks little about
herself, which nullifies obvious associations with Diamanda Galas or
Jarboe. “If the only thing you can grasp from it is something so
superficial as the fact that I’m a woman making noise, that suggests to
me that you’re not listening very carefully”, says Chardiet in an
interview with Pitchfork.
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