* Both industrial musicians and those who write about industrial music variously use a range of critical approaches to talk about more or less the same thing; each of these ideas is a distinct and detailed theoretical model, but they nonetheless graft onto each other with enough basic commonality to accommodate industrial music’s hazy worldview, expressed as much in the form of a gut feeling as a clear rubric.
* One important contributor to the strange scaffolding of a song like “Ayatollah Jackson” is the technology with which it was created. As will be discussed in Chapter 8, the ease with which a pattern could loop resulted in phrase and sectional durations that had more to do with the musicians’ improvisatory and performative whim than with a careful pre-compositional plan. Similarly, transposing a synthesizer line was very easy with a sequencer, and so industrial music often features direct transposition of keyboard parts (sometimes by strange intervals) instead of harmonic changes with more traditional voice leading. A good example of this is Throbbing Gristle’s 1979 “Hot on the Heels of Love.”
* The Third Mind is the title of Burroughs and Gysin’s collaborative cut-up manual. It is also from this notion that the aforementioned Third Mind Records takes its name.
* In P-Orridge’s worldview, heavily influenced by occultic philosophy, reality is a loose consensus of perception and is thus in no way absolute. Therefore, for anything at all to exist meaningfully, it must be perceived. Hence, his use of “recorded” here applies not merely to technological media but also epistemologically.
** Burroughs’s owning a remote control in 1971 is not a misremembering; P-Orridge says it was “the first I ever saw.”
* Karen Collins, through listener-response surveys, exhaustively identifies these themes: ecology, war, violence, society, sci-fi, Futurism, sociology, philosophy, discontent with society, technological dystopia, oppression, conspiracy, the apocalyptic future, technology, government, religion, censorship, urban decay, dehumanization, alienation, societal chaos, global technocracy, and mechanical fetishism.28