Not long after Sandy Robertson gave Throbbing Gristle’s The Second Annual Report a five-star review in Sounds in November 1977, London’s Virgin Records outlet store ordered 200 copies of the LP (the band had pressed just 785 in total). Robertson’s review states boldly, “It isn’t punk rock, it isn’t anything you could name.”1 But as P-Orridge remembers:
Saturday we went in to look around and see if it was on the shelves yet. We were looking around and it was not under T. We figured those fuckers hadn’t put it out. We looked under I for industrial and there it was, written “industrial” and they spelled it wrong too. The next time we went in, there was Cabaret Voltaire there under I. They really swallowed it. They’d gone for it. Industrial music was now a genre. We were all “Wow! We did it! We invented a genre of music!”2
It makes for a good story (P-Orridge excels as a storyteller), but this swift appropriation of the I-word was fairly isolated.* As discussed earlier, genre is a negotiation among communities of artists, fans, marketers, and cultural commentators, including journalists and academics. As such, it takes time for these parties to agree with one another about just what a given genre is, by which point it might be a few years old, or worse, totally over. For example, a 1986 issue of Spin suggests that “Industrial music got its name in Cleveland when the 1978 wave of new rockers began experimenting with factory hisses and mechanical beats,” revealing, regardless of its truth content, that our understanding of the genre’s boundaries and history has changed over time.3 (Incidentally, the acts to whom Spin alludes are almost certainly Cleveland’s Pere Ubu and Canton’s Devo, bands whose political and sonic extremism came packaged in too cartoonish a whimsy and who were too song-oriented to fit into the pantheon of early industrial music in all its abstract, oppressive direness.) But Spin’s odd assessment aside, 1985 and 1986 are without doubt the first years in which widely popular western media repeatedly acknowledged the existence of industrial music. These years also mark the beginning of a long period during which industrial music would be financially profitable, socially cool, and, to wide public audiences, musically pleasurable.
This chapter, however, is chiefly concerned with the period from the early 1980s to 1985 or so, during which the aforementioned negotiations of genre took place in a newly self-aware and fast-growing musical milieu generated from the collective contributions of the aforementioned English, German, and California-based scenes as well as the tape networks that gave voice to virtual scenesters the world over. Many musicians of this time were hardly concerned with (or even aware of) “industrial music” as an idea, and so mass culture’s retroactive assignment of the genre label to acts such as Foetus, NON, and Nocturnal Emissions has been met—perhaps rightly—with some skepticism and even hostility from those artists. Similarly, some acts who socially operated within what was functionally the industrial fold made music that, heard three decades later, doesn’t ring as especially industrial—23 Skidoo, for instance. This is all part of the extended dialogue of the scene during those years.
More directly, Industrial Records folded, and the likes of Jon Savage and V. Vale penned jeremiads that marked the end of the music’s first chapter. “1980! 1981! THOSE WERE THE DAYS! Those heady days of idealism are over,” wrote Savage.4 This pessimism was enough to raise the question of whether industrial music, whatever it was, would cease to exist. On one hand, how could it continue, progressing beyond the extremes of confrontation, noise, and high-concept PR embodied in its first wave? And didn’t the formalizing of a sound into a “genre” risk turning the music into just the kind of unobtrusive commodity that it railed against? On the other hand, how could it not continue, having hinted only momentarily at so many new ways of doing music? Was it against industrial music’s ethics to drop the directive of constant change and instead focus on a particularly engaging sound that the genre happened upon amid all its change? And did it matter? Questions like this, whether knowingly confronted or not, preoccupied musicians and fans during this “lost era” of industrial music.
On the sonic level, the biggest change during this time was the increased incorporation of pop and rock practices, particularly the use of dance beats. The immediate boost they provided to industrial music’s listenability marks this era as the beginning of “the good stuff” for some fans, while for others it was an irredeemable misstep. Journalist Bill Meyer writes in The Wire:
The assumption made by the bulk of the second wave Industrial groups … was that their music’s challenge resided in its rawness of texture, its crushing volume, its favouring of brutal tonality. In reality, it was the lack of a regular beat that made first wave outfits like London based Antipodeans SPK harder to digest. Rock audiences can deal with pretty much anything if there’s a big fat drum track on it. The idea that ever more massive clanking backbeats constituted an intense, iconoclastic experience rather than a huge compromise and watering down of the music’s power was self-delusional at best, Machiavellian at worst.5
But not all drumbeats serve the same purpose. The different ways that musicians incorporated pop can tell us a lot about how they were responding to industrial music’s potential identity crisis. Musical meaning and motivation vary with every artist, song, and audience, but we can broadly attribute three functions to industrial music’s pop excursions. These aren’t mutually exclusive—they stack—but in most cases a given industrial dance song employs one of these three behaviors dominantly.
First is the explicitly political appropriation of pop, which can include parody, but which usually instead of mocking popular music uses and recontextualizes it to assert social commentary about that pop and the culture that consumes it. In doing so, it also presents the industrial artist as knowing and empowered: he or she can do pop without being pop.
One example is the LP version of song “Today I Started Slogging Again” by You’ve Got Foetus On Your Breath, one of the many “Foetus” band names that Jim G. Thirlwell has used for his mostly solo endeavors. Atop a funky, unquantized drum machine, he begins by invoking cheap-sounding synthesizer imitations of a supposed backing band: “Are you ready on bass? Organ? Are you ready on guitar? Shut up! Shut up, guitar! A-hit me now! Ow!” In rejecting the guitar (which keeps practically silent after its initial masturbatory noodle), there’s a twinge of postpunk’s real antirock sentiment. More broadly, when coupled with the James Brown-isms in the vocal take and the drums, the intro helps the song merge longstanding popisms with its subject matter—the Marquis de Sade—in a way that exposes pop music’s hidden prohibition against truly radical sexuality and politics by violating it.
If this interpretation seems farfetched, consider Laibach’s 1984 song “Perspektive,” one of the band’s first recordings to use a metronomic 4/4 drum rhythm. Syncopated accents ornament an otherwise rigid backbeat as a narrator intones:
Laibach practices a sound force in a form of systematic, psycho-physical terror as social organizational principle, in order to effectively discipline and raise a feeling of total adherent bond of a certain, revolted and alienated audience, which results in a state of collective aphasia, which is the principle of social organization.
In this passage—less a lyric than a manifesto—the band declares their intent to force the compliance of a dissident audience (after all, who else listened to Laibach?). They do this in order to display through imitation the nature of centralized government: “One transmitter and a multitude of receivers … with a communication through uncommunication.” With this last bit, Laibach asserts that a broadcast monoculture handed down through one-way media such as recorded music silences its recipients, but this silencing is itself a political act of such significance that the one-way nature of the broadcast is more important than its supposed content. The band’s mission, then, is to oppose tyranny by revealing it through its own language, acknowledging, “All art is subject to political manipulation, except for that which speaks the language of this same manipulation.”6
As “Perspektive” marches relentlessly onward, Laibach instructs the silent listener in the dance beat’s uses: “Disco rhythm, as a regular repetition, is the purest, the most radical form of the militantly organized rhythmicity of technicist production, and as such the most appropriate means of media manipulation.” Relevant to this idea, musicologist Robert Fink comments that repetition “can be interpreted as both the sonic analogue and, at times, a sonorous constituent of a characteristic repetitive experience of self in a mass-media consumer society”—that is to say, the modern world is one in which we repeat ourselves.7 Staging our subjugation to modernity, Laibach then points out the dance beat’s theatrical power to synchronize masses of people into a single physical rhythm, a common machinelike choreography resulting from their shared experience in receiving the music’s ultrasteady metering of time: “Laibach is a recognition of time universality,” the narrator declares at the start of “Perspektive.” The band’s obsession with one-way dictation’s imperative of conformity is why, incidentally, they delight in recording cover songs; to Laibach, it’s an ideological double whammy to force another artist’s song to fit their own needs even as they assert that same unifying force on their audience.
Even among industrial acts, Laibach is uncommon in their explicit self-awareness and the complexity of their authorial intent, but in light of works such as “Perspektive” and “Today I Started Slogging Again,” and beyond that, in light of industrial music’s prankster cousin plunderphonics, it’s easy to see that pop appropriation can be a snarky middle finger or a dreadful arraignment of mass culture’s crimes. Drew Daniel says of Throbbing Gristle’s 1979 song “Hot on the Heels of Love,” it “had to be a parody designed to infiltrate the subversive TG message into dance clubs.”8 Indeed, the belief that pop was there to exploit had been in the underground air since the collapse of punk in 1978; just listen to 1979’s “Death Disco” by ex-Sex Pistol John Lydon’s band Public Image Ltd.
The second way that industrial musicians in the early 1980s started using pop music’s signifiers recognizes that in the historical moment, these new elements were not as identifiably poppish as we take them to be today. Instead, they might reflect a time when industrial music’s exploration of technology aligned itself in parallel with pop’s. One reason for this is that readily available consumer-level synthesizer gear encouraged musical possibilities that lay within a certain range of dance music styles. Because musicians from different genres began using these instruments—machines made by Korg, Roland, Oberheim, and perhaps most famously Moog—not only did their sonic profiles as a result converged in resemblance but they nearly all began working with the same musical signifiers of dance, even if these artists had no specific desire to channel disco or rock. This book’s previous discussion of cassette technology, along with writings by the likes of Paul Théberge and Mark Katz, should suggest that although a musician’s tools might not entirely determine the music produced, they bear a strong influence on it.
David Tibet, singer of pagan neo-folk act Current 93 and early industrial scenester, says of this era, “At this time a lot of people around me were moving into more dance-oriented stuff. That absolutely dumbfounded me. Most of them were people who had shown no interest in dance music whatsoever, but so-called Industrial music became dance music. … I never understood why people started dancing.”9 Perhaps Tibet would have understood if, like Die Krupps, he had bought a step sequencer. When attached to a synthesizer, a step sequencer could play an automatic loop of eight or sixteen notes of equal length; the hardware didn’t allow other possibilities. As such, the music these machines made was always in a 4/4 time signature; you can’t divide the sequencer’s eight beats into a 3/4 waltz. The same thing goes with that most famous of all drum machines, the Roland TR-808. Manufactured from 1980 to 1984, the TR-808 gave users sixteen equal steps of time to fill with the drum sounds it generated. These were represented in four sets of four buttons with LEDs, and each set of four buttons was a different color (red, orange, yellow, and white). This scheme, like the sequencer, enforces through its colors a four-beat pattern, visually dissuading even a syncopated clavé rhythm.
Computer scientist and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier warns that when machines are designed to facilitate one kind of creativity, they often stamp out other kinds. This basic phenomenon is called “lock-in”:
Lock-in, however, removes design options based on what is easiest to program, what is politically feasible, what is fashionable, or what is created by chance.
Lock-in removes ideas that do not fit into the winning digital representation scheme, but it also reduces or narrows the ideas it immortalizes, by cutting away the unfathomable penumbra of meaning that distinguishes a word in natural language from a command in a computer program.10
So when bands such as Clock DVA and Cabaret Voltaire threw out their guitars, saxophones, and tape splicing tools and built studios with ever more synth gear, the new sounds they made were exciting, but they existed within a range that in retrospect we perceive to be tied to that particular era, and in their digital precision and instant looping they encouraged repetitive, rigid music.
The gear situation was timbrally limiting, too: guitars sounded good through many kinds of distortion, for example, but most synthesizer tones are too acoustically rich to be musically versatile when run through a fuzz box—especially if played in chords. The limited palette of drum sounds during the early 1980s is duly instructive; there were only a handful of drum machines that were affordable to consumers, and so their sounds became quickly known. As Die Krupps had done, a lot of bands supplemented their sequences with live noise percussion, but at the heart of most early industrial dance music is a thin, familiar ticking.
There were few exceptions. One perpetually underrated act worth noting, however, is Esplendor Geométrico, from Spain, who exhibited real inventiveness in their use of limited technology to create changing, thick, and engagingly syncopated rhythm tracks. Active in the cassette scene, they foreshadow the subgenre of powernoise by well over a decade in songs such as 1982’s “Neuridina.”
The other thing to remember in considering the impact of technology on industrial music’s early dance elements is that the genre wasn’t solidified yet. Certainly not all industrial music was synth-based (see Test Dept.’s barrel drumming and Nurse With Wound’s staunch adherence to relatively pure tape manipulation), and certainly not all synth-based acts were industrial. In the late 1970s, a handful of musicians had independently scored left-field hits with electronic pop sounds, among them the Normal’s manic “Warm Leatherette” and Thomas Leer’s dreamy “Private Plane.” Many early synth acts were grouped together as a de facto movement because they all regularly appeared on the “Futurist” charts in Sounds magazine and Record Mirror in 1980 and 1981. Industrial music was very much in dialogue with this particular pop scene at the time, and even today it’s a blurry edge of the genre’s history: any postmillennial “old school” industrial club night will welcome the Human League’s “Being Boiled,” but no DJ would dare spin the group’s “Love Action” for fear of risking credibility. The early 1980s “Futurist” set had a similarly fickle logic that was due to its charts’ being assembled at the whim of seventeen-year-old Stevo Pearce.
I got a chart because I was DJing. … I had a residency in a club in Soho called Billy’s and also residency every week in the Kings Road in what’s now a McDonald’s. It used to be called the Chelsea Drugstore. I did lots of evenings at the Clarendon Hotel, which is no longer there; it’s now a part of the Hammersmith train station. But that was a big place and I put DAF and The Normal and Fad Gadget on, and I put loads and loads of artists on there. I had a residency at the Redford Pool House, which is north of Mansfield. From having the chart in Sounds, which they then tagged “Futurist”– I had no say in that tag—I suddenly got a job in Record Mirror. So now there were two weekly charts, both called the “Futurist” charts. It was my selection. … When A&R people would look at the chart, it would be full of demo tapes: Blancmange, The The, or Soft Cell or Depeche Mode or whatever and it was like, “What are all of these unsigned demo tapes getting a national, weekly presence?”11
Many acts from this wave achieved commercial success with the same equipment and sounds as the less-song-driven industrial bands of the day: Front 242 may have seen their use of Korg synthesizers as “architecture … linked with the technology,” but their 1981 “Operating Tracks” has the same sonic profile as Soft Cell’s megahit of the same year, “Tainted Love.”12 The biggest difference between the songs is Front 242’s barking male vocals and unadorned modal harmony versus Soft Cell’s lusty fey swagger, as “Tainted Love” was originally a 1965 Gloria Jones soul single.* Rather than separate industrial music from pop, technology draws them closer together.
As Nigel Ayers of Nocturnal Emissions recalls, “Popular music picked up on what we were doing, ’83, ’84,”13 which helps explain why records such as Nocturnal Emissions’ 1983 Viral Shedding sound clubbier today than they did at the time, but the technology of music making locked in a set of aesthetics in those days that shaped pop as a whole more than industrial music itself did. Whether by synthesizer manufacturers’ musical design or through engineering limitations (probably both), the more automated a band allowed their music to become, the dancier it was likely to be—a strange rearview of Laibach’s proclamations about disco. And even as synths, samplers, and sequencers went digital in the mid-1980s, the analogue hardware ethos of repetition persisted in the software and the music alike.
The third way that industrial music uses dance and rock tropes is for their sheer musical and bodily pleasure. Simply put, Big Black’s 1984 guitar-driven “Racer X” rocks. And Cabaret Voltaire’s 1982 hit “Yashar” is a brilliant, sexy dance track.
Musical pleasure interfaces in obvious ways with industrial music’s technology-driven second mode of pop incorporation: the tools of music were in part designed to optimize musical pleasure, and in exploring these tools a musician instinctively seeks to maximize the pleasure they produce.
Taken in light of the ironic first category of pop tropes in industrial music, though, this issue of pleasure can seem tough to grapple with. From the Marxist viewpoint that inspires Laibach, along with a host of social perspectives like those of Michel Foucault and Theodor Adorno, pop music’s most insidious power is one of mass control. The preeminent musicologist Susan McClary comments:
Social critics have typically been scornful of the pleasurable aspects of the arts, favoring those works that could be shown to have the proper political stance; to dwell on the actual details of the artifice was to be seduced by it into false consciousness, to be drawn away from the central issues of the class struggle.14
But the phrase “social critics” here applies just as easily to some staunchly ideological makers and fans of industrial noise music to whom the art is not just political but unwelcoming of any acknowledged social pleasure. A central theme in music by Throbbing Gristle, Factrix, Merzbow, and others is the intentionally ugly and alienating. If the genre is a critique of western culture’s assumptions about power, politics, and communication, then surely there is something problematic in simply lying back and happily partaking of the most standard musical signs of that culture.
Think again about what Laibach says in “Perspektive,” though. At one point, the lyric declares, “The dualism of Laibach’s message, perception, and receiver structure uncovers the social neurosis.” The dualism here refers to the band’s simultaneous use and critique of totalitarian methods; the social neurosis they reveal in “unit[ing] the biters and antagonistics into an expression of static totalitarism” is that audiences willingly sign up to submit to music, to be silenced by it.
Here we have to ask: Is the point of uncovering the social neurosis to cure it? “It’s 1984. … It’s the death factory society, hypnotic, mechanical grinding, music of hopelessness. Film music to cover the holocaust,” warns a 1976 Throbbing Gristle press release.15 Bodily pain thematically pervades this music as a suggestion that its listeners are anaesthetized, but beyond the near universal cry of “wake up!” there is relatively little industrial music that directly rallies the newly awakened to action.
Instead, a lot of industrial dance music admits and revels in its own pop pleasure. Masochism is therefore the most explicit reconciliation of this self-aware submission—especially in light of the thematics of pain. Whereas in punk contexts masochistic imagery served as a means to shock and revolt (think of Vivienne Westwood’s popularizing bondage gear in outfitting the Sex Pistols), with industrial music it takes on the added role of playing out a paradox. Nearly all of Die Form’s oeuvre is devoted to bondage and sadomasochism, and Swedish Industrial Records signees the Leather Nun embodied the idea as well. Similarly, a young London-based Irishman named Rod Pearce launched Fetish Records in 1978 (adapting the name from a mail art t-shirt) and, through five years of releasing music by Throbbing Gristle, 23 Skidoo, and Clock DVA under the label’s name, quietly connected perversion and Marxist commodity fetishism.16
Among the most infamous of industrial excursions into pop was that of SPK, who until 1983 were arguably the genre’s most outspoken ideologues and among its noisiest performers. Gary Levermore recalls:
Graeme Revell [of SPK] was one of the most intelligent men ever to walk the earth. He was not a stupid guy—a very learned guy. He starts out making pretty combustible hard electronic music, very uncompromising, and then suddenly decides, “This isn’t what I want to spend the rest of my life doing. …” I still remember taking a delivery of cassettes to the Rough Trade warehouse in Ladbroke Grove in London, so this would have been about April 1983, and as I did in those days, I would buy a bunch of stuff they were distributing, because you could get a cheaper price than you could in record stores. And I picked up the brand new 12” by New Order, which was called “Blue Monday.” And I was walking down the street and I bumped into Nigel Ayers from Nocturnal Emissions. And he said, “Oh I was just going to get that myself. I know Graeme is really keen to hear that as well,” and of course within a month or two, SPK were working with Mike Johnson, who was the engineer for “Blue Monday,” and of course they were in the process of putting together a record deal with Fiction Records. … Obviously it’s no exaggeration to say that in April of 1983, “Blue Monday” was a way forward.17
SPK’s ripoff of the massive dancepop hit “Blue Monday” was a single called “Metal Dance,” and it marked the beginning of a dizzying change in fortune for the band. SPK played the song live for the first time in late July 1983, and less than two weeks later they were sharing the stage with Howard Devoto and the Smiths—comparatively less dour openers than their previous support acts (of whom the Birthday Party and the Virgin Prunes were the most well known). SPK then played the song for a BBC session with John Peel on August 31, and by the year’s end they’d played on the national TV show The Tube with Depeche Mode and headlined at the Venue, with Sonic Youth and Danielle Dax opening. “Metal Dance” sold thirty thousand copies and earned the band a seven-album, million-dollar contract with Elektra/Warner Brothers (who dropped them after one record, letting them keep the full advance).18* The money was a welcome windfall, as Revell had been living in a squat and now had a child.
“Metal Dance” expresses a desire to move forward musically, strongly hinting at the second, technologically driven way in which industrial music veers toward pop, but the alarming melodic and centrally mixed female vocal (sung by Revell’s soon-to-be wife Sinan Leong) shows a kind of pop indulgence that the sequencer’s ready-made synth patterns can’t account for. SPK attempts to have its revolution and dance to it too: despite Leong’s centrality in the mix, the lyrics place her firmly in submission (sexual? political?) to the accompanying music in all its techno-newness. Physically exhausted and damaged, she is enslaved to its Marxist, opiate potential.
Can’t help moving to the rhythm
Feel so breathless
Can’t shake out that breathless voice
Crashing steel
Strange new sounds intoxicate me
Cutting hard
In some ways, this resembles the ambivalence between technophilia and techno-paranoia explored in the Futurism-Burroughs equation. It’s doubtful in this case that SPK felt optimistic about their ability to retain critical power over the hypnotizing erotics of pop frameworks while simultaneously enjoying them. Ever self-aware, they conclude the song (after an unsurprising drum-machine-plus-metal-banging breakdown) with a lyrical concession, “One step forward, two steps back.”
Of course, there are other ways to think about pleasure in music. If taking pleasure in popular music is, to the likes of Adorno or Laibach, a surrender to the oppressors, it’s just as conceptually oppressive to suppose that audiences are unable to adapt their own experience of music to new uses and pleasures, including an exerted resistance to a musical message, an identification with the dictatorial power of the music or its makers (rather than the silence of a supposed audience), or a creative empowerment through open-ended signifiers that invite a kind of playfulness at the interpretive level. We need to grant these possibilities in understanding industrial music. If we don’t, then ideologically speaking the entire genre is without capacity for contact or humor, and it effectively derails itself in the early 1980s (an assertion that indeed some hold to be true). Adam Krims warns against musicology privileging and rehabilitating every movement and genre as if it were operating against an unspoken mainstream, but it’s beyond debate that industrial music has expressly framed itself as an antiestablishment mouthpiece for decades since its first pop flirtations, and so this is a natural approach to the genre.19 We also need to grant that there are other possibilities of meaning and use for pop pleasure within industrial music because, despite its often explicit use of Marxist themes, the music engages vitally with other ideas too. During this era, for instance, it developed a polymorphous obsession with the body as a site of both purity (see the early work of Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb) and revulsion (Skinny Puppy).
Reflecting the music’s simultaneous roots in urban subculture and isolated home studio experimentation, the audience for industrial music was a social blend. There were makeup-wearing punks who (in the words of Cabaret Voltaire biographer Mick Fish) “looked suspiciously like they had a copy of Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea hidden under their coats.”20 There were working-class skinheads and university eggheads. There were clubgoers—gay, straight, and everything between—who’d heard about a more dangerous music. There were hipster DJs like Stevo Pearce who’d sneak in songs by Absolute Body Control between Depeche Mode and Joy Division. On occasion, there were Hells Angels. Beyond the cities was a huge swarm of indistinguishably normal-looking suburban boys—English, American, Belgian, and German—who subscribed to Sounds and who hounded their local record stores to special-order albums from distributors like Rough Trade and the Cartel. Bon Harris of English EBM act Nitzer Ebb recalls:
You’d have the holdovers from goth and postpunk, you’d have rastas, a few hippies, a couple of heavy metal blokes. I’d wonder what are each of these groups here getting out of this. Overall, I think they just got the fact that we were up for it. We would get up there and it was very energetic.”21
Even as musicians, marketers, and fans slowly came to recognize industrial music as a distinct (if hazily defined) genre, the idea of listening to it exclusively or even primarily didn’t yet make much sense. It wouldn’t be until the late 1980s that venues expressly launched industrial nights, but clubs such as Blitz in London (famously the cradle of the New Romantic movement) were friendly to the genre. At concerts, audiences would brood, yell, and occasionally dance. On the stage, dozens of bands imitated the military chic of Throbbing Gristle. Others wore futuristic black plastic jumpers, and others still blended in with the postpunk set, dressing in trenchcoats. Some fans went shirtless, modeling themselves after Soviet labor posters, contrasting with the Kraftwerk-inspired image of sweatless android performers. As KMFDM’s En Esch remembers, audiences followed performers’ leads: “There were people, just like in every era, who looked like the band themselves. Millions of mini-Blixa Bargelds and Mark Chungs.”22
All these modes of reinforcing an identity reflect fans’ and makers’ aforementioned variety of meanings and uses for industrial music—whether rooted in an acknowledged political discourse, a search for the technologically new, or a personal angle on pop’s sounds themselves. This also comes through in the album art of the period, from the constructivist style of designer Neville Brody (Z’EV, Cabaret Voltaire, 23 Skidoo) to the cyberpunk chic of Portion Control’s logo to the Darth Vader-esque gothic record sleeves of German grunters Warning. It is easy to chalk up any given image or sound in the genre to some aspect of the functional symbolism and supposed ideology of the music as outlined in the previous chapters, but it’s simply wrongheaded to ignore the fact that aesthetics and pleasure ultimately lie at the heart of most actual participation in any music.
So with an understanding of how and why so much beat-driven, even melodic industrial music began to happen, as well as its place within the still-ongoing development of a genre, it’s now worth looking at some important highlights of the era.
ICONIC:
Cabaret Voltaire – “Sensoria” (1984)
Die Form – “Masochist” (1984)
Nocturnal Emissions – “No Separation” (1983)
Einstürzende Neubauten – “Yü Gung” (1985)
Hunting Lodge – “Tribal Warning Shot” (1985)
ARCANE
Esplendor Geométrico – “Moscú Está Helado” (1980)
Laibach – “Panorama” (1984)
Les Vampyrettes – “Biomutanten” (1981)
Pankow – “God’s Deneuve” (1984)
Warning – “Why Can the Bodies Fly” (1982)