The amount of significant electronic music to emerge from Belgium in the early 1980s suggests a vibrant scene: there were acts that went on to become major players in industrial music, notably Front 242, the Neon Judgement, Luc Van Acker, à;GRUMH…, Absolute Body Control, and Vomito Negro, as well as bands whose following was more regional but whose music deserves continued attention, such as Parade Ground, Snowy Red, Polyphonic Size, the Names, A Blaze Colour, Siglo XX, Pseudo Code, and Kuruki. Later in the 1980s a hoard of new, important Belgian acts (and the entire New Beat genre) would follow. Because of such a density of electronic dance music in the small country, it’s surprising, then, to learn that in the first half of the decade these musicians had very little mutual contact. For example, Dirk Ivens of Absolute Body Control and the Klinik flatly states, “We didn’t know about each other.”1 Other Belgian EBM bands of the early 1980s were collegial with but fundamentally wary of one another. Collective ambition was muted, and there’s almost no hint of Belgian nationalism in this music, nor even in the efforts of alternative Belgian record companies such as Antler or Play It Again Sam. As à;GRUMH…’s Philippe Genion says, “Belgium doesn’t really have national pride. We are an area; it’s not even really a country.”2
The city of Leuven is only a twenty-minute train ride from Brussels, and Antwerp is less than an hour from both, but Belgian cities remain nonetheless socially detached from one another in important ways, a lingering relic of a time when it might take the better part of a day to cross such a distance. Add to that these musicians’ bedroom-recording mentality and the linguistic divide that cordoned off Francophone acts such as Front 242 and à;GRUMH… from Flemish bands such as Absolute Body Control or the Neon Judgement, and the isolation starts to make more sense. The few hangouts of the day included the DNA bar in Brussels and Arno’s in Leuven, but punks outnumbered synth aficionados in these dives.
In the 1970s, there had been one or two Belgian bands to find success in electronic music, most notably the disco-tinged act Telex, who debuted in 1978 and represented the country in the 1980 Eurovision contest. But at that time, most of Belgium’s incubating industrialists thought of themselves chiefly as fans, reading Sounds and Melody Maker to learn about groups such as Wire from the UK and Suicide from New York. Joy Division and the Cure especially found larger audiences at Plan K or Beursschouwburg in Brussels than in most English clubs. Philippe Genion was a music journalist in Belgium in the late 1970s, and he recalls, “Brussels was considered the second base from London for all bands. They would tour England and the UK, and then the first stop they would do on the continent was Brussels. It was the most hip place.”3
Having drawn record collections from abroad, it was natural for a lot of Belgium’s amateur synth tinkerers to connect more with the global cassette network than to join a mutually supportive urban music scene. For example, Sandy Nijs, a sometime collaborator of early EBM act Absolute Body Control, was exceedingly plugged into the network; the entire output of his band Maniacs is scattered across cassette-only compilations from Norway, the United States, and Belgium. In fact, it was directly through Nijs’s mail scene connections that the Klinik and Absolute Body Control received an offer to tour Norway in 1985. It was common for these acts to be bigger abroad than at home.
The musician Luc Van Acker is both historically important and a good example of what sort of efforts laid the groundwork for EBM. Van Acker is a founding member of Revolting Cocks and a hired hand for Shriekback, Arbeid Adelt, and My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult. It’s useful to see how his desire to participate in music culture at a very young age was subject to the journalistic and technological tastes that he and his family, as Belgians, had access to. It’s also curious to see how Belgium’s peculiar milieu of artistic isolation at that time affected a musician who is known more today for his collaborations than his solo efforts.
At just six years old in 1967, Van Acker took an active interest in rock band photos on the cover of Melody Maker at a newsstand in his hometown of Tienen. Musically hungry from the beginning (if decidedly untrained), he asked his mother for a subscription, and she obliged. “I couldn’t read English. I just looked at the pictures and slowly found words I understood, but the magazines were the only thing available that had to do with music.”4 No Flemish rock magazines of any traction existed at the time.
Van Acker taught himself a little guitar and bass early in his teens, but the synthesizers he read about in Melody Maker in the mid-1970s instantly appealed to him more than any rock instrument:
I was 14. It was 1975. At school we had two weeks of Easter vacation. I bought this train pass that you can use every day and go on any train, and for two weeks I traveled all over Belgium to any music store that had a synthesizer. I was there at 9 in the morning when they opened up, and I just plugged in with my headphones. I didn’t eat, didn’t drink, just asked to use the toilet. I’d be kicked out at 5 o’clock. I was at these places so much that Korg Belgium asked me to give demonstrations in stores.5
This love of electronic instruments may have been idiosyncratic to Van Acker; his father was a computer programmer, so he’d been raised around technology. However, across EBM there’s a pervasive belief that the synthesizer itself somehow resonates with the Belgian experience. As Patrick Codenys of Front 242 puts it:
Being Belgian was very particular because I’m not Anglo-Saxon; I don’t feel rock in my veins, or blues, or jazz, or whatever. It’s not part of me. I’m living in a country that’s very mixed: cinema is very mixed—a lot of movies are shown in original versions. Flemish people live alongside French people, and there are German parts. It’s the center of Europe, a melting pot, really. … So here you have a machine that does sound and noise, sort of an orphan or a bastard machine. It is very interesting for me to associate that with my origins as a Belgian. We don’t have a strong past; we don’t have a strong inheritance.6
As discussed in Chapter 8, analogue synthesizers and drum machines suggest and enable certain kinds of music, and the fact that Belgian industrial musicians chose these tools more frequently than metal percussion or Throbbing Gristleesque distortion contributes heavily to the preponderance of industrial dance music in Belgium, noise acts Etat Brut and Club Moral notwithstanding.
Fittingly then, the small collection of gear that Luc Van Acker assembled prioritizes harmonic and rhythmic features. At age seventeen, he was using a Korg MS-500 synthesizer, a Roland TR-505 drum machine, and a polyphonic Korg PS-3100, which his father had bought for him shortly before the latter’s death. Van Acker soon thereafter added a Korg MS-20 keyboard and a sequencer. This musical setup favors pitch-controllable sound generators instead of keyboardless modular devices and processors. This fact alone all but necessarily differentiates Van Acker’s music from the recordings of Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, in which effects units and uncalibrated oscillators paint a sonic landscape where timbre rules, not rhythm and pitch. This distinction is important in understanding EBM’s signature features within the industrial genre. It also goes without saying that although Van Acker played some guitar too, his dominant reliance on this electronic setup further differentiated his music from the metal-banging likes of Einstürzende Neubauten and Test Dept.
Because Van Acker was still in high school when he began recording his first album Taking Snapshots onto a Tascam four-track, he had basically no contact with other electronic musicians. He was a bedroom recordist, and even as the 1980s dawned he knew of few kindred spirits nearby, especially once he started attending art school in Hasselt—essentially the boondocks compared to Brussels and Antwerp. Van Acker tuned into the tape scene, however, which was on the art school radar thanks to its connections with Fluxus and mail art. He particularly became a fan of Z’EV. Playing occasional concerts and exchanging tapes both abroad and within Belgium, Van Acker landed a spot on a 1981 compilation record assembled by Roland Beelen, who would later found Antler Records and take up the overdue task of fostering a collective Belgian musical scene.
In September 1981, Van Acker finished and self-released Taking Snapshots, a throbbing mix of ambient tracks and clattery dance songs. For a year, he drove his Renault R4 to every record store he could find, hoping to hawk his album—an endeavor reminiscent of his teenage synthesizer quest. It worked, and he built a small following on the strength of songs like “Find a Way,” even landing a live set on the liberal Dutch radio network VPRO.* In Van Acker’s case, it’s hard to assert that the lack of an organized scene hindered him, because in fact he was able to attract attention and play shows partially because he was one of Belgium’s only all-electronic acts.
He recalls, “My first show was a Revox tape recorder and vocals, and that was it.”7 Without any keyboards to hide behind, Van Acker emphasized the physicality of his music. The 1981 song “What’s Downtown” verges on funkiness as he sings, “Everybody’s moving and they’re dancing to the beat.” The song is admittedly a shade or two removed from the sound of classic EBM: the drums rhythmically emphasize syncopation, the snare sound outweighs the kick, and Van Acker’s intonation flails toward the high end of his vocal range. The cumulative effect is one of insufficient masculinity for modern EBM standards, but seen in retrospect the beat-driven aggression that intersperses the more ambient moments of Taking Snapshots points directly toward a particular reckoning with the body that would soon develop more fully in the music of fellow Belgians such as the Neon Judgement and A Split-Second.
Regarding the emergence of the dance-driven EBM from the industrial scene, à;GRUMH…’s Jacques Meurrens says, “In ’85, the people who liked industrial and the people who liked EBM were mostly the same crowd,” but even by that time, audiences were starting to form subgenre-based expectations.8 Bandmate Genion explains:
à;GRUMH… started as an industrial band and separate rhythmic EBM band. The writing of the names on the records was different. … It was a gothic font for the industrial ambient thing and it was a bold Helvetica font for the EBM style. After the first album, produced by Daniel of Front 242, was such a big thing, the second album was the industrial one, and then another rhythmic album followed. Then the record company [Scarface, owned by Play It Again Sam] said, “The people are confused, because they all thought your second album would be rhythmic as well. They bought it and then we had a reaction from the record shops, so you have to change your name for the industrial stuff.”9
In grappling seriously and historically with EBM, let’s turn to the subgenre’s most formidable name, Front 242. Launched in late 1980 as the project of Aarschot-based Daniel Bressanutti and Dirk Bergen, Front 242 had expanded its lineup within a year to include Patrick Codenys and Jean-Luc De Meyer, who’d previously worked on a project together called Under Viewer. They’d given their demo tapes to Bressanutti, who worked at a record store, and he was impressed enough to invite them aboard. Bressanutti was something of a mastermind behind the scenes with the band, frequently absent from press photos, and more focused on the intricacies of recording than on performance. Prior to launching Front 242, he’d released a few one-off tracks as Prothese, including one on a 1981 compilation curated by Michel Lambot, later the founder of the hugely important label Play It Again Sam.
As with the music of Luc Van Acker, the earliest recordings by Front 242, Under Viewer, and Prothese all prioritize simple diatonic harmonies, rigid drum patterns, and the discrete identity of every instrumental timbre in the mix. Codenys confirms, “Each album we made was linked with the technology … every new synth in the house was a reason to rethink the whole aesthetic, including the imagery.”10 This wasn’t simple consumer techno-determinism, but Codenys and Bressanutti, in their cerebral focus on media and interface design, wandered a virtual Situationist dérive through the architecture of their synthesizers, looking for an ethical path of musical behavior beneath the knobs and keys; it’s fitting thus that their debut album is called Geography.
More than any other industrial act, Front 242 analytically embraced the unspoken expectations that machine design placed on humans. In this way, they differed somewhat from earlier industrialists who celebrated technical ineptitude and rule breaking. Codenys explains, “Our system was questioning the truth of the image, which is something you find in some postmodern philosophy. It’s a little different from the Throbbing Gristle philosophy. For us, it was a need to put our music together with those [given] elements.”11 This didn’t mean simply dialing up a machine’s factory settings. Instead, the band built sounds from the ground up by scoping out a machine’s systemic parameters: “Erase all the factory sounds for sure, and try to get at the guts of the machine.” If Cosey Fanni Tutti and Genesis P-Orridge’s hippie background contributed to Throbbing Gristle’s tactics of confronting and reversing cultural signs, then we might likewise see Codenys and Bressanutti’s respective backgrounds in architecture and history as a driving force behind Front 242’s critical exercise in mapping the psychogeography of technological interfaces—assessing and “questioning the truth of the image.” This is part of why postpunk historian Simon Reynolds says “Front 242 have an amoral fascination [with the] future.”12
The group’s early music avoids washes of noise, the clatter of reverberant simulated space, and tuneless, gritty drones; instead, every song features a repeating drum machine pattern and pulsing synth chords. Under Viewer’s “Trouble” foregrounds De Meyer’s unprocessed vocal in a Beatles-esque major key melody—a far cry from Industrial Records’ standard fare, despite Codenys’s insistence that “Throbbing Gristle’s noise [and] chaos” was a “trigger” for their music.13 Most of Front 242’s earliest songs are instrumental, though, and their repetition naturally foregrounds those few elements not based on cyclicity—oftentimes an individual drum hit that stands out, or a single reverberating note. In this way, the music suggests a kinship with dub reggae and with the 1970s experiments of Brian Eno, whom the band cites (along with krautrock) as another significant “trigger.”
Shortly after self-releasing Geography, Front 242 signed a deal involving the Belgian indie-label consortium Les Disques du Crépuscule, which was co-founded by Annik Honoré, mistress of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis. With the 1982 single “U-Men,” the 1983 re-release of Geography, and the 1984 album No Comment, Front 242 began garnering significant attention across northern Europe.
It’s evident in listening to the music from their 1981–1984 period that the band was developing a more finely honed aesthetic: progressively fewer songs were instrumentals, and when Bergen stepped down to manage the group in 1983, he was replaced onstage with Richard 23 (Jonckheere), a second vocalist and drummer who echoed De Meyer’s tight baritone declarations in an unhinged bellowing tenor. As Jason Hanley points out, this counterpoint between singers both reflected and suggested the band’s move into more differentiated song structures. Though most Front 242 tracks of this era eschew simple verse-chorus behavior, patterns of alternation increase steadily in their oeuvre throughout the 1980s.
The other significant change contemporaneous with Richard 23’s joining the band was an increasingly overt focus on the body. Taken on its own, the doubling of vocal duties plays a small part in this change, but duly contributing were two other facets: first, the combination of these humanizingly familiar new song structures with the volume and compression of percussion in the mix, and second, the confrontational live act that Front 242 began staging in which they employed smoke, military camouflage, and riot armor—or to be more precise, athletic padding made for baseball catchers.
The former, inspired in part by the hard-edged Spanish and Italian dance music of the early 1980s, unambiguously issues the sound of force: a man drumming as hard as he can, or alternatively, being hit with that same aggression. The more compressed the sound is, the greater the impression that the ear—and by extension the body itself—has reached its limit of shock absorption. On a song like “U-Men,” the particularities of timbre conjure metal, even electrocution.
The latter approach to centralizing the body in this music, a military-themed live show, was partially a response to the aforementioned popular belief at the time that electronic music was not only geekish, but impotent—that it could never compete with rock’s capacity for visceral power. This is of course a highly gendered criticism: the implication was that electronic music lacked balls, and indeed, the music press at large was not kind to Front 242 even as they were becoming one of Belgium’s most popular acts. Thus the band’s response was one of masculine overkill. Codenys explains, “We needed to impose the genre. It’s the kind of music that needs to be played loud, so that we could slam people somehow.”14 To that effect, the band’s military goggles and body armor stood as an open invitation for the audience—or critics—to slam back; the band presented itself as ready for the physical assault. While they were largely successful in asserting their music’s forcefulness, the results that these efforts had on their crowd makeup did little to attract women to the already male-dominated electronic scene. To Codenys, the connection between their adopted aesthetic and their audience demographic was clear: “Between ’81 and ’85 there weren’t any girls at the shows, only guys. It was really a very martial music.”15
Throbbing Gristle and NON had taken similar visual approaches a few years earlier, but never with the beat-driven sound that Front 242 made. Here, the body was not the site of experimentation via infrasound, or disgust via performance art’s grossness; it was instead neutrally responsive to technological control, just as Front 242 instinctively directed their music through their machinery’s design ethos. Although Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft called their music Körpermusik (“body music”) in 198016 and Kraftwerk used the phrase “Electronic Body Music” two years earlier in a radio interview,17 Front 242 independently coined the term again to describe their music in terms of this combined physicality and techno-centrism; the liner notes of their 1984’s No Comment boast “ELECTRONIC BODY MUSIC COMPOSED AND PRODUCED ON EIGHT TRACKS BY FRONT 242.”18 This coincidence reveals a common conceptual thread between these predecessors and Front 242’s music.
In particular, it is Front 242’s lineage of EBM that has inarguably found a home in the endless labyrinth of electronic and industrial subgenres. In 1988, the band’s sometime label Play It Again Sam released a compilation called This Is Electronic Body Music, with a remix of Front 242’s “Body to Body” as the leadoff track. This seminal compilation both solidified the style’s popularity in the underground and also—perhaps unfortunately—erected walls around what was and was not EBM, possibly delimiting the genre’s future musical potential. The record also reinforces EBM’s geography; more than half the featured bands are Belgian.
Reviewers over the years have consistently referred to the sound of EBM and especially Front 242 as “clean.” This is in keeping with the style’s aesthetic of order, where the grid of a song dictates its construction and its hearing alike—both horizontally in terms of quantized timing and vertically in terms of stacked instrumental parts.
“In architecture, they work with rosters,” Codenys says, referring to pre-calculated construction plans. He continues:
There might be a roster for air circulation set at 90 degrees, a technical roster for the lighting at 45 degrees, and then 45 degrees the other way for all the water pipes. This way to work with layers or rosters fit perfectly at the time with our approach to synth programming. On a structural level, the architecture was very interesting … it’s got a balance between a bassline and a drummer. It’s layers and layers.19
In EBM’s 1980s configuration, the bassline was generally a two-measure synth pattern, sometimes with chromatic inflections (for example, the bass in Nitzer Ebb’s biggest hit “Join in the Chant” can’t seem to make up its mind about whether the song is in F minor or F major). These timbres might be muted, emphasizing low frequencies, or they might be made up of square and sawtooth waves for a brighter, more in-your-face sound, but as a rule synth parts were undistorted and staccato, making it easy for the ear to distinguish one sound from another. This is a big part of the style’s supposed cleanliness.
Rhythmically, EBM is based around an incessant quarter-note kick drum pattern, often with a backbeat snare. Drum machine hi-hats fill in the rhythmic gaps, but percussive ornamentation varies from artist to artist: Bressanutti would meticulously festoon Front 242’s drum tracks, for example, while the Klinik’s Dirk Ivens opted for a bleaker, emptier aesthetic. At any rate, the four-on-the-floor beat became a monolithic presence in the style by 1985; syncopation was rare and always quantized to a grid.
Moving beyond the Italo-disco of Giorgio Moroder, these drum sounds were not quiet Kraftwerkian blips or TR-808 thumps but were usually either based on white noise generated from an analogue synthesizer or more often they were samples of drums, car crashes, doors slamming, or “environmental” percussion, to borrow a phrase from Die Krupps. Samplers were expensive; Codenys was able to purchase an E-MU Emulator II only because his family won the lottery in 1984 (his father wanted to buy him a car instead). Prior to that, however, his sampling was done on tape: on Front 242’s 1982 “GVDT,” listen for the telltale sound rewinding before the sample of “What’s wrong?” from THX-1138 is replayed.
Structurally, most EBM songs of the early and mid-1980s contain repeated texts and melodies (even if tuneful singing was something of a rarity), but seldom did repeated modules of a song manage to take on the feel of verses or choruses. This has a lot to do with musicians’ desire to escape the rock paradigm and their lack of training in pop music’s structure. In some cases, it also reflects the collaborative back-and-forth of composition in a group without a singular vision of a finished work. The emphasis that many of these musicians place in interviews on the synthesizer as a tool quietly demonstrates how much more concerned they were with sonic exploration than songwriting, an industrial practice common since the days of Cabaret Voltaire. There was also the reality that some of the lower-budget EBM acts could still not afford sequencers that held more than one loop in RAM at a time, limiting the melodic and harmonic variety across a song.
The preceding chapter mentioned the fascination with the body in the music of UK band Nitzer Ebb. Indeed, themes of kinetic exertion are everywhere in EBM. In Nitzer Ebb’s video for “Let Your Body Learn,” singer Douglas McCarthy glistens under torrents of sweat and the camera repeatedly ogles a male gymnast’s efforts on the parallel bars; similarly, Patrick Codenys graces the cover of Front 242’s Tyranny >For You< album gasping in mid-breaststroke, water cascading over his goggles. Thus, when Jean-Luc De Meyer shouts, “If you’re physical youth, you say you’re moving youth, so why don’t you feel the beat?” on the 1983 cut “Take One,” the notion of “feeling the beat” is neither vicious cruelty nor beatnik metaphysics, but instead it’s about undergoing a productive regimen. The tense-gutted shouting that characterizes EBM is always expulsive, safeguarding the body against any penetration, crafting an impregnable, fit machine of a man.
Musicologist Suzanne Cusick invites us to hear this kind of antimelodious singing as a performance of masculinity in which a vocalist effectively declares, “I have chosen not to re-learn the deep-body disciplines required to produce a ‘singing’ voice, as such voices are described by the gatekeepers of middle-class culture … the borders of my male body cannot be penetrated by Culture.”20 In this way, classic-era EBM acts an exercise in improvement through order and self-denial. Driving the point home, leather scene favorite à;GRUMH… applies this idea to sexual reality in the song “Danger Zone,” asking, “Are you a clean boy? Are you the AIDS toy?” The song’s culminating declaration that “Rubber is better than death!” explicitly advocates this bodily purity. When Front 242 chant “Divine body! Look right!” in “Take One,” they similarly idealize a self clean in its proximity to godliness as being “right.” This message would later reach its fullest lyrical articulation in Die Krupps’ 1993 “Iron Man”:
Weakness—these days are over
Old flesh—replaced by shiny armour
New thoughts—the mind expanding
Real tasks that are demanding
This body is invincible
Perfection is the principle
This consistent message of bodily strength and military neatness in EBM easily appealed both to gay and straight musicians and audiences; especially in the 1980s, industrial music was very closely linked with gay male culture (reaching an apotheosis with the early days of WaxTrax! Records), and it certainly helped to empower new possible identities within and beyond sexuality for men who made and enjoyed music that wasn’t cock rock. In Front 242’s classic track “Headhunter,” the chant of “I’m looking for this man!” drives home a potential interpretation of same-sex desire already suggested by the title.
Most industrial music prior to 1985 functionally excluded women, even if EBM (unlike power electronics) rarely actually articulated this idea. We briefly discussed this discrimination in Chapter 7, but it’s worth mentioning again here for two reasons. The first is that EBM forces the issue by centering its discourse—even its name—on bodily difference, whereas previous industrial music was at least plausibly about something else (though no doubt there’s a lot to be said about it through a gender-aware lens). The second reason to bring this up is that it was precisely during this era—1981 to 1985—that industrial music began attracting female fans and participants, and so EBM stands in opposition to such a change. This development is very closely linked with an industrial aesthetics decidedly concerned with an unclean, disorderly conception of the body. Delving fully into this will be a bit more meaningful, however, after a brief theatrical interlude.
ICONIC:
Front 242 – “U-Men” (1982)
Front 242 – “Take One” (1983)
The Klinik – “Sick in Your Mind” (1985)
The Neon Judgement – “TV Treated” (1982)
Luc Van Acker – “Fear in My Heart” (1984)
ARCANE:
à;GRUMH… – “New Fashion” (1985)
Absolute Body Control – “Weaving Hands” (1981)
Arbeid Adelt – “De Dag dat het Zonlicht Niet Meer Scheen” (1982)
Snowy Red – “Never Alive” (1982)
Vomito Negro – “Radio Silence” (1985)