HIV-positive and weakening, Jim Nash saw a few last successes at WaxTrax! after the TVT buyout. 1994’s Black Box retrospective was an instant classic, and in fitting ineptitude, the company was unable to print enough copies to keep up with demand. For a few years, KMFDM flirted with actual rockstardom: their song “Juke Joint Jezebel” headlined the platinum-certified Mortal Kombat soundtrack, and their albums Angst (1993) and Nihil (1995) each sold more than a hundred thousand copies. 1996’s Xtort would top two hundred thousand. But Jim Nash died in October 1995, taking the face and the heart of the label with him. The Chicago store closed its doors in the first weeks of 1996.
TVT soon after played a big role in pressuring the label to become a techno imprint, though to be fair, overtures in this direction had begun as early as 1992. Flesher retained nominal control of WaxTrax! for about four more years, squeezing out a handful of significant industrial records by UK aggro-EBM band Cubanate, the moody supergroup C-Tec, and the still-incubating futurepop flagship VNV Nation. There was no doubt, however, that the WaxTrax! era had been over for some time. When TVT retired the WaxTrax! name in 2001, nobody noticed at all. Flesher quietly stayed in Chicago for a few years before moving back to Arkansas in 2005 to be with his family. His death, also AIDS-related, followed in 2010.
Just as there was a turnover of industrial personnel in the mid-1980s, the early and mid-1990s saw a second wave of departures. However, industrial music’s first push had been a small, modernist endeavor to move forward and its petering out owed in many cases to musicians moving on in search of the new; this second death played out on a larger stage, as industrial music was more public and more populous than ever. Stakes were high: not only was money involved, but many believed the integrity of industrial music’s anticorporate stance was in crisis.
Though Jim Nash’s passing was singularly monumental, in the 1990s a number of other high-profile deaths chewed away at the scene’s collective reverie.
In October 1990, Chicago scenester poet Lorri Jackson overdosed on heroin. Jeff Ward, the drummer for Ministry side project Lard (and occasionally for Revolting Cocks and Nine Inch Nails), committed suicide via carbon monoxide poisoning in 1993, distraught over being unable to kick his own heroin habit—the details are ugly. These two events hung particularly heavy around Al Jourgensen, who was close with both and was a heroin user himself. The Ministry camp was further hounded when River Phoenix overdosed in October 1993 at a performance by the band P, with whom Jourgensen performed that night. Within the next year, AIDS claimed both singer Dean Russell of Moev and Hans Schiller (born Michael Gutierrez) of the San Francisco–based EBM act Kode IV. Then in 1995, Lee Newman of former WaxTrax! band Greater Than One died of cancer. That same year, newly anointed Einstürzende Neubauten member Roland Wolf was killed in a car accident, and Damon Edge, founder of the band Chrome, was found dead in his apartment. In January 1996, another wreck took the life of Shane Lassen, the keyboardist (as “Rev. Dr. Luv”) for the Electric Hellfire Club. Rod Pearce, whose Fetish Records had put out records by Throbbing Gristle and Clock DVA, was murdered with a machete in Mexico in 1997. A year later saw the suicide of Rozz Williams (born Roger Alan Painter), whose main body of work was with goth act Christian Death but who recorded ambient industrial with his project Premature Ejaculation. In the decade’s last year, Bryn Jones of Muslimgauze died of a rare blood infection, and guitarist William Tucker of Ministry, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, and Pigface committed suicide. The respective deaths of Timothy Leary and William S. Burroughs in 1996 and 1997 imparted to industrial music a spiritual and ancestral loss.
It’s crucial to note that through many of these deaths and through the scene’s changes and attrition, industrial music’s community at large became proportionately more heterosexual during the 1990s; as such its connections with fashion, house music, retro-raunch, and literary dandyism all atrophied.
Though not a direct result of the commercially predatory atmosphere surrounding industrial music, all these events were, to many people, emblematic of the endings and changes in the music, its business, and its meaning. Beyond its makers, something about industrial music seemed to be dying—possibly of exposure.
Ministry was shedding all acknowledgment of its industrial past in lieu of a metal identity, and Nine Inch Nails had achieved completely unprecedented popularity with 1994’s The Downward Spiral, selling more than four million copies in America alone. Its single “Closer” found regular rotation on MTV with a chorus hook—“I want to fuck you like an animal”—that appealed to a generation of teenagers looking for a quick way to enrage their parents. The backlash among defensively exclusionary industrial fans was immediate: no self-respecting DJ would play a Nine Inch Nails record at an industrial club between 1995 and 1999.
In addition to the major labels’ gutting of WaxTrax! described in the preceding chapter, other veteran acts were picking up more exposure. German EBM act Armageddon Dildos, who had released their first album with Andreas Tomalla’s Frankfurt-based Zoth Ommog records, managed to score stateside distribution through Sire in 1993. They would later sign with BMG. Tomalla himself had forged the relationship with Sire when his own band Bigod 20 had attracted their attention with the 1990 club hit “The Bog,” featuring Front 242’s Jean-Luc De Meyer on vocals; this record paved the way for bigger deals, including one with Warner Brothers, who in 1992 released Bigod 20’s cover of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” Similarly, Sony put out Foetus’s Gash album in 1995, hoping likewise for an industrial hit (it didn’t come). Simply put, not only had a dozen musicians died, but the independent spirit—Jon Savage’s old idea of industrial music’s “organizational autonomy”—seemed only a weak undercurrent. In a move that earned Trent Reznor some grudging credibility from the industrial old guard, he set up Nothing Records, a vanity label within Interscope over which he and his manager had autonomous control. Nothing Records offered U.S. distribution to critical lynchpins of the 1980s industrial scene such as Einstürzende Neubauten, Coil, and Pig, as well as veteran crossover acts Meat Beat Manifesto, The The, and Pop Will Eat Itself, but it was no secret that Marilyn Manson—universally reviled within industrial music—was the imprint’s real cash cow.
The death whose reverberations were most widely felt throughout industrial music was Skinny Puppy’s. To understand its significance, let’s back up a bit in the timeline.
By a lot of measures, the late 1980s had been good to Skinny Puppy. The band’s world tours, their high-profile activism against animal testing and censorship, and several outstanding singles such as “Testure” and “Worlock” had given them not only massive popularity—1989’s Rabies album sold 150,000 copies—but also a critical integrity that Ministry and Nine Inch Nails lacked in having gone pop in the eyes of many. Front 242 and Einstürzende Neubauten moved comparable numbers and were still making engagingly confrontational music, but neither act was so opulent; once Skinny Puppy was bolstered with a budget, the band’s monstrous Artaudian aesthetic became a high water mark of industrial spectacle.
Their last album with Nettwerk, 1992’s Last Rights, was in some ways an attempt to reunify the dance-oriented strain of industrial music with the genre’s heritage in experimental collage, noise, glitch, and magic. Aware of other industrial acts’ ventures into techno and metal, keyboardist Dwayne Goettel commented in an interview, “You know, there’s pressure out there for us to make a dance album. But… I need to make records about how living in 1992 really fucking feels.”1 Though the album did produce “Inquisition,” a 120 bpm club single, its overall tone was lugubrious and lumbering.
The murky opening track “Love in Vein” both lyrically concerns and musically simulates a heroin high gone wrong in progressive stages: first, time is unsettled through a warped marching band record, the lack of a chorus, a constant backwards piano sound, and a sample declaring “Everything around me seemed to move in slow motion”; second, blood sickness comes with a bubbling minor-key synth line and the accompanying lyric “Human heart explodes, attacking, pointed sticks in sores, the arms. Where’s the warning? Shot the lights out…”; finally, an orchestral swell matches Ogre’s vocal hysteria as he concludes the lyric, describing how “ants symbolize decay,” bemoaning that he “missed the warning, missed the vein.” The album also includes the song “Killing Game,” which uses the harmonic and tempo conventions of a rock ballad to build to a loose, clattering climax in which “tortured animals wake up [and] time beckons death upon itself.” The song’s video is surprisingly artsy: a student dance troupe arrhythmically casts shadows in high-contrast black and white. Elsewhere, Last Rights is more abstract: its final track “Download” is a sprawling work of neo–musique concrète, cutting up white noise with the sounds of prepared piano for five minutes before concluding in a six-minute distorted drone (courtesy of the Legendary Pink Dots’ Martijn de Kleer), carefully exploring the harmonics of a single pitch—an EKG flatline to end the record’s experience. As Key recalls of the track, “Dwayne and Anthony [Valcic, mixing engineer] sat up for like 14 hours just editing, and that’s not including the manufacturing of the sounds they did. They had collected that over a period of two months.”2
The band was tense and unhealthy while making Last Rights in late 1991. During the day, cEvin Key and keyboardist Dwayne Goettel (who’d joined in 1986 to replace Bill Leeb) would smoke pot and record instrumental tracks, sequenced through their Atari 1040STs. They had little notion of what Ogre would add when he came in to do vocals at night, after they’d gone home. Overseen by his personal manager and by Skinny Puppy’s longtime producer Dave Ogilvie, Ogre was not on steady speaking terms with Key. Nettwerk exec Ric Arboit recalls, “They couldn’t even stand to be in the same room together.”3 Key says, “Through drug situations, I would end up on Ogre’s paranoid delusional side, and I would become more or less the victim,”4 while the band’s one-time producer and Invisible Records head Martin Atkins pointedly contests that “in Skinny Puppy, the dynamic was to suppress Ogre.”5 It’s undeniable that Ogre was difficult to deal with: he told Spin that during the recording,
I was seeing things that I thought people were projecting into my room—like three-dimensional objects coming out of the walls. I’d go in the studio after incredible nights of hallucinations and hauntings. Those were the best sessions, but I was falling-down drunk. They’d stop the tape and say “Ogre, are you okay?” and then go “He’s down,” and put me in a cab. Everyone was concerned about me dying. I was off my head way too much—there’s no way I could ever do that again.6
That the album bore a handful of instrumental tracks may have been less a planned decision than the result of Ogre’s failure to record vocals for them.
The finished record, however, was powerful. The All Music Guide to Rock declares it “a hailstorm of electro-distortion ten years ahead of its time… a sonic masterpiece that undoubtedly influenced sound manipulators from Autechre to White Zombie.”7
So when the band’s contract with Nettwerk and their U.S. distribution through Capitol ran out in 1993, hip-hop megaproducer Rick Rubin began courting them to sign with his Def American label (later American Recordings), home of Sir Mix-a-Lot and the Black Crowes. Seeing Rubin as a potentially powerful advocate for their music, the trio accepted a three-album contract and set up camp at Shangri-La, a digital studio in Malibu whose equipment wasn’t familiar to anyone involved. To helm the recording, the band’s new label company brought in Roli Mosimann, a Swiss producer who’d worked with the Young Gods, Swans, and Foetus, but Mosimann bred trouble when he insisted that the band write and record no longer in shifts but together. The studio environment was hostile, exacerbated by Ogre’s refusal to write lyrics and sing, and more importantly, by everyone’s drug problems—which they each kept hidden.
In the face of industrial music’s now-established sound and media presence, there was also a tension over the band’s musical direction: Key and Goettel’s interests were growing increasingly abstract and techno-driven, while Ogre felt compelled to make “songs… that’s what we wanted to do, even though [cEvin] will say otherwise. That’s why we signed a deal with a major label, that’s why we went to these measures. I—as a singer—wanted to get some songs to perform live.”8 He had immersed himself in more guitar-driven material through his involvement with Pigface.
The band reached a standstill, and so Mosimann was taken off the project and replaced by Martin Atkins, with whom Ogre was already good friends. Sensing that the band needed additional artistic guidance, Rubin also brought in Genesis P-Orridge to spark them into creativity. P-Orridge recalls:
They were at an impasse with their new album. They wanted me to persuade Ogre into doing vocals. We went down there and were living with them in their huge bungalow with this beautiful studio in it. We said why don’t you all just fucking jam? And we put the whole studio through my box of tricks [Chris Carter’s old Gristleizer] and then yours truly turned all these knobs and so on. Then we tried to get Ogre to do vocals and he was being very reluctant. And we hit him in the stomach—Guh! But it didn’t work. He couldn’t sing.9
Later, that Gristleizer—one of the remaining original two—melted in an electrical fire at Rick Rubin’s recording studio and mansion, where P-Orridge was staying along with the members of Love and Rockets. P-Orridge was injured in the fire, and received over $1.5 million in damages from Rubin and American Recordings.
Amidst the difficulty surrounding Skinny Puppy’s album, which also included several emergency evacuations for wildfires and flooding, the band racked up expenses of $650,000. To give a little perspective, compare that with two industrial albums distributed by Sire Records: Ministry’s 1992 KEΦAΛH ΞΘ cost $329,000 to make,10 and Armageddon Dildos’ 1995 Lost had a budget of just $15,040—still quite a lot more than most indies could offer.11 With Skinny Puppy’s album still not done, Key asked the label to pay out their advances for the band’s next two records. Rubin, worried that this had become a money pit, cut the contract down to one album and replaced producer Martin Atkins with Mark Walk, who had helped to run a studio in Minnesota where Pigface’s albums were mixed.
Amidst all this, Dwayne Goettel’s heroin problems got much worse. Ogre recalls,
My girlfriend and I were in our room. I heard this bang on the door. The door was blown off the hinges. There was blood all the way down the fucking hallway. [Dwayne Goettel had] wrapped barbed wire around his arms, shaved his head, his eyebrows were gone, and he’d pulled a fucking stunt like Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
After two days of him walking around very uncomfortably, I went up to him and we talked. This is why I’m at peace, in a lot of ways.… We talked and we hugged and kissed, ‘cause we could do that, and the rest is history.12
The “rest” referred to here is Ogre’s leaving Malibu and announcing to Rubin that he was quitting the band. With the frontman gone, Rubin was able to enact a clause in the contract that froze the album’s funds altogether. Goettel returned to Canada and went through several weeks of rehab, but shortly after getting out, he died of an overdose at his parents’ house in Alberta on August 23, 1995. He was thirty-one.
Rubin at this point begrudgingly funded the completion of the album, which amounted to Key reuniting briefly with former producer Dave Ogilvie in Vancouver to mix down the incomplete tracks into a record of what might have been. American Recordings released The Process in February 1996.
“The Process” refers both to a 1969 novel of hallucinatory discovery by cutup inventor Brian Gysin and to the Process Church of the Final Judgment, a religious group of the 1960s and 1970s that worshipped both Christ and Satan. P-Orridge helped title the record and, together with Ogre, planned an online community that would attempt to combine the spirit of the early mail art networks with the mystical sensibilities of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, which had splintered a few years earlier. P-Orridge explained in 1996 that this new “process” would be
like the old zeroxs [sic] and cassette tapes, [but] now it’s going to happen on the computers. You can swap information to people across the world. The tactics and strategies are the same—slogans and cryptic remarks about behaviour. Initially people accessing the sites will be Skinny Puppy fans… but there’s also a lot on “The process” as well which will direct them to other databases.13
Lyrically, the album’s title track is an alarmingly self-aware statement of purpose.14
The process
aims to make individual freedom
…
to heal the wound of separation
to question the unquestioning of the mind
offers an alternative to mass control
the center of the information war
we have progressed
This clarity and self-analysis invite one to ask whether its function is to awaken a sleeping audience and inspire revelatory freedom or to archive the methods of doing so. Is talking about an internal revolution the same as doing it? At this point in industrial music history, when in fact most bands had not “progressed” in the dialogue that Throbbing Gristle initiated, did Ogre’s lyrics serve as a renewed call to arms, or a throwback? Or worse, an obituary?
To many, rather than reinvigorating industrial music’s “alternative to mass control,” The Process’s annunciated ancestry within industrial culture functionally only highlighted Goettel’s death and Skinny Puppy’s demise as an end to this lineage. Goettel himself was not the band’s most central member—though his melodic synth parts are evident on “Worlock” and “Mirror Saw”—but within the industrial music community, his death took on a sacrificial air.
Skinny Puppy’s members were emotionally extroverted in interviews; Jolene Siana gushes in a 1987 letter to Ogre, “You’re sensitive aren’t you? You seem like a sincere person. It’s really cool how you guys (cEvin Key and Dwayne) aren’t secluded from your fans. It shows how human you are.”15 This publicly raw personhood of Skinny Puppy’s members and their relentlessly abject imagery and sound meant that the band exuded both empathy and radicality, which taken together allowed fans to plug into honest emotional identities of theatrical extremity: no industrial band, excepting perhaps Nine Inch Nails, has inspired more fan tattoos, to be sure. Skinny Puppy was thus nearly sacred in the eyes of many fans on both sides of the Atlantic, and given their anticorporate, anti-exploitation politics, it was hard for the industrial scene not to connect the band’s big budget dealings to their death. As Key said plainly of American Recordings in 1996, “They destroyed the band.”16
The degree to which Skinny Puppy inscribed and influenced all that was “industrial” can be readily heard in the breathless slobbering vocal style of X Marks the Pedwalk or the monster-movie samples of Wumpscut. Daniel Myer of the German act Haujobb recalls, “When Too Dark Park was released by Skinny Puppy, this was the initiative for us to make this kind of music. We were blown away.… We wanted to sound like our heroes, we wanted to sound like Skinny Puppy.”17 The band’s role is perhaps most plainly stated on the pages of the industrial scene’s magazines of the 1990s, though: reviews and advertisements in Industrial Nation, Under the Flag, Electric Shock Treatment, Zillo, Culture Shock, Interface, Music from the Empty Quarter, Base Asylum, and DAMn! draw more comparisons to Skinny Puppy than to any other act. As just one of countless examples, a 1997 print ad by Pendragon Records announces that the German act Kalte Farben “are the ‘second coming’ (SP being the first, of course.)”18
The top-selling industrial releases of the 1990s were all made by veteran bands formed in the 1980s, when indie labels were the order of the day: Skinny Puppy, Nine Inch Nails, Front Line Assembly, Front 242, Ministry, KMFDM and My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult. A few rock-plus-synthesizer acts signed with majors in the early 1990s and managed to sell reasonably well—Stabbing Westward and Filter, for example—but the major-label gold rush on industrial music peaked in 1995. By early 1996, modern rock radio stations were sandwiching vaguely industrialesque songs by Gravity Kills in between records by Bush, Sublime, and Alanis Morissette; the music was contextualized as merely another flavor in the “alternative” stew, which in some ways was fitting, because many of these quasi-industrial bands themselves used machinelike noises as just another instrument in what was at heart a rock band. Although this book’s introduction notes that some supposedly industrial artists have spent their careers attempting to disavow the genre label, no such public pleas were needed with these acts: neither record labels nor fans nor the bands themselves ever thought what they were doing was “industrial,” even if club DJs occasionally played a song from The Crow’s soundtrack to get the floor going on a slow night. No, as far as major labels and corporate radio was concerned, industrial music was a stepping stone to capitalizing on a demographic whose taste for Marilyn Manson, White Zombie, Rammstein, and Oomph (in Europe, at least) directly paved the way for the nü-metal of the early 2000s. Often derided as “mall-goth,” this music claimed neither anticorporate ideology nor an aesthetic of genuinely challenging strangeness, and it was thus much easier to market.
“In the sense that Goth appropriates the mainstream’s designation of everything that does not fit into its systems of signification as dead or deathly, Goth cultures are death cults extraordinaire,” argues Carol Siegel.19 In this regard, goth’s embrace of the taboo is potentially consonant with industrial music’s clandestine sensibilities. In the 1990s, a significant, less literal industrial encounter with death came in the form of the near convergence of gothic and industrial audiences and music.
Both as social scenes and aesthetic styles, the two had rubbed elbows since the early 1980s. The musics share a harmonic propensity for Aeolian and Phrygian modes and an instrumental default of the drum machine (“The Goth scene appropriated technological developments from an early stage,” writes media studies professor Isabella van Elferen20). Aesthetically, there’s also the inevitable categorization of both as “dark”; for example, both validate masochism as a critical experience, albeit for somewhat different reasons. Politically, it’s true that goth’s pro-androgyny expressive principles—and as some have argued, its brand of feminism—are of limited historical interest to industrial music, and likewise industrial music’s militarized anarchy often comes across to goths as officious. But socially, it’s hard to ignore the artistic friendships between, for example, KMFDM and goth rockers X-Mal Deutschland, or Al Jourgensen and goth empress Siouxsie Sioux, or ignore that Skinny Puppy’s first performance was at an afterparty for an Alien Sex Fiend gig.
Part of what made the early 1990s a convergence point for these subcultures was that both had been effectively forced to stake out defensive cultural territory by the explosion of “alternative music” that was in full swing by the end of 1991, marked publicly by the establishment of a Grammy award for Best Alternative Music Album and iconically by the overnight success of grunge music like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. With “alternative music” now connoting by default a particular strain of college radio rock, goth and industrial bands—fantastical by nature—were misfits within an ascendant public taste for working-class authenticity, especially in America. Techno was in its own world by this point, and synthpop was a shrunken market. This consolidation and staking of subcultural territory brought to the surface those shared musical, visual, and social signs of goth and industrial practice. The scenes’ potential differences with respect to gender and class were submerged as dance clubs increasingly specialized in crossover goth-industrial nights (often with respectively alternating DJs), purging the pop, techno, and the jangly alternative rock from their playlists little by little. Though some tension between hardline goths and industrialists quietly simmered, this communal state of affairs largely became the norm. A 1992 internet post in the alt.gothic Usenet group by Margaret Gates offers one perspective on the merge as it was happening:
I have heard it argued that contemporary ‘industrial’ is the heir to the early-80s gothic cultural stream… and that current goth culture is more or less in the process of reclaiming that heritage, and in so doing absorbing part of the industrial stream. Tracing the roots of music is basically irrelevant and futile.21
Even if Gates’s last claim here is plainly false, it nonetheless illustrates how entwined the histories of these genres are. They even became economically entwined in the early 1990s as record labels such as Cleopatra increasingly staked their credibility and financial success on audiences’ free navigation between the subcultures.
Industrial music’s mixing with goth gave rise to new musical possibilities and meanings, too. To illustrate, we’ll consider a collaborative crossover whose particulars are unique but that ultimately uses a number of tropes common to goth-industrial music.
In the twelve years that followed their 1981 breakthrough Stahlwerksymphonie, Die Krupps reinvented themselves a few times, most recently as a heavy metal-tinged industrial outfit. Their 1993 album II: The Final Option was a massive hit with German teenagers, and so Rough Trade Records commissioned a collection of remixes with contributions from the likes of FM Einheit (of Einstürzende Neubauten), KMFDM, and Luc Van Acker.
Unlike most techno remix practices, industrial remixes nearly always emphasize and reframe a song’s vocal; this is a simultaneous effect of techno and industrial club nights splitting off from one another in the early 1990s and of industrial music’s increasingly songlike proclivities at the time. However, industrial practices do mirror techno and hip-hop in that remixes serve additionally to establish and publicly declare an artist’s connections with other acts; by trading remixes with a bigger band, an act might insinuate itself into a higher caste within the scene. Indeed, Nine Inch Nails helped legitimize themselves to industrial insiders by recruiting Foetus, Ministry, and Coil for remixes, just as Die Krupps—older but less widely popular—aligned themselves with Reznor’s gang by commissioning a mix from Nine Inch Nails’ touring keyboardist Charlie Clouser and also by performing in Europe as the band’s supporting act in 1994.
Track four on Die Krupps’ resulting record, 1994’s The Final Remixes, is a mix of “Fatherland” by Andrew Eldritch of the Sisters of Mercy, assisted by fellow Leeds native Rodney Orpheus of the early goth-EBM crossover act the Cassandra Complex. At this moment in subcultural history, Eldritch and the Sisters of Mercy held unrivaled goth cachet. Their version of goth rock, refined since the early 1980s, rejected the genre’s typically watery, exotic musical textures in exchange for testosterone: instead of flange and echo effects drenching melodic guitars, they favored low, eighth-note power chord chugging over an incessantly unsyncopated kick-snare drum machine (which Eldritch named Doktor Avalanche). Their hits “This Corrosion” and “Lucretia, My Reflection” were (and still are) club classics. Eldritch channeled Low-era David Bowie with aviator shades and a vocal mumble that somehow bespoke singleminded hysteria and defeatist indifference at once. Ripping off the Sisters of Mercy’s sound was the primary strategy for early-1990s male goth musicians who didn’t look good in eyeliner. Given the time he’d spent pushing at the subculture’s glass ceiling, it’s no surprise that Eldritch fought loudly though futilely against genre classification, protesting that the Sisters weren’t goth.
So by enlisting Eldritch to remix the decidedly masculine “Fatherland,” Die Krupps recognized the subcultural value of the gothic-industrial crossover zeitgeist. Not only were they fans of the goth band’s work—illustrating a latent kinship of musical genres—but the name and the sound of the Sisters of Mercy here served as a two-way signal whereby goth and industrial fans would find interest in one another’s music. Most tellingly, the internal stylistic consonance of the “Fatherland” remix testifies that at least musically the genres were perhaps not so far apart as one might think—or at least that goth’s inflections of the masculine and the epic overlapped with industrial music’s new interest in melody and rockism. In either case, the popularity of this remix has endured, easily matching and probably exceeding Die Krupps’ own original version.
In this track and in others, beyond merely revealing their compatibility, gothic and industrial elements come together to hint at a romantic transcendence within political ideology. A song lamenting the post-reunification rise of German neo-Nazi youth cultures, the original 1993 “Fatherland” is a lean dance number with a bubbling sixteenth-note synth bass and heavy metal guitar licks; singer Jürgen Engler’s voice rides unambiguously atop the mix.
The 1994 remix commences with and repeatedly uses a sample of Senegalese singer Baaba Maal, lifted from the 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ. Maal’s long, bellowed notes give both religious grandeur and a new sense of time’s passage in the remix: over slow synth pads—halfway between choral and string sounds, thus amorphously epic—the religious chant carries the listener’s attention for two measures at a time instead of the original version’s most evident divisions of quarter and sixteenth notes. The outright gothness of the remix peaks with the choir samples that Eldritch and Orpheus introduce in the chorus, more than a little reminiscent of the New York Choral Society’s performance on the Sisters of Mercy’s UK number seven single “This Corrosion.” The overwhelming sense is of an organic, spiritual element superseding the drum machines and bass sequencer. In the overlaid hierarchies of time as demarcated by the song’s rhythm and in the commingling of Engler’s vocals with Maal’s, this spirituality is one that embraces otherness, if imperfectly. Gothicized, “Fatherland” is more than just words against Nazism’s xenophobia; it’s action, too.
The integrated goth-industrial sound (one of many styles called “darkwave”) was also handy for tragedizing personal desire. It offered an inflection of longing that, in the meeting of the implicit male and female genderings of industrial and gothic music, suggests the abject male’s entreaty to the angelic female. In the 1990s, programmer-plus-chanteuse acts L’Âme Immortelle (from Austria), Kirlian Camera (from Italy), and Flesh Field (from the United States) all reiterated this pedestalization that otherwise pervaded the decade’s self-deprecating indie rock. The gendered tragedizing of personal desire also translated into the particular goth-club emphasis on dancing alone, in which individual catharsis is theatrically performed as a mating call.
In light of the failed promise of success that at least temporarily swept up so many of the industrial scene’s giants, the 1990s saw a rebirth of underground industrial music. Given that industrial music’s wave of death-by-exposure had, in the scene’s eyes, largely come at the hands of major labels, the role of new independent labels was a particularly important one, fostering an alternative to the poisonous ambitions of rockstardom.
A few underground labels championed the sneering, guitar-driven sounds that WaxTrax! and Ministry had pioneered—Re-Constriction Records and 21st Circuitry, for example. These Californian imprints attempted to brand their music with the subgenre moniker “coldwave,” presumably unaware that the term had been used to describe French postpunk a decade earlier. Because this style was so close to what major labels were signing in hopes of scoring another Nine Inch Nails, the independent imprints risked being no more than proving grounds from which majors would snap up the most successful artists. Chicago’s Slipdisc Records, for example, made a name for itself in the mid-1990s with industrial rock crossover bands such as 13 Mg., which led to its wholesale acquisition by Mercury/Polygram in 1998, which was then in turn bought up by Universal Music Group International.
Artists and labels in Europe saw the rat race of rock-based industrial and stepped in the opposite direction, by and large. Copenhagen’s Hard Records, for instance, nurtured a lineup of Danish EBM acts such as Birmingham 6, who used modern synthesizers to make a shinier, faster, and more aggressive brand of dance music than their Belgian and German predecessors. Probably the day’s most impressive stable of musicians belonged to Stefan Herwig’s Off-Beat Records in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, not far from Dusseldorf. Off-Beat’s lineup boasted Covenant, Haujobb, Suicide Commando, and the highly successful Project Pitchfork—bands who never really competed sonically or commercially with Ministry and Nine Inch Nails, but whose sound and image offered respite from the mid-1990s guitar craze. Haujobb, the project of East German–born Daniel Myer, was especially heralded as a cerebral, intricate alternative to the overtly bodily grime coming out of the States. Stefan Herwig’s prescience is remarkable: the all-electronic sound that he fostered at Off-Beat starting in 1993 quickly became the initial blueprint for the Philadelphia-based Metropolis Records, whose synonymity with an all-electronic sound has since 1995 become positively dynastic.
Not all independent industrial labels created a trusted brand so easily. A cautionary tale is that of Los Angeles–based Cleopatra Records, who initially signed a handful of Californian acts, most of whom never escaped obscurity. Cleopatra managed to stay in business, however, by venturing outside its time and place, re-releasing hastily assembled editions of out-of-print albums by Psychic TV, Front Line Assembly, and Kraftwerk. They also served as American distribution for European bands, mostly from Zoth Ommog’s roster. Their catalogue was made more eclectic by a deluge of goth rock signings, early punk reissues, and a glut of cheaply remastered space rock. Although some of Cleopatra’s compilations were high-quality and sold well—the original Industrial Revolution set of 1992 remains a good introduction to the genre—the tactics they resorted to in order to create a name brand ultimately undermined their artistic integrity. Beyond the label’s consistently trashy in-house cover art, they reduced themselves with a series of goth/industrial tribute albums throughout the second half of the 1990s, beginning reasonably enough with covers of the Cure, Depeche Mode, and Kraftwerk, and progressively venturing into embarrassing and utterly baffling territory, commissioning second-tier industrial acts to record the songs of AC/DC, Madonna, and Smashing Pumpkins. Cleopatra indeed became a go-to label, but for a product that eventually scared bands away from dealing with them. By the late 1990s, they had all but stopped signing new artists, not for lack of trying.
While industrial music was finding foothold in some new geographies (notably Mexico, Japan, and Russia), its online discourse was a particularly vibrant example of new life. Given the genre’s fondness for cyberpunk themes, it’s no surprise that the industrial community was internet-savvy long before the mid-1990s boom of the World Wide Web. The rec.music.industrial Usenet group, for example, organized and released a series of compilation CDs between 1992 and 1996 featuring its regular online contributors, including the bands Snog, Stromkern, Sphere Lazza, and Informatik—all acts who later achieved a measure of success in the scene at large.
The Usenet group was quickly filling the DIY roles left vacant by the decline of the tape scenes and by the pressure for zines to go glossy. Participants’ conversations in 1996, for example, included a heated debate on the use of guitars, with headings like “GUITARS ARE DEAD,” “HELLO THIS IS INDUSTRIAL, NOT GRUNGE ROCK!!!!!!” and the guitar apologist’s response “Guitar Bashing (was: How to be cool in an ‘industrial’ interview).” Perpetually at stake in these online discussions was the nature of industrial music, the crowning of the best new and old artists, and the building of transcontinental friendships. The trading and recommending of music along with the public posting of DJs’ playlists proved especially vital in giving bands exposure beyond local and regional audiences. Industrial music embraced its new virtuality with vehemence. Common was the situation of a band like THD, who hailed from Pennsylvania but whose first signing was with Hard Records in Copenhagen.
Beyond the internet, the middle and late 1990s reinforced the importance of danceclubs in popularizing industrial music. Bypassing the traditional model of building fan bases progressively from local to regional to national in scope, many bands throughout industrial music’s history decided against playing live shows at all; it’s neither physically practical nor performatively engaging to twiddle knobs onstage. Mechanical concerns over synth playback, live sound technicians’ unfamiliarity with (or disdain for) electronic music, and the issue of whether to use taped backing tracks all made it hard for industrial music to play by the rock circuit’s rules of authenticity. Plenty of acts managed to tour despite all this, but industrial music’s marketing was channeled through tastemaker DJs and fans who negotiated small canons by region and subgenre through playlist construction and dancing.
This emphasis on the dancefloor reinforced industrial music’s reinvention as a clean, electronic, European one. Frequently called electro-industrial at the time, the new music that Off-Beat and Hard Records peddled bore some self-conscious similarities to techno, which by the mid-1990s was the coolest music on the planet, the rave scene having danced into the limelight. EBM in the 1980s was characterized by crystalline timbres for melody instruments, oddly spatialized drum samples, and squonking FM bass sounds, but mid-1990s electro-industrial music by the likes of X Marks the Pedwalk, Haujobb, and Covenant was full of expansive analogue filter sweeps, muted echoing string pads, and vocoder effects.
To some, there was a nagging feeling that industrial, long assumed to be the self-evident vanguard of pop, had been surpassed not just in popularity but in experimentalism by techno—which was, after all, a largely instrumental genre that had, with the advent of jungle around 1994, managed to escape the pop treatment of the backbeat as prerequisite. Regardless of whether techno was cutting-edge, news magazines ran cover stories on it, and books were hastily assembled, offering supposed histories of electronic music that lacked any mention of industrial. The result within industrial music communities was a simultaneous chip on the shoulder and—whether out of genuine affection or in an attempt to capitalize—an intentional borrowing of techno sounds and gestures. Leætherstrip’s 1997 pseudo-techno stomp “Kill a Raver” is representatively schizophrenic, indecisive about who its audience might be and whether they’re supposed to dance, kill, or laugh.
Industrial music’s shared sonic territory with techno in this era also owed to synthesizer manufacturers’ tailoring their instruments for dance music to maximize sales. Industrial musicians bought these keyboards (certainly the most popular of the era was Roland’s JP-8000 of early 1997) and when they used the machines’ preset sounds, the washes and blips resembled the Prodigy more closely than Skinny Puppy. It is the sound of technology doing exactly what it was made to do; contrast this with early industrial music’s intentional misuse of machines in search of the revelatory malfunction.
Beyond techno sounds becoming standard on keyboard presets and hence standard within industrial music, industrial itself was still enough of a buzzword that musical hardware and software makers developed tools to make it easier than ever to get certain aggressive sounds. For example, a pair of CD-ROM sound libraries for Akai samplers (released 1992 and 1994) was called Dance Industrial. If achieving the sound of banged scrap metal was as easy as loading a pre-made sample bank, then why go to all the trouble of finding, pounding, and recording an oildrum? The nativization, the taming, and ultimately the assimilation of once-transgressive musical practices into the entry-level consumer palette—editable and sequenceable—is almost certainly a reason behind industrial music’s move in the 1990s away from technological misuse, found sound, improvisation, location-specific events, and urban provocation. A few astute musicians also worried that this shift silenced the little flaws of timing, the timbral changes from one percussive thwack to the next, and the musical spontaneity that flows from the body.
More than ever, the home studio became the location for industrial music making, as audio software such as StudioVision Pro (1994), SoundEdit 16 (1994), Cakewalk Pro Audio (1995), and FruityLoops (1997) hit the market and as dedicated digital recording machines became affordable. Recall that when Cabaret Voltaire set up shop in their own Western Works studio, they found themselves with enough time to tweak their sounds laboriously; the same effect applies here, with isolation, limitless time, and access to gear tailor-made for techno and industrial music leading to sonically cleaner, more detailed, mistake-free records. The increase from 1992 to 1997 in the audible fidelity and orchestrational complexity on industrial records can’t be overstated, especially when it comes to independently recorded and released CDs. From album to album, bands such as Haujobb, Forma Tadre, and Gridlock unveiled a completely new cool sonic clarity, highlighting the aesthetic possibilities only just discovered in the digital era of home recording. In bedroom studios built out of hobbyists’ desire to work more and pay less, the analogue grit of the WaxTrax! sound was nearly impossible to recapture, but because sparse, single-synth timbres sounded immediately elegant, the songs that these bands made—Haujobb’s “Eye Over You” is a classic example—veered toward reverberant minimalism. This music’s breakbeat skittering of drums atop the surface of unchanging textures connoted an oceanic depth.
The dominant industrial sensibility that developed in the middle and late 1990s played up chic synthesizer mastery and ignored abjection. Was this uncluttered approach the confluence of death imagery, techno influence, and new electronics? Was it a premeditated aesthetic shift? In any event, as the millennium neared, the genre’s experience with death cycled through mourning and gothicism, and as its tools revealed progressively more nuanced, home-designed sounds that exchanged rage for meditation, rock ‘n’ roll swagger for European flair, it was clear that, by chance or design, industrial music had begun to articulate new, subtle ideas—the stuff of wonder.
ICONIC:
Beborn Beton – “Another World” (1997)
Chemlab – “Codeine, Glue and You” (1992)
KMFDM – “Juke Joint Jezebel” (1995)
Project Pitchfork – “Alpha Omega” (1994)
X Marks the Pedwalk – “Facer” (1995)
ARCANE:
Gridlock – “From Zero” (1999)
La Floa Maldita – “Sorcière (Das Ich remix)” (1995)
Oneiroid Psychosis – “Box” (1996)
MindFluxFuneral – “Flesh” (1994)
Wumpscut – “Mother (Oral Staircase remix by Haujobb)” (1996)