On January 13, 2000, Covenant released an exclusive European single of “Der Leiermann,” a song that takes as its lyrics Wilhelm Müller’s poem of the same name, most famous as the nihilistic closing text to Franz Schubert’s 1827 song cycle Winterreise. Müller’s poem concerns an old street musician who, as a wraith of the beleaguered narrator’s bleak future, forever plays the same tune alone at the edge of a village, undying in an unchanging winter. In the context of Müller and Schubert’s full cycle, “Der Leiermann” occupies the crushing moment at which death itself is revealed to be an insufficient escape from the narrator’s terrible disillusionment, and where he instead resigns to fade into a numb, undreaming circularity. Both Schubert’s and Covenant’s settings of the poem are appropriately spare in their melody, but the harmony, rhythm, and timbral palette in Covenant’s recording mismatches the stagnation in the text awkwardly.
“Der Leiermann” is built on an energetic quarter-note kick drum smash at 128 bpm, but although most electronic dance music fills its rhythmic space with eighth-note hi-hats, Covenant here subdivides the beat into three. Because the song never adopts a backbeat snare, we hear an intense phrasing where each kick drum pulse careens to the next with a suggestion of equal metric importance—a feeling emphasized by the handclap samples that eventually double the pounding. This, along with the song’s consistent use of rhythmic triplets (as opposed to a two-step swing), differentiates it from the faux-blues shuffle of Skinny Puppy’s 1989 “Hexonxonx” and from the menacing half-time arrangements of KMFDM’s 1996 “Rules”—rare industrial digressions from squarely divided beats. Additionally, the triplet rhythms in Covenant’s “Der Leiermann” skew slightly when we hear a delay effect on the lead synthesizer that doesn’t quite fit into the song’s metric grid. In short, the track achieves an airy yet forceful uncertainty that spins more than it swaggers. This is hardly revolutionary in pop, but within the industrial soundscape the opening moments of the song are undeniably fresh, befitting Covenant’s Swedish minimalism, borne out by their black onstage business suits and white album covers.
The song’s sense of the new and of the ever-emergent isn’t merely rhythmic; undistorted synth timbres bubble in slower quarter-note triplets with filter sweeps that sonically distinguish each note’s articulation from the previous, even on the same repeated F-sharp. The cadence that concludes the verses of “Der Leiermann” is the harmonic progression VI–VII–i, an Aeolian gesture that musicologist Philip Tagg suggests imparts not only dramatic flair1 but also a signification of Northern European funeral music.2 The alignment of Scandinavian industrial with funereality is no stretch: on the single “Call the Ships to Port” Covenant sings of Viking funerals, and fellow Swedish industrialist Roger Karmanik, founder of the noise label Cold Meat Industry, notes in an interview, “I love Christian funeral hymns.”3
In Covenant’s “Der Leiermann,” Müller’s text—dejected beyond suicide—fails in its intimate, eternally sad rot to resonate with the music’s vibrant rhythms and grandiose harmonies. Significantly, however, Covenant released another song, “Like Tears in Rain,” with identical instrumental parts but with a wholly new set of lyrics in English and a new distinct chorus melody, where previously the “Der Leiermann” refrain bore the same tune as its verses. “Like Tears in Rain” was initially a B-side to the single of “Der Leiermann,” but in late February 2000 it was this English language take on the track that not only made the cut for their hugely popular United States of Mind album but was the record’s opening song. Viewed as a commentary on their setting of “Der Leiermann”—or even a repositioning and correction of it—“Like Tears in Rain” is revelatory.
The lyrics to “Like Tears in Rain” capitalize on the song’s clean brightness in a way that “Der Leiermann” does not. They do this with two significant poetic moves in juxtaposition.
First, the hopelessness in Müller’s poem is so all-encompassing and bleak as to suggest that death, far from an escape, is meaninglessly undifferentiated from life: an eternally numb continuation of its misery. But Covenant’s lead singer and sometime lyricist Eskil Simonsson repeatedly invokes death as forceful, totalizing, grandiose, and, as we’ll shortly see, beautiful. In his chorus, featuring a new resolute melody with a syncopated hook, he sings, “Every man I ever knew, every woman I ever had is gone. Everything I ever touched, everything I ever had has died.” The finality and the scope invoked here closely matches the harmony’s epic flair. Tagg’s likening of the “Aeolian pendulum” to the funeral music of Northern Europe finds apt consonance with Covenant’s transformation of “Der Leiermann” into “Like Tears in Rain.” The band was forging a new musical sensibility within industrial music, and through this public experiment they’d arrived on a lyrical sensibility to match, discovering and revealing what this new music was really about.
The second aspect crucial to “Like Tears in Rain” is in that aforementioned beauty—the way the song exchanges all its overstated loss and death for wonder and transformation. In light of the subject matter of “Der Leiermann,” it’s a funny twist of fate that among industrial music’s only rhythmic predecessors to Covenant’s quasi 3/8 rhythm is Wumpscut’s tortured and swampy 1995 “Die in Winter,” but there’s a suggestion in the electronic bounce of “Like Tears in Rain” that instead of freezing to unchanging stillness, death here is a progression and a lens through which to revel in life: it is the moment at which beauty is shown to have been always present. This suggestion is voiced in the two verses’ lyrics (we’ll get to them in a moment) and is effectively understood through the heuristic of the song’s title, which is itself never uttered in the recording.
Cyberpunk fans will immediately recognize the title “Like Tears in Rain” from the end of the genre-defining movie Blade Runner*. At the film’s climax, the “replicant” android villain Roy Batty, suddenly aware that his predetermined lifespan is about to expire, opts to save the life of protagonist policeman Rick Deckard, whom only moments earlier he was trying to kill. Exhausted and mutually beaten, the two then sit atop a gothic skyscraper in a futuristic Los Angeles, pounded by a torrent of rain. Batty, fighting the throes of his inevitable death, holds a dove in his hand and speaks softly with a strange and wizened acceptance to his nemesis: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time. Like tears in rain. Time to die.”4 Batty, played by Rutger Hauer, crumples and dies to the sound of a funeral drum, releasing the dove to fly into the blueness that only now begins to peer through the rainclouds. The major chords that Vangelis scores over the scene (framed aptly in an Aeolian mode) solidify Batty’s redemption. His death makes meaningful all the wonders he has seen, but beyond that, the wonders themselves highlight the smallness of his life and his experience amidst their grandeur and perpetuity. On the screen, the sunlight that follows his death asks how meaningful life could really be in a finite world, or the underbelly of that question: How meaningful is the infinite possibility of experience without death? Death affirms the sublime nature of perception, the truth that our living minds and bodies are insufficient to withstand the world’s present and full magnitude.
With this in mind, it’s very easy to see just how, rather than reinforcing a mournful reading of the chorus, Simonsson’s verses frame their loss and death as a gateway to beholding beauty:
Go to the Empire State and watch the city lights
Hear the noise of millions struggle in the sprawl
Stare into the sky, we’re few and far between
Black eyes full of stars, wide with memories
…
Lie down in the park and watch the satellites
Hear the children sing just a breath away
Dance in the heavy air along the interstate
Black lung full of fumes, choke on memories
Though Covenant’s music of this era typically walks a tuneful line between latter-day EBM and synthpop with an occasional excursion into analogue minimalism, their lyrics and public presentation sustain a fascination with the sublime. This reading of “Like Tears In Rain” is completely congruous alongside the rest of United States of Mind. In the song “Humility,” Covenant is a notch less subtle: “Behold the beauty that surrounds us.… Turn your gaze towards the moon, even further if you dare.”
The reason for this extended look at Covenant’s song is that it typifies a postmillennial approach to the sublime in industrial music. The sublime exposes the limits of one’s perception by markedly exceeding them. Classically, the human response to the sublime is a blend of awe and terror. The discussion here isn’t whether listening to this music actually produces sublime experiences; such encounters likely depend more on the listener than on the music. Instead, the point here is that the sublime as a topic is an important one to industrial music; as an act of revealing heretofore unknown limits by exceeding them, we might understand it as dérive, or even as shock, and certainly as part of the industrial legacy.
Recall the genre’s use of abjection and the gothic—qualities that break down the distinction between the inside and outside of bodies, spaces, and musical forms; examples include Skinny Puppy’s fascination with slasher films and vivisection, Coil’s “The Anal Staircase,” and the genre’s ubiquitous themes of the cybernetically enhanced body. Metaphorically speaking, this music forces open the body, exceeding the capacity of flesh to contain itself. This is also the musical impact of distortion, in which a sound’s amplitude exceeds its medium’s capacity to contain it. The sublime here is first, then, physical—even physiological. It’s also rational, though, because not only is the body directly interrupted; this interruption makes it irreconcilable. (The irreconcilability is additionally part of a listener’s supposed experience of unpredictable noise, as this book’s postscript will discuss.) In the end, industrial music’s traditional approach to a scorched earth sublime came by way of ugly disorder and irrational noise, or to use two of Jon Savage’s characteristics of industrial music, shock tactics and “anti-music.”
What Covenant attempts to enact circa 2000 is a sublime built on wonder, rather than abjection. They invite us to move past our own insignificance by embracing it, rather than recoiling from it. While their music may not particularly reach the heights to which the band conceptually aspires, it reinforces the lyrics’ call to “feel the rhythm of time” and “be happy that you’re alive.” In their blend of hissing machine noise loops and lush, folkish harmonies, Covenant suggests that what we perceive as a tension between ugliness and beauty is only paradoxical because we are incapable of understanding their real relationship—certainly not binary. As noise theorist Joanna Demers writes, in musical moments of this sort, there resides “a pleasure that does not conform to Kantian standards of balance and semblance but nonetheless aspires to the condition of beauty. The sublime and the beautiful are thus not so much opposites as they are different destinations along the same trajectory.”5
Covenant is only one of the many acts in a new wave of industrial around the turn of the millennium to take this approach. The same week that United States of Mind came out, Norwegian act Apoptygma Berzerk released their important album Welcome to Earth. For the previous ten years, the group had been putting out a goth-tinged brand of above-average dance industrial music; their early hits “Deep Red” and “Love Never Dies” narrated sadomasochistic bloodplay and sampled Carmina Burana, respectively—pretty standard stuff. Welcome to Earth was a marked change for the band, however. Aside from a cover of Metallica’s “Fade to Black,” Apoptygma Berzerk in 2000 jettisoned their goth murkiness in exchange for a focus on melody amidst Scandinavian tidiness. Hinting at the utopian social politics of rave, Apoptygma Berzerk uses “Hoover” synth chords and subtly swing their hi-hat timing to connote trance and house music. Here the lyrics again gesture unambiguously toward sublime wonder. Atop another Aeolian chorus progression nearly identical to Covenant’s,* the album’s first single, “Eclipse,” declares:
One day we’ll awake by a bright light on the horizon
In one second every eye will see the same
And this blinding light will draw all our attention
Some day we’ll catch a glimpse of eternity
As the world stands still for a moment
For the very first time and it’s meant to be
We’ll forget about ourselves and share the moment
Here, the wondrous sublime suddenly reveals itself, and “we” in turn reveal it in “our” actions: we forget about ourselves, unable to remain central in our own world—this, after only a glimpse of a light brighter than our eyes can withstand (blinding) and more enduring than our numbers can express (eternal).
Welcome To Earth dresses this sudden revelation of wonder as an alien landing. The album art features stylized crop circles, but perhaps more tellingly, the cover of the 1999 “Eclipse” single is the famous “I WANT TO BELIEVE” poster from The X-Files television show, which along with the Y2K computer virus scare was the west’s the most culturally iconic reflection of pre-millennium tension. Sampled, referenced, and otherwise beloved by industrial acts in the late 1990s, The X-Files channeled into alien fascination the hope and fear of the future’s arrival. Reversing this rubric, we might see then that Welcome To Earth, which was written and recorded in 1999, is less about science fiction and more about the potential of the future—in the form of the millennium—to solve our problems. The lyrics to the song “Starsign” make this clear.
I’m living on nerves last days of ninety-nine
Nightmare, conspiracy, depression, and lunacy
I need to feel more love inside
Locked up, messed up, maybe there is no tomorrow
Of course the turn of the millennium didn’t solve much of anything, and despite all his hope, Apoptygma Berzerk frontman Stephan Groth aggressively turned away from industrial music to make pop after 2000, an apocalypse preacher searching for a new congregation after getting the date wrong. Despite this, Welcome To Earth (arguably alongside Haujobb’s Ninety-Nine from the previous year) is a rare futurological moment of optimism in industrial music.
Less than three months after Covenant and Apoptygma Berzerk’s records dropped, Irish act VNV Nation released Empires, the final album of this triumvirate that would refocus industrial music on a synthpop-infused sound dubbed “futurepop” by VNV’s Ronan Harris and Apoptygma Berzerk’s Stephan Groth.6 Like the other two albums, Empires boasts a collection of tracks that are neither constructions nor processes but genuinely songs, with clear, singable vocal melodies and distinct harmonic progressions that largely delineate verse from chorus.
Sonically, Empires is less detailed and bright than its futurepop contemporaries; stereo imaging is minimal, drums are low in the mix, hi-hats are steambursts of dull noise, and the mixing pits Harris’s quiet, husky vocals in the same frequency range as the synths’ ever-lingering faux strings. The sense of sameness across the recording extends beyond the sonic and into a peculiar consistency of melody, harmony, tempo, and timbre from song to song.
Because the club dancefloor was industrial music’s prime advertising space in 2000, bands were largely evaluated on the strength of singles. As an album, though, Empires took a surprising hold of the industrial scene: whereas tracks like “Standing” and “Kingdom” were club hits, the record was embraced and consumed as a unified entity. Other bands of the day aped VNV Nation’s moody gothicism and muted trance techno borrowings, but beyond those superficial qualities, what makes Empires so compelling is the way its aesthetic unity interacts with its lyrical theme to expose the human limitations that the sublime exceeds.
The central plot of Empires, and pretty much of VNV Nation’s entire oeuvre, is that of a solitary warrior fighting against unnamed, faceless, barbaric hoards. In an interview, lead singer Ronan Harris explains that it’s “the battle for the control for one’s own soul and destiny,” though he expresses this lyrically as a quest against all odds to reclaim a paradise long lost—if indeed it ever existed.7 It bears some readily apparent similarities to Kristeva’s idea that we are unrecoverably severed from a perfect womblike state as a precondition of existence—a state to which we forever strive in vain to return.
The lack of vocal harmony on Empires, its dulled sonic palette, and the singlemindedness of composition don’t distract from the image of a lone, fearless hero in a battlefield trench; they actually contribute to it. In the song “Darkangel,” lines like “I’m in this mood because of scorn, I’m in a mood for total war” may appear to veer close to the anger and “Total War” of NON’s music; in both, battle metaphorically depicts a struggle to assert one’s individuality, but for the leftist Harris there’s a world of difference.
First, the hero’s fight in VNV Nation is to a large degree on behalf of the helpless; “Darkangel” continues, “Given time you’ll understand what possesses me to right what you have suffered.” To Harris, battle is the tragic but necessary path to an enlightenment whose merest glimpse would awaken the sleeping to wisdom. In NON’s war, combat is its own thrill, and anyone not fighting (and winning) is complicit with the enemy—a waste of space.
Second, and much more importantly, Harris’s lyrics paint him as knowingly overconfident despite being insanely outnumbered; when combined with his humble production choices, it’s too much to take at face value. The tragedy underlying VNV Nation’s music is that the battle is a losing one. The hero doesn’t stand a chance. Cinematically, he assures us (and himself) otherwise, but what choice does he have? Paradise can come only after the battle is won, and so whatever the odds, it’s the only fight worth fighting. This perspective is revealed in the obsessively unchanging thematics of the band’s other albums, whose titles include Advance and Follow, Praise the Fallen, and Of Faith, Power and Glory.
VNV Nation is perpetually stuck at the point of conflict, not because, like NON, VNV Nation glorifies violence or asserts dominance but because victory is such a distant hope that the music literally can’t yet conceive of what the ensuing brave new world would even look like. The chorus of “Kingdom” sings of the heaven beyond battle, but the lyrics can couch it in only the haziest, most provisional way: “I believe that we’ll conceive to make in Hell for us a heaven.” To Harris, Heaven isn’t here, and it’s not coming on its own; the best that can be mustered is his belief in a collective future plan to build a heaven, despite the very real presence of the Hell. It’s a fact of the lyric that an awful lot of words separate “I” and “heaven.” VNV stands for “Victory, Not Vengeance,” but instead of eyeing victory itself the band holds fast to the idea of victory—it’s the closest they’ll ever get. The gap between present war and future paradise is so pronounced here that, much to the credit of all involved, fans nearly universally understand VNV Nation’s music as one of longing and peace.
Covenant suggests that a sublime paradise beyond life and death is already around us. Apoptygma Berzerk sees its glow in the future beyond the horizon. We cannot grasp the sublime by definition, but in VNV Nation’s ethics, we—or at least the solitary “I”—must die trying. VNV Nation’s sense that their efforts are simultaneously necessary and futile is closely in line with the information war of the old industrialists. As is, for that matter, the band’s military imagery and garb—fascinations shared by neither Apoptygma Berzerk nor Covenant.
Futurepop is about yearning for wonder. Like nearly every previous incarnation of industrial music, it calls for an end to the invisible oppression that radiates from all authority structures. However, instead of invoking the abject sublime to glitch audiences into confronting their own assumptions about reason, power, and propriety, futurepop seeks to give audiences a glimpse of the wondrous sublime entailed by a life free from these quietly tyrannical assumptions. It focuses on that which lies beyond the battle, rather than on the ostensible enemy. It is victory, not vengeance.
Or so goes one line of thinking.
Despite—or more likely, because of—futurepop’s sudden and visible popularity within the global industrial scene, it was subject to harsh criticism in the early and mid-2000s. A musician in the subgenre himself, Tom Shear of U.S.–based act Assemblage 23 is quick to categorize it as “mostly people who can’t sing, over 90s-era trance patches.”8 But criticisms of musicians’ ability and genre borrowings mostly served to mask a deeper suspicion about futurepop. Its preponderance of melody and its avoidance of the abject both painted the subgenre’s unspeakable wondrous sublime as awfully Christian. Indeed, early interviewers of Stephan Groth frequently probed him about his Christianity, and VNV Nation does little to shake the question when in the single “Genesis” they declare, “With you I stand in hope that God will save us from ourselves.”
At almost every turn, industrial music is hostile to religion in general, and to Christianity in particular, viewing especially its organized forms as a control machine with a long historical and modern record of oppression; industrial music’s anti-Christian discography is of nearly incalculable size. A few thematically Christian acts had managed to gain acceptance within industrial music over time—notably Blackhouse (active since 1984) and Mentallo & the Fixer (active since 1992)—but they were perennially underground groups who made challenging, sprawling albums of noisy strangeness. Futurepop, on the other hand, was easy to listen to, and with sales of at least fifty thousand apiece the breakthrough albums of 2000 were popular to the point of ubiquity within the scene. To those concerned with industrial music’s impetus to escape musical, religious, and corporate dominance, futurepop’s tunefulness, reverence, and popularity represented a major step backwards, and perhaps even embodied hegemony itself.
Related to this backlash was the gravitation of some industrial fans and musicians toward harsher styles. Though futurepop was a dominant strain within industrial music, acts such as Converter, Noisex, and Hypnoskull developed a sound they dubbed “powernoise,” based on looped patterns of alternating noise timbres—pinching and abrasive—over a heavily distorted kick drum pulse. Largely instrumental and dance-oriented, powernoise was differentiated from techno styles on a structural level by its frequent absence of both harmonic content and timekeeping hi-hats. Powernoise is often more syncopated rhythmically than futurepop and EBM-derived styles, but this syncopation’s pleasure is grooveless and cerebral. In the intros and breakdowns of songs like Winterkälte’s 2001 “Green War Theme Three,” there is a willful challenge issued to dancers: find the downbeat, if you can. This is what techno scholar Mark Butler calls “turning the beat around,” but instead of playfully reframing rhythms, powernoise seeks first to disorient and then sternly to correct; it acts as provocateur, judge, and jailor.
On a broader aesthetic level, powernoise revels in sheer timbral ugliness and is a concentrated return after the 1990s to the aesthetics of the machine, replacing grungy guitars and EBM’s futuristic computer blips with the mechanical roar of 1980s power electronics, now given hi-fi brightness and quantized to a beat in hopes of melding industrial music’s old sense of formless dread with a rearticulation of rhythm’s fascist undertones. Though powernoise predates futurepop (it was coined in 1997 by Noisex’s Raoul Roucka), the redoubling of its club presence circa 2000 is best understood as an attempt by both musicians and DJs—typically connoisseurs and amateur historians of the genre—to reclaim an aesthetic of negation for industrial music.
If powernoise and futurepop staked out the poles of industrial dance music, then most of the post-2000 fare occupies the space between them. “Terror EBM” is one phrase that emerged to describe the new blend of harmonic simplicity, melodic synth riffs, harsh syncopated beats, and screamed distorted vocals, too angry to care about beholding wonder. Various inflections exist within this range, from artists influenced by Berlin minimal house music to mopey darkwave bands.
In this era, it grew even more important that bands land club hits in order to sell records and concert tickets. This happened for a few reasons. The internet’s rapid growth after 2000 helped put the industrial zine circuit largely out of business, but the websites that sought to replace the independent publications came, went, and were abandoned without warning. Thus advertising and interviews held less sway than they once did. The availability of CD burners and portable mp3 players also meant not only that music piracy was a growing concern but that fewer fans were listening to the already limited number of industrial-friendly radio shows—where DJs could play slower and newer music without the pressure to make people dance. The upshot was that artists started packing albums with 130 bpm dance songs, hoping that one would catch on; many releases of this sort don’t hold up well to extended listening. And if a musician wasn’t interested in making dance tracks and didn’t want to appease DJs with a remix album—an increasingly common gimmick—then she or he simply risked oblivion. As such, the already appreciable divide within industrial music between dance styles and ambient, martial, noise, and found sound grew only wider after the 1990s.
This is a shame, because the esoteric corners of industrial music have made important advances and initiated productive artistic and political dialogues. The arcane, magical sensibility of early industrial music’s offshoot neofolk genre managed, after a twenty-year incubation, to find relatively hip exponents with the likes of Antony and the Johnsons, Devendra Banhart, and Joanna Newsom. Einstürzende Neubauten made a string of breathtaking albums beginning with 2000’s Silence Is Sexy, and their family-friendly imitators Blue Man Group became a worldwide yuppie phenomenon. High-concept noise artists such as Matmos were churning out remarkable records under the spiritual influence of Throbbing Gristle, but none of this was even a blip on the radar for clubgoers.
In the midst of the wider culture’s post-2000 retromania, hipster acts such as Cold Cave, Flux Information Sciences, the Knife, and the Horrorist lifted gestures of vintage industrial music, but they treated it as little more than yet another 1980s artifact to reframe. These acts felt affection for vintage Nitzer Ebb and Einstürzende Neubauten but were completely uninterested in the industrial scene’s post-1989 family tree. They also embraced the idea that music could be fun—a notion almost completely missing from industrial attitudes, Tim Burton-esque carnival aesthetics aside.
The industrial community’s rejection of all this music also had to do with branding: neither these acts nor the quieter, thinkier stuff were on EBM mega-labels Dependent Records or Metropolis, but instead they share imprints with techno DJs, alt. rockers, indie rappers, and electroclash bands—musicians from styles that were surpassing industrial music in coolness at that cultural moment. New acts would need baritone singers, songs about pain, and a lot of black clothes if they wanted to break into the industrial club scene, and given its insularity and apparent sales cap, many found themselves rhetorically asking, “Why bother?”
It’s no surprise, then, that many of the musicians who’ve found success within the industrial scene since 2000—including Covenant, VNV Nation, and Apoptygma Berzerk—have been veteran acts formed before the millennium. It’s a rehashing of 1980s acts finding the widest audiences during the industrial gold rush of the 1990s. As a rule, industrial bands are long-lived. It might be nice to suppose that this has something to do with an unshakeable dedication to an ideological mission, but in many cases it makes less sense to call it persistence than failure to break up: the life of an industrial band, especially today, is one of minimal volatility.
For starters, there’s the fact that a huge number of industrial acts are essentially solo projects. The physical and conceptual space of an electronic studio doesn’t suggest collaboration: sequencers obsolesce live performance, and industrial music’s focus on the materiality of technology and recording media gives musicians little impetus to emphasize live playing of any kind. Thus Nine Inch Nails is Trent Reznor. Android Lust is Shikhee D’iordna. Suicide Commando is Johan von Roy. Friends and hired musicians might contribute and help out in concert—sometimes if only to fill the stage with the illusion of a “band”—but the key arithmetic equation of interpersonal relations here is that with fewer members involved, there are fewer reasons for a band to break up. Artists do sometimes take breaks; for example, Claus Larsen’s solo endeavor Leæther Strip was on hiatus from 1997 to 2006. But if the itch to make and share music returns, then a musician’s choice is either to start all over again or to revive the brand, reclaiming its built-in fan base with minimal effort.
Because music is so central to identity in subcultures like the modern gothic-industrial scene, fans are unlikely to cast off their old records when they buy new ones. Goth club playlists in particular are endlessly nostalgic reinscriptions of identity, and sociologist Paul Hodkinson has noted that fans of gothic and industrial music tend to remain socially and sartorially involved in the subculture deep into their thirties and beyond. Thus it’s no surprise that veteran industrial musicians periodically exhume their projects and take the stage at subcultural festivals. In 2010 and 2011, Leipzig’s humongous Wave Gotik Treffen event featured performances by Clock DVA, Nurse With Wound, Leæther Strip, Kirlian Camera, Attrition, the Bollock Brothers, Lustmord, Deine Lakaien, and Front 242—all bands founded before 1985. The sense of history and myth is deep. For some in the scene, the ostensibly totalizing mission of industrial music suggests that these bands of the past still have something to say about the future: artists and fans use one another to hang on to a rebellious, hopeful youth. In turn, bands such as Einstürzende Neubauten, KMFDM, and Nine Inch Nails have launched particularly inventive fan-rewarding initiatives in hopes of attracting and retaining lifetime supporters.
At its heart, the choice of whether an industrial band calls it a day is one born of a certain privilege. Whether sales are a thousand units per album or ten thousand, it is and has always been nearly impossible to earn a full-time living from industrial music, and so at any time in the genre’s history all but the most wildly popular, the most grant-subsidized, or the most independently wealthy artists have held day jobs.* The economic result is a normalizing one: industrial musicians almost never stake their livelihood on their band’s success, and those musicians with traditional careers—seemingly more numerous as time goes by—similarly seldom compromise professional achievement for the sake of their art.
In a strange conflict with the music’s oft-perceived sense of danger, there seems to be remarkably less personal risk taking among modern industrial bands than once there was. For example, heroin claimed the lives of a handful of important artists in the 1990s but is completely absent from the backstage area today.
Despite the industrial scene’s enduring institutions, there are persistent whispers among promoters, DJs, fans, bands, and labels that the social cachet, political relevance, artistic creativity, and subcultural vibrance of industrial music are not what they once were. Front Line Assembly’s Rhys Fulber says the scene is now “akin to a comic book convention.”9 How seriously should we take him? Or the 2011 Sideline.com thread in which “Cyberium” declares, “Industrial is dead.… If the big name industrial bands had half the skill of these dubstep house guys we’d be in business”?10 More seriously than the 1998 CD Industrial Music Is Dead by Polish EBM act Aggressiva 69? Or Jason Hanley’s dissertation claim that between 1989 and 1996 John Fryer—producer of Nine Inch Nails, Moev, Die Krupps, and Stabbing Westwards—“ruined industrial music”?11 Or the 1992 interview in which Bill Leeb declares, “Industrial music really was 8–10 years ago”?12 Or for that matter Jon Savage’s 1983 assertion that “‘industrial’ is now obsolete and useless”?13
On one hand, it’s easy to dismiss these claims as perennial, a harmless noise in the system’s works. However, as this book’s preceding pages illustrate, 2011, 1998, 1992, and 1983 were all very different moments for industrial music. Between these moments, the ebb and flow of technology, politics, and subculture shape the music and its meaning in more dimensions than a simple rise-and-fall narrative can reveal; indeed, despite these repeated and grave pronouncements of industrial music’s death, there’s still a thing that people do called industrial music. To consider these recurrent concerns over industrial music’s supposed death, one first needs to understand what the genre has been and what it has the potential to be.
This book’s previous pages have presented a timeline of industrial events. As a history, we’ll stop here; the present enforces its arbitrary law. But a few thoughts are worth reflecting on still, and the remaining pages offer a deeper interpretation of the genre’s values and materials—an interpretation that directly addresses the questions of death, life, politics, and industrial music’s legacy and future.
ICONIC:
Apoptygma Berzerk – “Kathy’s Song (Come Lie Next To Me)” (2000)
Combichrist – “Get Your Body Beat” (2006)
Covenant – “Brave New World (Radio Version)” (2006)
Haujobb – “Grounds”/“Overflow”/“Doubleyou” (1999)
VNV Nation – “Solitary” (1999)
ARCANE:
Chrysalide – “I Do Not Divert Eyes” (2012)
Coil – “Batwings (A Limnal Hymn)” (2000)
I, Parasite – “Thirst” (2003)
Index AI – “Aerial Fossils” (2009)