Assimilate, p.1
Assimilate, page 1
ASSIMILATE
ASSIMILATE
A Critical History of Industrial Music
S. ALEXANDER REED
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© S. Alexander Reed 2013
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reed, S. Alexander.
Assimilate : a critical history of industrial music / S. Alexander Reed.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-19-983258-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-19-983260-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Industrial music—History and criticism. I. Title.
ML3528.7.R44 2013
781.64809—dc23 2012042281
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Publication for this book was supported by the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword by Stephen Mallinder
Introduction: The Front Lines
PART I
TECHNOLOGY AND THE PRECONDITIONS OF INDUSTRIAL MUSIC
Chapter 1 Italian Futurism
Chapter 2 William S. Burroughs
Chapter 3 Industrial Music and Art Music
PART II
INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY
Chapter 4 Northern England
Chapter 5 Berlin
Chapter 6 San Francisco
Chapter 7 Mail Art, Tape Technology, and the Network
PART III
INDUSTRIAL MUSICAL STYLE
Chapter 8 The Tyranny of the Beat: Dance Music and Identity Crisis
Chapter 9 “After Cease to Exist”: England 1981–1985
Chapter 10 Body to Body: Belgian EBM 1981–1985
Chapter 11 Industrial Music as a Theater of Cruelty
Chapter 12 “She’s a Sleeping Beast”: Skinny Puppy and the Feminine Gothic
PART IV
INDUSTRIAL POLITICS
Chapter 13 Back and Forth: Industrial Music and Fascism
Chapter 14 White Souls in Black Suits: Industrial Music and Race
PART V
PEOPLE AND INDUSTRIAL MUSIC
Chapter 15 Wild Planet: WaxTrax! Records and Global Dance Scenes
Chapter 16 Q: Why Do We Act Like Machines? A: We Do Not.
Chapter 17 Death
Chapter 18 Wonder
Suture: From the Author’s Diary
Postscript: Is There Any Escape for Noise?
Sources Cited
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Invaluable commentary, questions, and suggestions throughout this project came from several anonymous readers and also from my fellow scholars Ian Reyes, Marsha Bryant, Daphne Carr, Robert Fink, Mary Lewis, Andrew Weintraub, Rebekah Ahrendt, Philip Tagg, Zarah Ersoff, and Galen Brown. Helpful discussions and opinions were offered by attendees at conferences where earlier versions of this book’s chapters were presented. Amy Gorelick, Lee Hendricks, and Phil Sandifer also inspired, advised, and cooked good food. Vital early manuscript guidance came courtesy of Jane Behnken. Thomas Finnegan provided detailed and witty copy editing. Suzanne Ryan is to thank for believing in this book enough to bring it to Oxford University Press.
Thanks to all of those who granted interviews or whose incidental conversations made their way into this book; whether you’re quoted directly or not in these pages, you helped to shape them. I’m also grateful to those who helped me with archival research and with helping me find some obscure sources: James “Ned” Kirby, Kelly Litzenberger, and Walt Miller deserve mention here by name. Thanks also to my army of volunteer transcribers: Daniel Siepmann, Amber Braun, Leslie McCluskey-Eissing, John Aho, Stefanie Acevedo, James Young, Donovan Howe, Andria Poiarkoff, Amanda Swenson, Morgan Rich, Sarah Bushey, Adam Scott Neal, Lindsey O’Brien, and Holly Ray.
My colleagues at the University of Florida and New York University have been immensely supportive throughout the writing of this book. Especially vital has been the trusting encouragement of John Duff, Paul Richards, Paul Koonce, James Paul Sain, Leslie Odom, Jennifer Thomas, Silvio Dos Santos, Margaret Butler, Mutlu Çitim-Kepic, and Amanda Mayberry. The University of Florida Fine Arts Scholarship Enhancement Fund assistance in my 2011 research travel. Penelope Collins, Aiva Veinberga, Sarah Manvel, and Koen, Annette, and Jaap Brand were wonderfully hospitable during these expeditions. Further funding for this book was provided by the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society.
Thanks to the countless people around the world who have made, written about, and contextualized this music. Those who personally helped me know, enjoy, and think critically about it are too many to name, but they include my sisters, Robyn and Karen, Kurt Thorn, Doug Morse, Chris Boone, Ian Struckhoff, Rosemary Ledesma, Jacob Racusin, Brian Ales, Rik Millhouse, Aaron Fuleki, and Jeremy Long. I am particularly grateful to my parents for tolerating my lifelong immersion in this music. Finally, I owe special thanks to my wife, Meredith Collins, whose love, patience, proofreading, academic camaraderie, encouragement, and smart conversation make writing, thinking, and music better every day.
Foreword
A brief word of warning. I have to confess to a level of discomfort when the term industrial is put to me. As a musician and producer who, it would seem, had more than a passing flirtation with what the media and music consumers broadly label “industrial music,” or “industrial beats,” I tend to bristle a little. As a founding member of Cabaret Voltaire, a group who hail from a northern British industrial city, it seems I can offer little defense, though. We made music that was often sonically brutal, we challenged ideas of authority and control, we toyed with moody and often taboo imagery, we were simultaneously intellectual and anti-intellectual, we thought ourselves iconoclastic, and we wore raincoats sometimes; in our defense it was the north and it did rain occasionally.
Perhaps the initial reaction is justifiable, as “industrial” was never a term we applied to ourselves. Wary of being burdened with a media definition, we felt a natural fear of having a spectrum of work reduced to a single classification. There was also an issue of courtesy. Throbbing Gristle, with a commensurate serving of gravitas and mischievousness, tagged their record label Industrial Music for Industrial People. As friends and peers, we were honored to have releases on the label, but understandably we avoided any identity conflict out of respect.
In truth it has to be said that the muted response to being called “industrial” is much more complex. Fearful of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, we did not find the idea that we would become a short-lived sonic reification of our city’s monocultural identity appealing. Similarly, we felt under no obligation to answer for a whole subsequent genre as the media began to box it up. Like all artists, we felt responsible for ourselves alone, and as the industrial banner unfurled to incorporate disparate protagonists, some too singular in ideology for our tastes, a diplomatic distance was put in place. But perhaps for many who are invested in the meaning of the “I-word,” particularly in the context of the dominant rock modality, this arm’s-length riposte has put “industrial” outside the general music discourse or academic reflection for too long. Many of the implications, connections, and consequences of the music made in its name have been overlooked, denied proper scrutiny.
It should be recognized that music movements are in large part externally constructed and driven; they are convenient labels to help market and shelve. In truth, music and the creative process do not work in isolation or mutual exclusion but are part of a much more complex series of associations and connections. There is clearly a need to progress beyond classification to unpack the rich complexity contained inside. It is important and appropriate to look at the wider contexts in order to appraise the etymology, processes, ideologies, and legacies of what we term industrial. This book addresses the industrial cultural spectrum from esoteric to populist, presenting evidence of the diverse and dispersed roots of the industrial story and its sonic, text-based, visual, and performance heritage.
Music,
The industrial story, at least for me, acknowledges the importance of time and place. At the beginning of the 1980s, the defining period, there was a fusion of raw elements: readily available technology, postpunk ideology, a vibrant DIY ethos, burgeoning Reaganomics, and a whiff of insurrection in the air. Speaking a little of my own industrial credentials, those boxes were clearly ticked. To those of us living and making sounds in a northern English city, there was unavoidable synergy between the place and its output. Everyone was collaterally implicated. The city’s sounds during the 1980s were both a considered response and a practical resolution to the industrial atrophy that was well under way by this time. Against a backdrop of Thatcherite fiscal policy and regional confrontation, Sheffield’s regeneration was in every sense postindustrial. Built upon the bones of its once-thriving steel and cutlery production, the abandoned offices, workshops, and factories proved useful to would-be musicians, producers, and artists who would come to occupy these lost properties. Cultural redemption came to those who were happy to exploit Youth Employment schemes and the cheap council housing of the time to provide their own solutions to southern capital abandonment. However, as much as the geography was helping configure the sounds that began to emanate—Clock DVA, Hula, Human League, BEF, et al.—many of a northern disposition feared entrapment, the conviction being that music was an agent of escape, an effective means of transcending those very spaces and signifiers that shaped or confined you.
From a creative perspective, this conflict between day-to-day reality and otherness offered a useful tension central to what was produced. The shiny modernity of technology, an escape route to an idealized future, was in turn anchored in the more subversive dirt of reality. The pyschogeography of the city was an indelible stain on us, as I’m sure it was for others. Drop hammers, fiery furnaces, and steel forges—the clichéd sounds and sights of heavy industry were part of the sonic deal being made. In many cases, this filtering was pretty literal. In our case, the first gig we ever played, which had some dynamic consequences, was perhaps inflamed by the use of a tape loop of a steam hammer (from Ostend, as Richard proudly pronounced) as the rhythm track. “Nag Nag Nag,” a more successful Cabs single, made sure that it wasn’t to be emasculated by claims of rank commercialism; percussion fills came courtesy of bashing metal keyboard legs. Some of our earlier machines were ex-government tape recorders, dangerously heavy and built, it would seem, to withstand nuclear attack. For our part, we walked the walk.
The inspiration of Dada offered a guidebook of how to go about deconstructing a world that did not adequately represent the one we actually inhabited. Suitably driven by Duchamp, Tzara, and other past pugnacious artists, this was a sincere if somewhat naïve attempt to tear up the plans and devise new strategies. Process meant the rejection of traditional methods and instrumentation. The recording studio became the most valuable writing tool; tape machines, effected voices, “treated” instruments, tape loops, and drum machines. Song structures and linear arrangements were abandoned; the logocentric norm of most contemporary music was dismissed for a sonic democracy. The music was intended to be primal, visceral, and provocative. Noise, for us a Sheffield birthright, was the most effective tool in the box. Although most at the time were unaware of many of the readings into the inherent political and social power of noise, it was clearly a language of subversion. Noise defied order and control. It was a musical taboo. Sonic belligerence. It could destabilize. This was not entertainment, but it was fun. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music worked, for us, in perfect … well, perhaps not harmony.
To understand the thinking behind the sounds, there needs to be some recognition also of the images that were processed. It can be argued that an expanding media meant the post-1960s were primarily visually driven. Bombarded with television and film images, much of the music that was produced under the industrial banner sought to align sounds with other media. Music was in effect a translating medium. For many bands at the time, inspired by Velvet Underground and the dark psychedelia of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the thinking was to encourage immersion into a total experience. Multimedia and text were an important component, an attack on all fronts; like others, we filtered, collated, and cut up visuals in true Gysin style to accompany gigs and later produce video releases. Still, rather than anodyne, psychedelic textures and colors, punk had conditioned most into the power of representation the shock tactics of realism. This was a generation seeped in the imagery of the Cold War, the inheritors of Oppenheimer’s nightmare. As an example, for British players the vision was made startlingly real by the disturbing footage in Peter Watkins’s 1965 documentary-drama War Games that followed the buildup and aftermath of a Soviet nuclear attack on a UK city. The sights and sounds were strange pre-echoes of the Burroughs-esque dystopian world we inhabited. As a group, we continued to draw on this imagery. Our 1984 video for “Sensoria” was shot in the abandoned hospital where the postnuclear apocalypse Threads had been filmed.
Although never perceiving this as any kind of movement or collective, there was a clear sense of connection. Throbbing Gristle, as mentioned, were key agents and offered a gateway for a number of kindred spirits—23 Skidoo, David Tibet, Last Few Days, et al. On a wider scale, the importance cannot be overstated of Vale at RE/Search Publications, whose San Franciscan North Beach apartment became an important transit point and destination during the late 1970s and 1980s for musicians, writers, and an array of general nonconformists. Vale’s seatless VW Beetle was industrial by default, and collaborator Mark Pauline, artist and inventor extraordinaire, made kinetic art that encapsulated the zeitgeist perfectly. Vale and RE/Search’s connections to the City Lights bookshop around the corner added extra cachet, linking those passing through the North Beach hub to America’s postwar renegade literati. Across the water, Chrome were a big influence at the time, and we had our home-grown companions—Hula, Clock DVA, and Workforce, to name a few. It is interesting to note that at this point, as a shared sense of identity was beginning to emerge, the fear of being trapped or simply standing still meant that most looked to their own map to find an interesting path to the next destination. Other people had joined the conversation. When Cabaret Voltaire moved to Some Bizzare Records, there was a growing sense of collective spirit, but one (it must be said) that had no name and no slogan—just attitude and ideas. The label, whose rise was colorful and whose ultimate demise was a divisive and cautionary tale, drew together a roster that included two of the toughest kids on the block, Einstürzende Neubauten and Test Dept., who literally played with the detritus of industry. These together with Coil, Psychic TV, and Jim “Foetus” Thirlwell ensured that the label was defining its own aesthetic, leading rather than being led.
There was also acknowledgement of changing dynamics during the mid-to-late 1980s, particularly from the east coast of the United States, where perceptions of beats and dance floor cultures were being transformed. The industrial ethos, which sought to configure body and mind, was being remodeled by fresh rhythms that equally made play with social and cultural themes in nocturnal spaces. The embryonic hip-hop and electro sounds emanating from that side of the Atlantic Ocean were making an impact on embedded understandings of race, gender, and the body. It seems that British audiences who had already absorbed soul and Jamaican rhythms into their sonic lexicon assimilated these beats and cultures more readily. With changing drug practices as a timely accelerant, it was only a matter of time before the tougher beats of Detroit techno would form an affinity with places like Sheffield and Düsseldorf. As is often the case with game-changing music, this became a loose cartel of second-tier cities, places away from the moneyed business capitals that shaped their cultural identity through manufacturing, ancillary trades, and pastimes. In the late 1980s, Richard Kirk and I worked in Chicago recording with house producer Marshall Jefferson, but also spending time with Al Jourgensen and Chris Connelly making the Acid Horse twelve inch for the pivotal WaxTrax! label. As outsiders, it seemed natural—no conflict of ideology or technologies, just simple shifts of emphasis. The sounds evolve. Sheffield made its own adjustments, integrated its cultural idiosyncrasies. Warp Records became the city’s first real label, and significantly, with a track by the seemingly industrial sounding Forgemasters, the label would also become known for Sweet Exorcist’s and LFO’s onomatopoeic “bleep” releases. Although not part of the industrial canon, nevertheless the sound of industry was made corporeal.
