From dtam@epas.utoronto.ca Sat May 6 15:05:46 1995 Date: Sat, 6 May 1995 01:25:54 -0400 From: dtam To: dtam@epas.utoronto.ca Subject: personal.html A Personal View of INDUSTRIAL Before you go on and read the rest of this file, I would recommend that you go over the FAQ for the newsgroup rec.music.industrial, especially the section on the history of industrial music. I shall refer to the information contained in the FAQ in this document. Before I go on, I probably should give a little disclaimer. This document contains the reasons why I listen to industrial. It does not have anything to do with what falls into the category of industrial, why you should listen to industrial, or any other topic that has been discussed in rmi (rec.music.industrial) or any other forum. There have been some rather extensive flame wars on this subject, which I do not want to participate in. I will however give my own opinion of what I consider industrial, and why. It has not been a very long time since I have been listening to industrial, about three years, one of which I spent in complete ignorance of what industrial was meant to be about. Ministry was the big industrial thing for me then, and I still think that Twitch and Land of Rape and Honey are excellent albums. However, quite a lot has changed since then. I still do not own a lot of the industrial that I would like to. I neither have the time nor the money to collect what I would like to. I learnt more about industrial from rmi, and from the FAQ. It's simply amazing what you can learn by just sitting back and listening, and keeping an open mind. I still have a long way to go though, to try and figure out what was going on in the heads of the members of Throbbing Gristle when they started industrial records, and I have yet to find out everything that they produced. I have started unloading material that I had collected for groups for my WWW page. And at this point, I am seriously considering making a slight reversal on this and collecting everything that Throbbing Gristle had done, the interviews they gave and so on. But again, time and money are major constraints. This curiosity stems almost entirely from an interview that I had read, in the Industrial Culture Handbook. (An excellent place to start if you want to find out more about industrial. The history of industrial given in the FAQ is from that book. The full reference for that book is also present in the FAQ.) I must admit that part of my fascination for industrial comes from the fact that it appears to be extremely inaccessible. There are few books on industrial, if any, in most major bookstores. Most people tend to dismiss it for noise. This inaccessibility has made me intensely curious. I have completely failed to understand why industrial should be this inaccessible, even if the style of music is completely alien to most people. One of the albums that I still consider industrial all the way through is Skinny Puppy's Last Rights. This was the third group I had invested in after Ministry. (The second was Front 242.) This is the album that got me really interested in industrial. I had not heard anything like it before in western popular music, and the closest parallel I could draw was with Indian classical music. The latter of course is very, very different, but the similarity for me lay in the fact that there wasn't a single rhythm that was followed through the album. Rather, it changed very rapidly, and yet in a manner that was quite well thought out, melodious at times yet quite harsh jarring at others. Soon after this I discovered the world wide web, and decided to set up some pages for myself. The WWW at the time had just started catching on. There were only a handful of individuals who had set up pages for themselves on the Northwestern campus. I posted an article in rec.music.industrial, asking for materials for the WWW page. I gathered all the resources I could from there, and discovered that there were few people, if any, who had put anything on the WWW for industrial. The only person who had put anything on before me, to my knowlege, was Jake Harris. He had put up some information on the albums that he owns, which included Skinny Puppy. All I had to start with was material that I had downloaded from cs.uwp.edu, and a couple of other links to the FAQ, a couple of FTP sites and so on. And over the past year and a half, there has been an enormous quantity of material added to the net. For this reason I decided that there is no need for me to add any more information related to specific groups to the industrial page, and decided to concentrate on the ideals behind industrial. This task has just started, and the first effort in this direction is the Total Dementia page. There are a lot of things about industrial that caught my attention. My interest was in heavy metal before I got into industrial, which I sometimes still listen to. The first industrial album that I truly enjoyed was Ministry's The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste. Then I acquired Twitch and Land of Rape and Honey, and finally Psalm 69. The last of these I listened to a lot when I first bought it, but now I hardly ever do. I got some Front 242 from my brother, and then bought Skinny Puppy's Last Rights. The last of these marked a turning point. I think this is Skinny Puppy's finest work, and am eagerly awaiting the next album. I do hope that they take the music along the same direction as Last Rights, only further. Currently, I am uncertain what I would call industrial. It does not depend on the group, that is for certain, because there are some albums that I would call industrial for any given group that I would refuse to classify as industrial for others. Even within an album, I would call some songs more industrial than others. Industrial to me is something that is unconventional and experimental. At times it is chaotic, as the world generally is. At others it is very melodic, though even these tracks have an underlying emptiness, as though ephemeral and fragile. A favorite is melody and music created out of noise, which represents an attempt at making sense of a world gone mad, and getting something just slightly better than chaos out of it. Industrial has to be looked at and listened to carefully if one is to make any sense out of it. The same way that one has to look at the world very carefully to make any sense out of it. All in all, it is an excellent representation of the way I tend to see the world. But there is a real problem right now, in that the groups seem to be running out of ideas, and rehashing old things. I love Lab Report, but what they have done seems quite reminiscent of Throbbing Gristle. I do not know if they have done this on purpose, but it is an excellent effort, and I do hope to see a lot more out of them. I tend to look for both music and lyrical content in my music. A lot of the current industrial makes heavy use of MIDI, sequencing and sampling. This can easily be overdone, so much so that you end up at the fringes of popular music. True, these techniques and this equipment has generated a lot of new material that would otherwise be impossible to come by. But it has been to a great extent overdone. The distorted voice is now a cliché, and samples are to be found in almost any industrial group out there. There certainly seems to be a general lack of original material and the experimental nature of industrial seems to be disappearing. So much so that I would be tempted to say that industrial is nearly dead. I am certainly not willing to say that industrial is dead just because Throbbing Gristle is, or because their ideals have been modified. On the contrary, I see it as an evolution of industrial. There is a huge spectrum of bands that come under the umbrella of industrial. I am not willing to admit that all of these are industrial, but it is good enough for me that I have a choice in believing what I wish to. One of these is Nine Inch Nails. There have been a number of flame wars on rmi concerning NIN. I used to think of NIN as industrial, but that was before the last album. It now appears that Trent Reznor is interested in whining away his life, and that it is unlikely I will see any original thoughts from him any time soon. Musically I do agree that he is talented. All in all, industrial I think is about discovery. It is about finding the most effective means of conveying the chaos, lies and deception around us. This may be done by any means one chooses to. So far I have only seen work in the domain of music. I do hope that someone out there realizes that video may be a far more effective means of conveying these ideas, and tries working with this medium as well. smishra@nwu.edu