Genre Extravaganza: INDUSTRIAL TECHNO

[satiemaniac]

INDUSTRIAL TECHNO

"My music is very visceral, it's a confrontation in itself, it's not very palatable, it certainly isn't easy listening, it fits uncomfortably within techno. That's the kind of disturbance I bring. I don't have to do anything special to make interference happen. It's natural." – Karl O'Connor (Regis)

"Sometimes people need a great intensity to feel something if they are disconnected from themselves. Also, overload is a very effective hypnotic technique." – Anthony Child (Surgeon)

"Desocialization waves desolate telecommercial space, until impending human extinction becomes accessible as a dance-floor. What is the scale of now? It isn't a matter of informing the mind, but of deprogramming the body. Amongst the strobes, artificial cool, and inorganic attack beat, dark-side K-war machinery resiliently persists, luring the forces of monopolism down into free-fire zones of fatal intensity, where promiscuous anorgasmic sexualities slide across tactile space, meandering fractally into wet electric distributed conflicts continuous with their terminal consequences." – Nick Land, Fanged Noumena

It was always going to end up like this sooner or later. Once the afrofuturistic ambitions of techno originators Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson had to go toe to toe with a bleak reality where even voting the bad guys out of office wasn't a tenable solution for the horrors of Reagan and Thatcher's neoliberalism, their music, intrinsically political and dissociative itself, was morphed into something even more stunningly nihilistic, raw, and pent up. As visions of the future changed from Afronauts funkitizing galaxies, in the words of George Clinton's Starchild, to hyperreal dystopias with accelerated production and consumption cycles, and the final flame of revolution was gently blown out by the Berlin Wall and late capitalism's anti-Nostradamus, Francis Fukuyama, the machine whirr became the backing beat for a terrifying, bone-crunching new sound: Industrial Techno.

THE INFLUENCES
Industrial techno borrows a lot of its aesthetic from early proto-techno electronic performers like Kraftwerk, but without the same bright colors and sickeningly sweet irony. In industrial techno, die mensch maschine is much more likely to be something of a compactor for Soylent Green than it is a manufacturer of fine automobiles in which one can fahren fahren fahren auf der Autobahn. Of course, more direct influences include the aforementioned Belleville Three in 1980s Detroit. Two directly preceding movements, minimal and dub techno, had very similar aesthetic goals in their darkening of techno themes until they were sparsely present, just riding on stripped down, confrontational beats. For reference, here are a few precursors to the Industrial Techno sound:

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The Man-Machine by Kraftwerk

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Innovator by Derrick May

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BCD by Basic Channel

Of course, on the Industrial side of things, the artists involved in Industrial Techno took many stylistic cues from acts like Throbbing Gristle, Einsturzende Neubauten, and the like, and the music has a lot in common with the Neue Deutsche Welle. As Industrial is a parent genre of diverse sub-genres from EBM to Industrial Rock, etc., it's difficult to cleanly make a linear line of influence from one place to another, and it's difficult to assess the level of influence that these parallel digressions took. Still, seeing as Industrial Techno comes to a head in the later '80s and early '90s, it is safe to assume that the late '70s and early '80s stuff was being listened to by some of the seminal influences and pioneers of Industrial Techno. There's also the matter of geographic proximity, with Britain and Germany being the epicenters of various counter-cultural art movements that bear striking similarities to and are clear precedents of Industrial Techno. Below are some examples of pre-emergence Industrial music that could be included in this broad discussion:

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The Second Annual Report by Throbbing Gristle

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Zeichnungen Des Patienten O. T. by Eins... Neubauten

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Nail by Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel

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Alles Ist Gut by D.A.F.

THE AESTHETIC
Industrial techno is typified musically by its "parallels with factories and the rhythm of machinery." (RYM). The album cover aesthetics and reserved stage personas of individual DJs evoke a suffocating atmosphere that shares a nihilistic fascination with darkly taboo subjects with sister genres such as powerviolence. For example, Regis's Penetration has a variety of track titles evoking sexual domination ("Get on Your Knees," "Slave to the Inevitable," "Her Surrender"), and Surgeon's Screw the Roses EP features an individual with face taped over and hand bound. Much of the aural content of industrial techno comprises raw, gripping, heavily percussive constructions that tend to have, like much techno, repetitive beat patterns that shift quite gradually over the course of a composition.

THE HISTORY
London has historically been the home of industrial techno. Industrial Techno itself is perhaps most readily associated with Karl O'Connor, a DJ who performs under the name Regis. Along with Anthony Child, who goes by Surgeon, he performed as British Murder Boys and established what is referred to as the Birmingham Sound. Along with Peter Sutton, a.k.a. Female, the former two DJs broke out into the subsidiary label Sandwell District through the aughts from their previous home on Downwards Records. The three have also released material on Berlin label Tresor, a major techno label that has also played host to Jeff Mills, Robert Hood, Model 500, Drexciya, and other visionaries.

THE ESSENTIALS
Industrial techno is more of an offshoot of major techno sounds from the end of the '80s and the entire '90s that incorporates elements from properly Industrial music and as such is somewhat of a niche from which only a few truly essential artists and labels emerge, though the entirety of their output tends to be highly memorable and powerful music. A crash course essentials guide for strictly industrial techno is below:

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Gymnastics by Regis

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Adolescence: The Complete Recordings 19...1 by Regis

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Force + Form by Surgeon

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Screw The Roses by Surgeon

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Magneze by Surgeon

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Don't Give Way to Fear by British Murder Boys

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Learn Your Lesson by British Murder Boys

Into the Exotic by Female

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Negative Fascination by Silent Servant

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Sandwell District by Sandwell District

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Hard Education by Various Artists

CONTINUED RELEVANCE AND EXCELLENCE
Industrial techno is hardly a past-tense musical movement, and incredible releases and club scenes continue to be cultivated to this day. I've selected a handful of favored recent releases for perusal, but this is much more a personal list than anything else:

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History Survivors by Lucy & Silent Servant

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C.V. Is Dead by Oscar Mulero

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Untitled (Sheworks001) by Karenn

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Kino-i by An-i

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Testpressing#005 by Demdike Stare

[satiemaniac]

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[Norman Bates]

Will listen, thanks! I know nothing about this. You do make it sound like it's very cerebral and #abstractqualities, can you still dance to it?

[joyofdivision]

Love what you've done here, can't wait to delve into this stuff. I always assumed NIN were industrial..

Don't be sad, not many of us around on Saturday evening

[pa]

very useful thread, industrial techno is an unknown genre to me
thanks for sharing this

[sp4cetiger]

It looks interesting, I'll check some of these out. Don't know much about it or I'd contribute more.

[meccalecca]

[satiemaniac]

[Norman Bates]

Do you think EBM could be counted as an influence then?

[undefined]

Fantastic thread Satie. So is it safe to say that industrial techno as a genre takes more from the "techno" end of the spectrum? (i.e. has negligible influence from the likes of Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire)

Also does Einstürzende Neubauten fall anywhere within the sphere of influences on the genre?