Very few of the groups who were initially called "industrial" liked the term, although from the mid-80s it became a word that bands embraced willingly, to the extent that nowadays even quite tedious rock bands claim to be industrial, and the jazz / classical ensemble, Icebreaker, has even bizarrely been described as an "industrial" group. Monte Cazazza is usually acknowledged as inventing the term "industrial music", and the label used the name in a very specific sense - as a negative comment on the desire for "authenticity" that still dominated music in the seventies. It would be hard to disagree with the suggestion that prior to the formation of Throbbing Gristle as a side-project of performance art group COUM Transmissions in late 1975 industrial music did not exist and certainly the genre took its name from the label that Throbbing Gristle set up, Industrial Records. Few, if any, of its tactics and methods were truly original, although the way it combined its components was very much of its time.īefore the prehistory can be properly explored, we need to know what this "industrial music" is, or was. For all that industrial music set out to provide the shock of the new, it's impossible to understand its achievements without a context to place them in. Instead, I offer a prehistory, a look at heritage, tradition and ancestry. Still, this article isn't that history that will have to wait for someone better qualified than I. A more recent contribution to the field, Dave Thompson's Industrial Revolution suffers from Americocentrism, major omissions, basic errors and from a concentration on electrobeat and industrial rock to the near exclusion of all else. Unfortunately, the best books on industrial music (Re/Search's Industrial Culture Handbook and Charles Neal's Tape Delay) were both written when the genre was still fresh, still on the move, and neither tells us much about where the music came from. After all, there are histories of reggae, rap, and countless rock, jazz, folk and classical histories. I've often thought that somebody really ought to write a history of industrial music. Instead of making an odd description, I thought of quoting somebody who tried to make a little (pre)history of what we call today - industrial music. I put up a pack of one of the genres that's not covered so well as the other ones here, rb. Since it's my 100th upload here, I thought of doing something more than an usual upload.
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