Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music (Pop Music, Culture and Identity) [1st ed. 2022] 3030924610, 9783030924614

Table of contents :
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: Assemblages and Interventions
First Plateau
Second Plateau
Third Plateau
Fourth Plateau
Fifth Plateau
Bodies, Noise, Power
Works Cited
Chapter 2: “My Body Disgusts Me”: Swans, Biopolitics, and the Hangman’s Noose of Success
Works Cited
Chapter 3: Nafada: Industrial, Hip-Hop, and the Diasporic Condition
Industrial Music and Its Aesthetic
The Influence of Hip-Hop
The Diasporic Condition and Resisting Hegemony
Hip-Hop and Muslim Identities
Rewriting MENA Identities
Works Cited
Chapter 4: “The Odds of the Body”: Clipping. and Escaping the Power Hold on the Black Body
Works Cited
Chapter 5: All Too Human: Industrial Bodies and Anti-bodies in the Time of AIDS
Anti-human Biopower
Coil’s Tainted Love
Works Cited
Chapter 6: Chance Meeting: Disembodied Voices in the Work of Nurse with Wound and Cabaret Voltaire
Premonition
A Precise History of Industrial Music
The Dadda’s Intoxication
Ghostalk
(I Don’t Want to Have) Easy Listening
Messages Received
The Power (of Their Knowledge)
Double Vision
Scissor Rock Bicycle Revelation
The Continuous Accident
From Another Source
Works Cited
Chapter 7: The Last Attempt at Paradise: Early Industrial Culture in Kansas
The Tragedy of Princess the Poodle: Short-Term Memory
LARD: The Ambience of Everyday Life
Schloss Tegal: The Failed Exorcism
Works Cited
Chapter 8: Industrial Music and Inner Experience: Aural Abrasion as a Window to Post-Subjectivity
The Abandonment of the Lyric
Arrhythmia
The Advent of the Aural Posthuman
Works Cited
Chapter 9: The Occultural Side of Industrial: From Its Origins to Industrial Black Metal
Works Cited
Chapter 10: “Happiness in Slavery,” or Industrial Erotic
Works Cited
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

POP MUSIC, CULTURE AND IDENTITY

Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music

Edited by Jason Whittaker · Elizabeth Potter

Pop Music, Culture and Identity Series Editors Stephen Clark Graduate School Humanities and Sociology University of Tokyo Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan Tristanne Connolly Department of English St Jerome’s University Waterloo, ON, Canada Jason Whittaker School of English & Journalism University of Lincoln Lincoln, Lincolnshire, UK

Pop music lasts. A form all too often assumed to be transient, commercial and mass-cultural has proved itself durable, tenacious and continually evolving. As such, it has become a crucial component in defining various forms of identity (individual and collective) as influenced by nation, class, gender and historical period. Pop Music, Culture and Identity investigates how this enhanced status shapes the iconography of celebrity, provides an ever-expanding archive for generational memory and accelerates the impact of new technologies on performing, packaging and global marketing. The series gives particular emphasis to interdisciplinary ­ approaches that go beyond musicology and seeks to validate the informed testimony of the fan alongside academic methodologies. More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14537

Jason Whittaker  •  Elizabeth Potter Editors

Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music

Editors Jason Whittaker University of Lincoln Lincoln, UK

Elizabeth Potter University of York York, UK

ISSN 2634-6613     ISSN 2634-6621 (electronic) Pop Music, Culture and Identity ISBN 978-3-030-92461-4    ISBN 978-3-030-92462-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92462-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction: Assemblages and Interventions  1 Elizabeth Potter and Jason Whittaker 2 “My Body Disgusts Me”: Swans, Biopolitics, and the Hangman’s Noose of Success 19 James McCrea 3 Nafada: Industrial, Hip-Hop, and the Diasporic Condition  37 Rachael Gunn, Susie Khamis, and Steve Collins 4 “The Odds of the Body”: Clipping. and Escaping the Power Hold on the Black Body 55 Daniel Gillespie 5 All Too Human: Industrial Bodies and Anti-­bodies in the Time of AIDS 71 Jason Whittaker 6 Chance Meeting: Disembodied Voices in the Work of Nurse with Wound and Cabaret Voltaire 87 Rupert Loydell

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Contents

7 The Last Attempt at Paradise: Early Industrial Culture in Kansas109 Francis X. Connor 8 Industrial Music and Inner Experience: Aural Abrasion as a Window to Post-Subjectivity129 Jay Fraser 9 The Occultural Side of Industrial: From Its Origins to Industrial Black Metal143 M. Cecilia Marchetto Santorun 10 “Happiness in Slavery,” or Industrial Erotic163 Elizabeth Potter Works Cited177 Index195

Notes on Contributors

Steve  Collins is a senior lecturer in the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language and Literature at Macquarie University, Sydney. His research focuses on the intersections of creativity, technology, disruption, and law. He also produces industrial and electronic music in Konqistador, z(cluster), INfest8, and Other, as well as numerous remixing projects. Francis  X.  Connor  is Associate Professor of English at Wichita State University. A Shakespearean and Book Historian, his first book, Literary Folios and Ideas of the Book in Early Modern English, was published by Palgrave in 2014. He is working with Darren DeFrain on No Choice But Action (University Press of Kansas), a history of post-punk and indie scenes in Kansas from the 1970s through the 1990s. Jay Fraser  is a writer and poet from Lincolnshire. A master’s student, he graduated from the University of Lincoln in 2019 and is interested in the philosophy of anarchism, horror, and the post-human. He watches too many movies and even enjoys some of them. Daniel Gillespie  is a PhD student at Idaho State with a wide range of interests including modernism, rap music, and twenty-first-century American culture. He has presented on Get Out as a zombie movie, the Adult Swim short Too Many Cooks and destruction of self in Rick and Morty. His PhD explores BoJack Horseman and sincerity in reaction of postmodern cynicism.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Rachael Gunn  is a lecturer in the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language and Literature at Macquarie University, Sydney. She is an interdisciplinary researcher interested in the constructions of gender and the dancing body, the intersections between theory and practice, and Sydney’s hip-hop dance scene. She is a practising breaker and is a member of the Sydney breaking crew 143 Liverpool Street Familia. Susie Khamis  is Senior Lecturer in Public Communication at University of Technology Sydney. Her research areas are branding, representations of cultural diversity, and consumer cultures. She has written widely in these areas, and her research focuses on how successful global brands represent cultural diversity in their marketing media. Rupert  Loydell is Senior Lecturer in the School of Writing and Journalism at Falmouth University, the editor of Stride magazine, and contributing editor to International Times. He is a widely published poet whose most recent poetry books are Dear Mary (2017) and A Confusion of Marys (2020). He has edited anthologies for Salt, Shearsman and KFS, written for academic journals such as Punk & Post-Punk, New Writing, Revenant, Axon, and Musicology Research, and contributed co-written chapters to Brian Eno. Oblique Music (2016), Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and Music in Twin Peaks: Listen to the Sounds! (2021). James McCrea  is a PhD student in Manchester Metropolitan University’s Gothic Studies department whose research focuses on materialities of the body as well as iconologies of death and dying. Elizabeth Potter  is a PhD student at the University of York. Her thesis focuses on William Blake’s marginalia to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1798). She analyses the manuscript notes on material and conceptual levels to provide insight into Blake’s aesthetics and artistic philosophies. Beyond her thesis, she is also interested in transatlantic studies, visual culture, and affect theory. M.  Cecilia  Marchetto  Santorun  holds a PhD from the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and a member of the research group Discourse and Identity. She is a visiting scholar at the University of Lincoln and has completed a comparative study of William Blake and Alan Moore. Jason Whittaker  is Head of English and Journalism at the University of Lincoln. He mainly writes on the reception of William Blake, but also has

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published on digital technologies and culture as well as post-punk and industrial music. His most recent books include Divine Images: The Life and Work of William Blake (2021) and Jerusalem: Blake, Parry and the Fight for Englishness (2022).

List of Figures

Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2

Scene of a tooth being forcibly removed; Broken Scene of victim, played by Bob Flanagan, feeling pleasure while being eviscerated by the machine; Broken

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Assemblages and Interventions Elizabeth Potter and Jason Whittaker

First Plateau On 18 October 1976, a small audience gathered at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London to, as they believed, witness a performance piece by COUM Transmissions, the art group comprising Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti at its core. COUM Transmissions formed in 1968 and was profoundly influenced by Dada and the international art movement, Fluxus. COUM’s final performance was part of the infamous Prostitution exhibition that shocked audiences with bandages, tampons, bottles of blood as props, and pornographic images enlarged onto posters: the exhibition quickly gained notoriety with Fleet Street editors and led to the artists being denounced as “wreckers of civilization” in Parliament. Since their inception, COUM Transmissions had attracted some attention for their extreme performances although their influence— until Prostitution—had been limited.

E. Potter University of York, York, UK e-mail: [email protected] J. Whittaker (*) University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Whittaker, E. Potter (eds.), Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92462-1_1

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That night, however, P-Orridge and Tutti were joined by Peter Christopherson and Chris Carter to engage in a different kind of performance as Throbbing Gristle, the band they had been developing since September of the previous year. The Prostitution gig was to be the official public debut for the group and, if COUM had focussed on deep dives into abjection and liberation of the sexual body as a response to social control (the original poster for Prostitution announced that “Everything in the show is for sale at a price, even the people”), Throbbing Gristle would bring an additional element: unlistenable noise. As P-Orridge later told Jon Savage, the event was suitably chaotic, with the singer being attacked by a reporter from the Evening News (251), although Tutti records that the group was considerably shaken by the experience of that night, so much so that they did not complete any further performances that had been planned (172–4). Part of TG’s appeal for P-Orridge was the move beyond the very limited elite audience that responded to COUM performances. While the extreme nature of TG’s music meant that they never had a chart hit, the impact of future releases such as The Second Annual Report (1977) and 20 Jazz Funk Greats (1979) percolated through the post-punk scene. Their music was always challenging: when Mute Records picked up Second Annual Report, the group released it in reverse order with all tracks played backwards. Their debut brought together dark, ambient sounds and pre-recorded samples, heavy with distortion that would infiltrate their first single, Untitled/Zyklon B Zombie Some of the earlier COUM Transmissions shows had made audiences literally vomit at the sight of bloodletting and torture (Ford, 5.19–20). The aim of Throbbing Gristle was to achieve a similar effect of turning the body inside out through music.

Second Plateau On Halloween night in 1986, Canadian band Skinny Puppy played an intensive hour-long live show. Just a month after the release of their second studio album, Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse, the performance would re-energize the earlier efforts of the likes of Throbbing Gristle. On a darkened stage at Dolce Vita in Lausanne, Switzerland, cEvin Key and Dwayne Goettel take their positions behind towering racks of synthesizers, disappearing into the background. Distorted, disembodied, and indecipherable voices fold into rhythmic beats begun without the presence of a frontman. Nivek Ogre with pallid makeup, smudged black eyeshadow

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around his eye sockets, and under his cheekbones wavers onto the stage to his microphone. The song “One Time, One Place” begins and Ogre sways with occasional convulsive movements—striking his head, pulling his hair, and drooling while he shouts the words to the song. When his voice hits a louder volume, the vocals become mechanically distorted, competing with the danceable bassline and driving beat. During the song, “Assimilate,” Ogre’s convulsions become more erratic and violent. The danger increases when he holds a large knife in both hands. His knuckles are white, gripping the blade so close to his face—the knife appears to have a mind of its own, wanting to plunge into him. The vocals, already unclear in the studio recording of the song, languish hazier with the layered reverberation. His live agonizing screams cease while the reverb carries it forward and he meditates with the knife like a ceremonial blade. An audio sample of a shrieking woman pierces the obscured screams and he flicks and pulls the blade parallel to his sucking mouth slicing on both sides. The dripping Glasgow smile is prominent while the echoing moans of Ogre’s whine, “I can’t smile” hangs in the air, penetrated with what sounds like a flicking radio dial of poppy disco interrupts. In the audience, fans sway, stomp, and punch their fists in the air to the beat while all this occurs on stage. The simulated self-aggression on stage is entangled with the celebratory pleasure of dance music, creating a bizarre and complicated discourse of what audiences enjoy when viewing live music. Skinny Puppy’s stage antics would develop over the years into occult costumes, screen projections of bombings and vivisection, and buckets of fake blood poured onto the stage and into the audience’s faces. The artist, typically viewed as in control of the entire performance, becomes victimized to the voyeuristic audience: mutilating himself for their entertainment. The power dynamics have shifted into a new contract of the artist and spectator.

Third Plateau A man, known only as the “metal fetishist,” walks through a semi-derelict industrial yard, dressed in overalls and a peaked cap. The site is empty, filmed in atmospheric monochrome, with rusting air-conditioner units poking through broken windows and heaps of junk piled around the single-­story wooden buildings. Barefoot, he steps inside one of the buildings and drops a metal rod and pieces of wire, wrapped in a pornographic magazine, onto the tiled floor, before kneeling amidst the detritus and

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slowly unzipping his jacket and exposing his chest. As the camera slowly pans around the chaos of junk and dirty metal, discordant, repetitive beats of industrial machinery begin to play in the background, and amidst the scraps of metal we catch glimpses of runners and athletes, collages of perfectible machine bodies that contrast with the abject decomposition all around. If, as Laura Mulvey argues in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, such slow shots are the classic fetishism of the male gaze, lingering upon the female body, something is very wrong here—interrupted as both music and scene are by a sudden cut to the fetishist piercing his leg with the metal spike, black blood spurting between his fingers across the celluloid. Later, when he removes the bandages with which he has bound his leg, the fetishist is horrified to discover maggots falling from the rust-­ infected wound. Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) is often described as a cyberpunk horror but is more important as establishing a particular aesthetic of industrial culture. While S.  Alexander Reed rightly emphasizes the importance of Futurism to the genre, with its invocations of technophilia and Filippo Tommasso Marinettii’s “aesthetics of the machine,” it is also important to recall the importance of Dada to much industrial music and culture in the 1980s and early 1990s. The contraptions of Duchamp and Picabia are useless and frequently derelict, literally broken in the case of Duchamp’s notorious The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. Filmed on 16 mm monochrome stock, Tsukamoto’s visuals are frequently stunning, but they also record the backstreets of a Tokyo less familiar to the technological utopia frequently presented to the world: rather, this is a place of crumbling junkyards and fabricators, the rotting assembly lines of post-war industry that over the subsequent decades would increasingly be shipped to mainland China—just as European and North American heavy industries were outsourced to other parts of Asia and South America. As such, the aesthetic invoked by Tetsuo, with its accompanying music composed by Chu Ishikawa (who formed the industrial percussion group, Der Eisenrost), focuses on the body not as the perfectible machine of Enlightenment thinkers such as La Mettrie or of electronic music bands such as Kraftwerk, but rather as broken assemblages of flows and parts, always dysfunctional, often in pain but only knowing itself through its own torture.

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Fourth Plateau On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went on a deadly shooting rampage at their high school in Littleton, Colorado. The Columbine High School Massacre was the worst school shooting at the time with 24 people injured and 15 killed, including the shooters. The horror of the scene caused the American people to question the young men’s motivations. In attempts to understand this atrocity, investigations into Harris and Klebold’s media consumption revealed they were obsessive fans of industrial music. On Eric Harris’ personal blog, he wrote: “I’ll just go to some downtown area … and blow up and shoot everything I can. Feel no remorse, no sense of shame.” The last sentence is a quotation from KMFDM’s track “Anarchy,” a song about rising up from debasement into brazen, violence-based power. On the same day as the shooting, Klebold wore a t-shirt with the word “Wrath” printed in bold red letters to reference the KMFDM song of the same name. The day after the shooting, Sascha Konietzko, founder of KMFDM, released a statement to express sympathy for the victims. “We are sick and appalled,” Konietzko wrote, and clarified that, “from the beginning, our music has been a statement against war, oppression, fascism and violence against others.” The moral panic shifted the target to Marilyn Manson with headlines like, “Killers Worshipped Rock Freak Manson” and “Devil-Worshipping Maniac Told Kids to Kill.” In actuality, Harris and Klebold did not like Manson’s music at all and listened to the likes of KMFDM, Nine Inch Nails, Rammstein, and other industrial musicians. The connection to the Columbine Massacre remains despite KMFDM’s best efforts including their campaign advocating for more effective gun control legislation in the United States. Those campaigning against the industrial musicians Harris and Klebold enjoyed focused on the genre’s themes of marginalization, BDSM references, physical violence, and pain. These essential elements of industrial music became weaponized in a different manner: instead of exploring the dimensions of body and mind, it was considered to be nefariously influential to producing extreme acts of violence against the public. The symbolic and metonymic violence of industrial music performances and recordings moved from the world of metaphor into the very real world.

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Fifth Plateau The band Death Grips has the hallmarks of industrial music: melodic synth, multi-layered recordings, extensive sampling, harsh vocalization, and crushing lyrics. These, however, are complicated and reenergized by hip-hop rhyming schemes and percussion loops. Their experimentation is not relegated to their music composition as shown by their release of the album, No Love Deep Web in 2012. On Twitter, Death Grips made a vague online announcement of the album with an edited publicity photograph. Hidden in the promotional image was the first clue to engage in their alternate reality game. Alternate reality games (ARGs) are described as chaotic fiction, where individuals collaborate in an interactive networked narrative using the real and virtual world as a conduit. Typically, ARGs are centralized on the internet but also include telephone, email, and letter correspondence. Using the Tor anonymity network online, Death Grips provided encrypted archive file references that fans would need to explore to receive the end message. Sending the fans on a quest using braille messages, QR codes, binary code, Affine and Caesar ciphers, and many other communication types, the game revealed that the release date for the album was intended for October 23, 2012. This new wave of industrial music has embraced the technological innovations that the current world has to offer and transformed traditional consumption roles. Typically, there would not be a labyrinth of codes to reveal a release date for an album, but this approach introduces a self-guided power and discovery process independent of the artist. After struggles with their record label, Death Grips released the album themselves through Twitter, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, and other torrenting websites. Later that day, it was revealed that Death Grips topped BitTorrent’s “List of Most Legally Downloaded Music” following the release of No Love Deep Web, with 34,151,432 downloads. Epic Records, their label, shut down the band’s website although they would later deny any involvement. The band then posted confidential emails with Epic Records and the contract was severed. Online, fans speculate the hostility between Death Grips and Epic Records inspired the controversial album cover: Zach Hill’s erect penis with the album title written in sharpie on it. This defiant and controversial act reaffirms the body’s important place in industrial music. Like Ministry before them, whose controversial album cover for The Land of Rape and Honey (1988) features the burnt corpse of a victim of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Al Jourgensen of Ministry

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explained that the image was chosen because his original idea of a decapitated deer had been rejected. The rejection of traditional power structure, such as that of a band and a recording label, has been turned upside down by both industrial bands using bodies that are unseemly to the general audience. Confirming their similarities, Death Grips and Ministry co-­ headlined a tour in 2017.

Bodies, Noise, Power When Throbbing Gristle released The Second Industrial Report (1977), they adopted Monte Cazazza’s phrase “industrial music for industrial people,” presenting an aesthetic of harsh, provocative sounds and transgressive themes that would percolate through a loose assemblage of groups and performers across the following decades. As Gunn, Khamis, and Collins observe, since the first use of the terms, industrial music and industrial culture have proved to be very broad churches, involving a wide range of styles from abrasive noise to dance and electronic body music. This book will explore—and problematize—a considerable number of those approaches, dealing both with the origins of the genre but also with more recent evolutions. In particular, a fundamental aim of Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music is to move beyond the typical approaches of much writing about post-punk music that, as a number of contributors to this volume observe, tends to focus on music that is white, male, and heterosexual. As a study that is deeply concerned with the industrial dream (or nightmare) of reconfiguring the body, this book engages with a number of intersectional approaches to the music which are not merely recent developments but, in some cases, have been in place for decades. As with punk and other related genres, industrial music stimulated a number of publications that sought to define the scene, the most significant of which was RE/SEARCH #6/7: Industrial Culture Handbook, published in 1983. Edited by V. Vale and Andrea Juno, the book included interviews and articles featuring Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, and SPK and served as one of the earliest examples linking what was at that point an eclectic and niche group of artists. The very act of compilation and curation provided by RE/SEARCH provided one means towards identity formation, bringing together what Reed has referred to as extremely varied musical forms. The disruptive noise performances of Throbbing Gristle, for example, were very different to the cooler electronica of groups such as Cabaret Voltaire or the abrasive techno of Skinny

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Puppy. Throughout the 1980s, books such as RE/SEARCH and Open Eye created aggregations of performers and groups alongside writers such as William Burroughs, J.  G. Ballard, and Kathy Acker and art movements such as Actionism and the parodic forms of Neoism with its roots in Dadaism, Futurism, and Fluxus. One of the most significant early industrial music groups, Cabaret Voltaire, took its name from the Zurich nightclub, established by Hugo Ball and Emily Hennings and associated with Dadaism. This indicated an ephemeral quality to the industrial scene, that it was often a series of contingent assemblages of loosely related approaches to music, fashion, bodies, and culture. Unsurprisingly, a significant number of titles dealing with industrial music have tended to focus on the history of the scene or, more specifically, individual bands. Reed’s Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music (2013) is the most comprehensive account, with notable studies of groups including those of Simon Ford’s Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle (1999), Mick Fish’s Industrial Evolution: Through the Eighties with Cabaret Voltaire (2002), Alexei Monroe’s Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK (2005), and more recently Jennifer Shryane’s Blixa Bargeld and Einstürzende Neubauten: German Experimental Music: ‘Evading Do-Re-Mi’ (2016). A feature of such books is their willingness to engage with high theory (Monroe’s book, for example, includes an introduction by Slavoj Žižek who has often written on his fellow Slovenes) and it is this critical engagement that particularly attracts us to the genre. As such, while this introduction provides some account of the evolutions—or, perhaps better, the mutations—of industrial music and culture, we are more concerned with the impact of the scene on perceptions and configurations of bodies (such as through fashion and invasive body modification), power relations through sexualities and fetishes, the role of noise in all forms of music— from experimental and avant garde forms that share roots with the atonal performances of Karl Stockhausen to EBM (electronic body music) and other forms of dance and techno. In addition, this collection is keen to extend the focus of industrial culture to explore elements such as queer sexualities and intersectional social and political identities. As such, influences include John Gill’s Queer Noises: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Music (1995) and Jennifer Wallis’s Fight Your Own War—Power Electronics and Noise Culture (2016), which have been as important in shaping the development of the approaches of Bodies, Noise,

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Power even when they extend beyond narrower definitions of industrial music. What, then, is meant by industrial music? A starting point, and one referred to by a number of commentators in this volume, is Jon Savage’s two-page introduction to the Industrial Culture Handbook. Opening with the decaying postwar cityscape in which Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti lived, Savage observed that their music was “the most thorough examination of the decaying English environment, both physical and psychic” (Vale and Juno, 4). This localization, which saw industrial music—as with much of post-punk music—emanating from the streets where London called to the faraway towns and countries, is a familiar one, and one that Bodies, Noise and Power will often complicate by drawing attention to parallel, overlapping intersections in Europe and North America in particular. Savage goes on to suggest that industrial culture is defined by five principles: organizational autonomy, access to information, use of synthesizers and anti-music, extra-musical elements, and shock tactics. Clearly, a number of these elements are not exceptional to this kind of music, synthesizers in particular having been popularized by a wave of electronic and new wave bands that followed in the wake of Kraftwerk in particular; likewise, autonomy was a credo of the anarchism of some parts of punk music. Nonetheless, a focus on extra-musical, and even anti-­ musical features, as well as information, is an important innovation in terms of what could loosely be termed popular music: classical developments in atonality and dissonant counterpoint had disrupted the expectations of audiences in the twentieth century, but in popular traditions chord progressions and harmony still dominated. For those following in the path laid out by Throbbing Gristle, anti-music was a form of disruptive information designed to shake the listener out of complacent acceptance of the systems in which they found themselves. Even this, however, does not define industrial music in its totality: while there were plenty of performers who were extremely willing to punish their listeners’ ear drums, it wasn’t long before many self-professed industrial acts were producing the kind of danceable EBM, or electronic body music, that was popularized by Ralf Hütter of Kraftwerk at the end of the 1970s. Savage’s seminal introduction was influential because of its timing and literal location—the first entry in the first book to deal with industrial music and culture. As such, the genealogy that it fed into, whereby TG’s Industrial Records in London begat Chicago’s Wax Trax! label, and Cabaret Voltaire in Sheffield inspired a generation of European acts, is

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much more complex than it first appears. Reed rightly locates its sources in Italian Futurism and the work of William Burroughs, with an overlapping industrial geography that takes in Berlin and San Francisco, as well as the decaying landscapes of the north of England—COUM Transmissions having their own genesis in Hull rather than the capital of the UK. The sources for Throbbing Gristle’s inspiration included Kraftwerk, Captain Beefheart, and Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music (1975). What is clear is that the earliest progenitors of the genre, however, were generally more interested in the avant-garde of popular culture, in using anti-music and noise, to subvert the expectations of their audiences. This was complicated very quickly, however: S. Alexander Reed acutely observes that the influence of dance music on the scene in the early 1980s brought about an “identity crisis” for industrial music: although he and others tend to view the scene as having dissipated by the turn of the millennium, a process accelerated by events such as the fetishization of industrial bands by the Columbine murderers and its increasing acceptance into mainstream forms, we would argue that there has actually been a revival of interest in industrial music in the past decade, helped by its fusion with alternative musical forms—most notably hip hop—which have extended its reach and diversity. Jon Savage’s series of definitions was a historical accident: there is not, nor has there ever been, such a thing as a pure industrial culture— by its very nature it was polluted and dirty from the start. The intention of this collection, then, is not to establish anything approaching a canon of industrial musicians and artists. While many of the groups considered in the following chapters will be familiar to those interested in the genre, our approach to the formation of industrial culture as an assemblage of plateaus is intended less as linear history and more as points of intersection for the relations between noise and music and how these interact with constructions of the body and power relations. As we have already noted, industrial music is a category that has frequently invited engagement with critical theory, in part because its more extreme formations seem to defy conventions of musicality; rather, they invite comparisons with the experiments in atonality by composers such as Schoenberg and Stockhausen. Indeed, by setting themselves up as oppositional agents of much contemporary popular music, plenty of performers themselves have sought to express their approaches to their art theoretically. This was evident from the start with the transition of COUM Transmissions from actionist-inspired art to the musical performances of Throbbing Gristle, but a more explicit link is provided by Blixa Bargeld,

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the front man of Einstürzende Neubauten and one of the Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds. In Klaus Maeck’s and Johanna Schenkel’s 2005 documentary, Einstürzende Neubauten: Liebeslieder, Bargeld says: “My idea of destructivity corresponds with Walter Benjamin’s. He wrote an essay titled ‘The Destructive character’ in which he said, ‘the destructive character is cheerful and friendly and knows only one motto: Make Room.’” This destructive character that Benjamin described and that Blixa Bargeld valued can also be found in the vocalization patterns in industrial music. Einstürzende Neubauten’s order to “Listen with Pain” (Schmerzen Hören) conflates the vulnerability of the body and artistic power to affect pleasure or pain. Guitars, keyboards, and other traditional and non-traditional instruments cannot express the sounds of suffering that is unique to the human condition, meaning that the vocals are the key conduit. In an article called “Pretty Hate Machine: A Beginner’s Guide To Industrial Music,” Nisha Gopalan prepares the listeners for: “abrasive” and “ghoulish” vocals while an article for recording artists looking to produce industrial music states that the lyrics are “growling” but the vocalizations are “even growlier.” The words “abrasive,” “ghoulish,” and “growling” are incompatible with the neat organization of noise into music and render the noise to be a weapon, once again. Yet although it is tempting to concentrate on the aspect of noise as disruptive, even painful, such an approach neglects fruitful variations such as Industrial Hip-Hop, the subject of two chapters in this volume, as well as dance or electronic body music (EBM) which are especially important to a wide range of listeners. In his “On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening,” as well as his partnered essay with Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Adorno is particularly dismissive of popular forms of modern music for being overly formulaic, using “baby talk” instead of engaging with complicated discourse, which he and Horkheimer viewed as a distraction tool for those in power. Industrial music, while having enjoyed popularity, does not fit within many of Adorno’s complaints. As Jeffrey T. Nealon points out in Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and American Popular Music (2018), the temptation to fall into Adorno’s trap of high culture versus mass culture can be misleading. Nealon contends that critics who create arguments that “Elvis Presley or Johnny Rotten are in some way also great artists and thinkers, just like Marcel Duchamp” suggests that “music critics tacitly agree” with Adorno’s dismissive critiques of popular music (3). The adherence to Adorno’s dichotomy of modern music is a precarious way of exploring any genre

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because it insists on outdated notions of authenticity and substance. As described earlier in the first plateau, Throbbing Gristle developed from the performance art collective COUM Transmissions. Considering popular music as being worthwhile for its own sake is one thing, dismissing it as inauthentic is another, but neither lens is suitable for this study. Economic and social theorist, Jacques Attali, used music as a way of perceiving the world in his book Noise: The Political Economy of Music (original title: Bruits 1977). Attali describes music as a “mirror of society,” that is much more effective than “language or mathematics,” two studies that are “incapable of accounting for what is essential in time—the qualitative and the fluid, threats and violence” (4). For Attali, music is the organization of noise, a historical attempt to preserve and form culture to sublimate the natural violence of the world into pleasurable sound for escape. “Noise is violence: it disturbs,” he insists because of its abrasive power, “it is a simulacrum of murder” (26). Music, however, is a “channelization of noise, and therefore a simulacrum of sacrifice” (26). These navigable codes for consumption were necessary to refine and make life pleasurable for communities but ultimately have been confined to an endless cycle of sublimation. Industrial musicians from the beginning embraced the use of noise to reconfigure the process. In an interview about his experiences with the band Einstürzende Neubauten, Bargeld explained that, “musically, it’s about breaking expectations and past representations of what music is.” After all, in a later interview, he explained, “I never wanted to be a musician. I still don’t.” The band’s description of their music as Schmerz, meaning “pain,” follows Attali’s analysis of the inherent state of noise. By resisting the past expectations and representations of music and dismissing the label of musicians, Einstürzende Neubauten attempted to sever the endless sublimation of violence in noise. In this sort of engagement, the body is reconfirmed into the element of performance and music. Rosemary Overell calls these “affective intensities” in her study of the metal subgenre, Grindcore. Extreme music scenes, argues Overell, generate a sense of “brutal belonging” out of violent cadences and slam-dancing which reconfirms the sensation of embodiment—“a feeling of being in place” (12). This “brutal belonging” directly opposes Adorno’s belief that the listener is a detached consumer of music. Overell emphasizes how the embodied affect of extreme music encourages countercultural communities, and this has certainly manifested in industrial music. Within this collection, there are examples of such embodied inclusion throughout the chapters in this book, yet other examples engage

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much with the sense of alienation within popular music that Adorno judged so negatively, and which informs much of Attali’s work. Attali is important for focusing on the emergence of music from noise, but his projection of the political economy of musical production cannot explain an aesthetics of industrial which embraces noise as a weapon. Alongside this fascination with extremes of noise, industrial culture has also frequently taken inspiration from transgressive notions of the body. From its earliest phase, industrial music has often overlapped with transformative technological perceptions of performers’ and audiences’ bodies. Some of this was due to historical serendipity, as noted by Sherry Turkle’s observation in 1995’s Life on the Screen that a shift had occurred in popular culture, away from fear of machines towards a more pragmatic acceptance of digital culture and “interface value.” More appropriate to industrial culture than this mundane absorption of tech into the practice of everyday life, however, was a fascination with posthumanism, whether by technoevangelists or more critical approaches such as Donna Haraway’s The Cyborg Manifesto (1985 [1991]). One of the most remarkable demonstrations of the posthuman cyborg body was through the activities of the performance artist Stelarc (Stelios Arcadiou). In 1998 he launched a series of alternate interfaces, beginning with Exoskeleton, followed by Movatar and Extended Arm, which formed internal and external prostheses that could be connected to the Internet and controlled by third parties as a very apparent external nervous system, as well as performance pieces such as his Hollow Body/Host Space: Stomach Sculpture (1997), which reconfigured the body as a distended sculpture in which to hold art. Stelarc’s body installations were themselves a potentially interesting transition from the body/mind performance art of the 1960s and 1970s, as found in the work of COUM Transmissions, for example, and as performance appeared to share aspects with other figures who inspired industrial culture of the 1980s and 1990s such as Fakir Musafar and Genesis P-Orridge. An alternative approach to the technologies of the body is what Laura Glitsos, in her book on somatechnics, calls, after Merleau-Ponty, “bodymind,” the Möbius strip by means of which consciousness is aware of both itself and its limitations (6–7). Particularly important to an understanding of this bodymind in the performance and aesthetics of industrial music and culture are the works of twentieth-century French writer and dramatic theorist, Antonin Artaud. Proving to be a continuing influence on experimental theatre and industrial music, his 1938 manifesto The Theatre and

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its Double called for a Theatre of Cruelty: a medium to explore beyond the conventions of realism and the disciplined, old-fashioned notions of theatre. Artaud likens theatre to plagues and poison, infection, and deleterious to the public: “the theater is poison, injected into the social body, disintegrates it” ([2017], 31). Like Adorno’s distaste for modern music as a dulling device, Artaud suggests his answer of the Theatre of Cruelty. The notion is a complicated concept that Artaud explains: on the level of performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all. (79)

As well as an arena for performance, Artaud is important as the originator of the phrase the “body without organs,” not so much a concept as a series of routes for considering the body as a desiring machine that influence a number of the approaches in this book, whether as Deleuzian deterritorializations of the boundaries between human and machinic, or posthuman cyborg combinations of flesh and the technologies of noise. Again, the power of theatre and performance cannot be divided from body metaphors. Industrial music, from the early days of Throbbing Gristle to contemporary performers, is certainly a category of theatre. Elaborate costumes, stage performances, and vivid imagery are essential to experiencing the heady themes of the genre. Jennifer Shryane’s concentrated monograph, Blixa Bargeld and Einstürzende Neubauten: German Experimental Music: Evading do-re-mi, emphasizes the influence of Artaud onto the pioneering industrial band. She describes the band’s music as “research through their relationship with their immediate environment and their use of this research to destruct music which is conventional and commercial in order to construct music which is both unconventional and socially meaningful” (8). This Benjamin-inspired creative destruction coupled with the unconventional exploration of Artaud reveals the innovation of the genre of popular music. For Shryane, the radical performative elements of Einstürzende Neubauten can be seen in five “strategies”: the body, site and instrumentation, voice, scream, and texts (83). All five of

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these classifications are critical to theatre, strengthening the connection with industrial music performances. The ignorance of how to connect sight and sound in such a powerful manner rendered Western performance to be a rationalist, stale, and spiritless practice. Industrial musicians have continuously connected the body and noise to their performance. For example, Blixa Bargeld has performed onstage lying flat while his fellow bandmates stepped onto his body, effectively changing his vocalization style in the moment. German industrial band Rammstein are notorious for elaborate performances and during a rendition of “Engel,” Till Lindemann was strapped into cybernetic, flame-­ throwing wings that lifted him off the stage during the song. In 2002, at a performance in Bologna, Coil was haunted onstage by nude actors in chalky white body paint and shaved heads to exaggerate the song “Amethyst Deceivers” nihilistic and otherworldly themes. The conjunction of visceral visual presence and relentlessly noisy and melodic sound renders industrial to be well-situated in the Theatre of Cruelty. Another important attribute of electronic music more generally is identified by Saiber as speed—the “joys of adrenaline”—and minimalism, what she calls a “molecular music,” stripping down and sacrificing harmony for direct stimulation of the body. The essential difference of such music, however, in contrast with the sublimated violence of earliest forms of sacrificial sound, was that it was concerned not only with human flesh but also the “eros of the machine” (Saiber, 1621). As McDonald also observes, modal subversion of traditional rock power chords as they appeared in industrial registers tacitly in the listener and can influence them to transform their expectations of musical and other forms of cultural rigidity (362). Overell’s notion of brutal and intensive embodied affection can be linked to these ideas of sound as sacrificed, wasted to noise: the body is profoundly disturbed by what it is listening to, its organs of production turned inside out in an act which is perversely luxurious. At its limits, industrial music is often unlistenable and non-commodifiable, yet wholly technological: extreme forms of music generate pain and alienation out of which those who hear it in turn generate community and sovereignty because of their acceptance of the unlistenable. In Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music, Alexander Reed focused on the 1986 song by Skinny Puppy, “God’s Gift (Maggot).” He notes that the samples are pitch-shifted lower, rendering them as “direly evil and linguistically incomprehensible” (178). The vocalist for the group, Ogre oscillates between a “nasal-voiced declaration and a gagging

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whisper,” descriptions that emphasize the vulnerability of a body. The deformed voice and agonizing screams utilized by Skinny Puppy display the alienating and exhilarating world of pain. The abjection of Ogre’s vocalizations is amplified by live performance tactics. Simulations of self-­ mutilation and torture accompanied by buckets of fake blood and projected visuals of vivisection and militarized assaults emphasize the politics of the brutalized body. Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World considers the representations of the human body when made vulnerable to pain. The difficulty of expressing physical pain means that there are perceptual and political complications that soon follow. Scarry argues that pain is resistant to language. The inability to describe pain accurately to the reality of the sensation leads the individual to describe the feeling using metaphors, like a toothache is a “throbbing pain.” When the pain is far too great, language breaks down and ushers in a reversion to the state of primitivity of language: screams, sighs, growls, and cries that a human employs before language is impressed. When considering industrial music, most songs are limited in lyrical content and instead focus on sounds of screams, grunts, and cries from both the vocalist and even sampled tracks. Referring back to Bargeld, he explained that “It is common to speak of the language of music, but that is neurologically wrong; music doesn’t work in the sense of the words that we speak every day or even in the way that the language of painting would work … [music] has to offer the unthinkable, something beyond language.” Bargeld’s own, shrieking high-pitched screams move past language to impress pain onto the listener—giving them no choice but to listen with and to pain. Scarry asks, “how is it that one person can be in the presence of another person in pain and not know it—not know it to the point where he himself inflicts it, and goes on inflicting it?” In the case of a Skinny Puppy live show, the screams are piercing, gigantic projections of war atrocities flash behind the band, and fake blood splatters on the audience as they continue to dance. The bestial vocals, shouts and cries, and the simulated acts of violence occurring simultaneously with the pleasure of a live performance create a tense relationship between the artist and spectator. The reorganization of music’s merits can be a disconcerting but creative experience. The exploding of the repetitious, easily enjoyed music for the politically engaged, negative, and painful expands the possibilities for creative endeavours: it is not that noise and pain provide the medium for some mystical transcendence away from the alienation of the body, rather that

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the body discovers its power in the recognition of that violent, abrasive, even sacrificial noise. While all the essays in this collection concern themselves with the interplay of bodies, noise, and power relations in some shape or form, they have also been grouped in ways to explore particular aspects of these themes. The first four chapters focus on the body as a site of performance in industrial music and culture, beginning with the confrontational, even abject, biopolitics of Swans and Michael Gira’s work in James McCrea’s “My Body Disgusts Me.” While the Bataillean notion of the body transcending its own filth to attain some kind of sovereignty is not an uncommon one in studies of the scene, we are particularly pleased to consider other aspects of intersectional identity and politics that have often been missing from writing on post-punk. Thus, the study of 2019’s Nafada by Steve Collins, Rachael Gunn, and Susie Khamis explores how a fusion of industrial music and Arab hip hop provided a means to focus on the censorship of women’s bodies in regimes that have tended to fall outside the consciousness of industrial artists and fans who tend to concentrate on Europe and North America, with occasional reference to Japanese extreme noise groups. Similarly, Daniel Gillespie’s “The Odds of the Body” again combines industrial music and hip hop to examine representations of the body by the band clipping, in a distinctly African-American context. Finally, among this group of essays, Jason Whittaker’s essay on antihumanism and bodies explores the relations between industrial music, body modification, and the explicitly queer music of Coil as a response to the spread of AIDS during the 1980s. The next series of essays explore different aspects of music and noise, beginning with the industrial Dadaism of Cabaret Voltaire and Nurse with Wound’s Steve Stapleton who, as Rupert Lloydell demonstrates, use chaotic soundscapes to construct hypnagogic dream states that can profoundly disconcert and disrupt the listener—an effect replicated by the essay itself which deploys the technique of cut-ups and assemblage to create a critical collage of writings and interviews. The other two pieces in this section—Francis X. Connor’s “The Last Attempt at Paradise” and Jay Fraser’s “Industrial Music and Inner Experience”—are more concerned with noise as violence, whether it is the sonic assault of SPK’s performances in Lawrence, Kansas, in the early 1980s or the aural abrasion of groups such as Prurient and Death Cube K which seek to breakdown the classical vision of the subjective self by reversing the common conventions of pain and pleasure in the experience of listening to music.

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The two final essays in the collection offer two complementary approaches to power relations in industrial noise and bodies: the first, Cecilia Marchetto’s “The Occultural side of Industrial”, offers an overview of the use of “occulture” in industrial music from its earliest stages to more recent groups, using a term employed by Genesis P-Orridge to describe the interrelations of hidden knowledge of contemporary art and culture as a means to power. Elizabeth Potter’s “Happiness and Slavery,” by contrast, focuses on a specific moment—the 1992 video to Nine Inch Nail’s single Broken to consider how the depictions of a supermasochist artist, Bob Flanagan, create an extreme BDSM aesthetic that not only presents the body as its own theatre of cruelty, but also confronts the strictures of a music industry that inevitably polices its own limits of what is permissible in the field of commercialized sexual and performance activities.

Works Cited Artaud, Anton. The Theatre and its Double. Trans. Victor Corti. London, Alma Classics, 2017. Fish, Mick. Industrial Evolution: Through the Eighties with Cabaret Voltaire. London, SAF Publishing Ltd, 2002. Ford, Simon. Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of COUM Transmissions & Throbbing Gristle. London: Black Dog Publications, 1999. Gill, John. Queer Noises: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Music. London and New York, Continuum Publishing, 1995. Monroe, Alexei. Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2005. Nealon, Jeffrey T. I’m Not Like Everybody Else. Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and American Popular Music. Lincoln, Nebraska, University of Nebraska Press, 2018. Reed, S.  Alexander, 2013. Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Shryane, Jennifer. Blixa Bargeld and Einstürzende Neubauten: German Experimental Music : ‘Evading Do-Re-Mi’. London, Routledge, 2016. Throbbing Gristle. The Second Annual Report. Industrial Records. 1977. Throbbing Gristle. The Second Annual Report. Industrial Records. 20 Jazz Funk Greats. Industrial Records. 1979. Wallis, Jennifer. Fight Your Own War: Power Electronics and Noise Culture. London, Headpress, 2016.

CHAPTER 2

“My Body Disgusts Me”: Swans, Biopolitics, and the Hangman’s Noose of Success James McCrea

There are perhaps few musical groups whose oeuvre is as dynamic, challenging, and enduring as Swans, the New York-based project spearheaded by Michael Gira. Writers attempting to engage with either Swans or Gira must navigate a complex corpus of musical output without clear antecedents or identifiable styles, as exhibited throughout the history of Swans from the early 1980s into the late 2010s. Consequently, Gira and Swans have only recently entered the realm of academic discourse, with scholars focusing largely on literary and philosophical comparisons drawn from the band’s semantic qualities. Michael T. Miller’s essay (2019) explicates Gira’s portrayal of human monstrosity in his short-story collection The Consumer (1995), in turn likening Gira’s depiction of life in an abstracted hyper-capitalist New  York to the image of Friedrich Nietzsche’s sub-­ humanity. Miller’s comparisons are in contrast to those of Sławomir Kuźnicki (2018), who compares Swans’ new material to the transcendent poetry of William Blake by linking Gira’s yearning for identity with an individualised spiritual engagement echoing Blake’s Songs of Experience.

J. McCrea (*) Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Whittaker, E. Potter (eds.), Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92462-1_2

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However, other essays interpret aspects of Gira’s personality as a signifier of the band’s unique place in the music industry. The earliest example is Joshua Gunn’s “Gothic Music and the Inevitability of Genre,” in which Gunn cites Gira’s resistance in attributing a musical genre to Swans as an example of the artist rebuking categorisation in order to maintain a certain perceived inimitability separating Swans from its contemporaries (1999). Finally, Dean Lockwood’s assessment of Gira’s work ethic relating to Swans’ relationship with Mute Records (2018) touches upon certain themes this essay will revisit, most notably Gira’s fixation on the concept of labour. In contrast to these offerings, this essay focuses on how Gira’s aesthetic values shifted with varying degrees of commercial success and cultural visibility. Thus, Swans’ history is an almost perfect—albeit troubled—case study in cultural biopolitics. Swans faced tremendous hardship in promoting themselves throughout their early to middle history, with Gira dissolving the band in 1997 only to resurrect it in 2010 to tremendous critical acclaim. Ever since the band’s resurgence, the dangerous and often thanatological aesthetics employed by Gira subsided in favour of celestial imagery indicating a spiritual, time-weathered optimism. Ultimately, Swans’ cultural transition from aberration to asset suggests the band’s significance as a biopolitical indicator of individual success in contention with its surrounding social environment. As Swans breaches a previously insurmountable barrier into cultural visibility, the band’s success would be further tested in 2016 when Gira faced highly publicised allegations of sexual abuse. Although this contribution is primarily a study in aesthetics and semiotics, both are heavily steeped in Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, with specific attention to the body as both a signifier and tangible actor in a governed system—be it that of capitalist United States as a whole or the music industry as a distinct social nexus embedded therein. Foucault’s initial theory of biopolitics emerged from examining how biological rubrics were being used as a means to govern society by juxtaposing the individual body against its role in a global mass. The individual is discretely robbed of individuality through a massifying process centred on maintaining normalcy, which is itself supported by scientific dialogues relevant to aspects of human life like health and longevity (Foucault 2003, 242–244). Foucault describes biopolitics as a unique phenomenon that is distinct from outright discipline over society, but very effectively and subtly leads to modes of discipline by adhering so closely to society’s

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regularity (2003, 242). Therefore, anything that may be aberrant or unregulatable can be treated akin to a pathogen based on a solid ethical foundation of upholding public health. I put no words in Gira’s mouth regarding similarities to Swans and Foucault’s biopolitical musings. Gira has already stated his distaste for philosophy, ascribing to it a certain tedium that renders texts like Sartre’s Being and Nothingness entirely forgettable (Wengrofsky 2009). When interviewer Jeff Wengrofsky attempts to link the thematic body within the oeuvre of Swans to Foucault’s biopolitical ideas, Gira states “I could never read Foucault” before attributing his obsessions with corporeality as a consequence of his ingenuine “ersatz” upbringing (2009). As such, his adolescent fixations on television and LSD contributed to his seemingly terminal distance between himself and others, transforming his body into a self-proclaimed dough-like state existing, in his own words, “without relation to anything” (2009). Consequently, a certain preoccupation with the body permeates Gira’s work, wherein corporeality itself is an inscrutable substance capable of manifesting in forms both wretched and divine. The individual, inextricably bound to its own body, is depicted with a semblance of abjection as it confronts its own existence. As Swans persisted in the music industry, with or without commercial success, the body in their work transforms from a loathsome object whose personality is bludgeoned by a hyper-capitalist system into an introspective being questioning its own nature before ultimately finding acceptance from a heavenly, partially parental, figure. Two examples act as conceptual bookends in this regard, originating in his early song “Mother, My Body Disgusts Me” (Body to Body, Job to Job 1991), which lyrically describes an anonymous, purely thematic body responding to a maternal figure with a combination of loathing and longing. Conversely, “The World Looks Red/The World Looks Black” on 2016’s The Glowing Man re-establishes the motherly figure as a cleansing agent called upon by the speaker to bury his mind in a tacit liberation of the body. That this same song is a conceptual revision of lyrics Gira wrote for Sonic Youth’s “The World Looks Red” on Confusion Is Sex in 1983 further reinforces the persistence of the body as a conceptual negotiator between the body and existence itself. Most pertinently, the thematic body is subject to proximal biopolitics throughout the band’s history. Swans’ early records relate to the experiences of the individual bound within an all-encompassing vector of toil and subjugation—exemplified by the albums Filth (1983), Cop (1984), Greed (1986), and Holy Money (1986). Music journalist Frances Morgan

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eloquently summarizes the band’s conceptual despondence during this period as “the repetitive and compulsive nature of such feelings made literal in cyclical song structures and reiterative lyrics, with short phrases forming impossible existential demands and promises” (2017, 299). Most of Gira’s lyrical content in these albums referenced the deprecation of physical labour, aggressive power relations, and the transfiguration of bodily expenditure with money, which is effectively mirrored in the graphical illustrations of dollar signs on the covers of Greed (1986) and Holy Money (1986). At the time, Gira was supporting himself through construction work while living inexpensively in a particularly dangerous section of Manhattan, funnelling as much money as possible into keeping Swans in the recording studio (Soulsby 2018, 71–72). This situation was not unique to Gira, who recalls the multitude of artists working as physical labourers at the time—in turn noting the tendency for their own artistic expression to become subsumed by the job itself: Construction was the go-to day job for artists, especially visual artists: they ended up being carpenters or Sheetrockers. One company I worked for was pretty well all visual artists. One reason I never refined those skills was that I refused to buy my own tools: I didn’t want to end up like many of the people who, as they made really good money at carpentry, got sucked into it, and eventually stopped making their art—the art went away and they gradually became carpenters rather than artists. (Soulsby, 71)

Gira’s refusal to compromise his status as an artist effectively relegated him to the social rank of unskilled labourer. Therefore, Swans’ existence was almost entirely dependent on Gira’s low-wage day job. Low cultural visibility would plague Gira for the majority of Swans’ existence, partially owing to unpleasant first impressions in tandem with the band’s austere presence and ear-shattering volume. Furthermore, Gira’s often abrasive personality would adversely affect his interpersonal relationships, amassing a litany of ex-bandmembers and scorned business partners throughout the decades (Soulsby, 69, 90, 97–98, 142, 158, 161, 180, 190–191, 199). Consequently, Swans seemed to gain little financial traction at the cost of fostering an unpleasant, dangerous image for themselves. Prior to 2010, Swans rarely profited financially from touring, as revealed by Gira and several members venting their frustrations at enduring the demanding rigors of touring only to return home with no money (Morgan; Soulsby, 71, 108, 180). Hence, while Gira has always maintained a certain distance

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between Swans’ material and his own experiences, he channels very real miseries into his work (Neal, 146). As such, the physical toll Gira endured to maintain Swans’ existence manifested in the form of direct, often overwhelmingly morose aesthetics throughout his lyrics and the band’s album art. While Gira’s body slowly dies in service to his art, the art itself welds death to labour. To this end, Gira employed the imagery of a hangman’s noose so prominently that it became emblematic of Swans’ early existence (Soulsby, 116, 190). The New York Times journalist Ben Ratliff recalls seeing Swans on-stage with a noose hanging from the rafters just over Gira’s head (2010). Similarly, Swans’ guitarist Clinton Steele recalls how the noose remained hanging in Gira’s rehearsal space well into the early 1990s when Steele joined the group for White Light From the Mouth of Infinity, at which point Steele considered the old rope a kind of mascot (Soulsby, 166). Gira himself occasionally reveals a sardonic attitude about his morbid aesthetic. In a 2015 interview with Dave Simpson of The Guardian, Gira laughingly referred to the noose as a form of talisman, noting how “you could look at it and think ‘Well, that’s always an option.’” However, the symbolism of the noose bears semiotic significance in its historical nearness to the gibbet as a place where criminals are executed. Its physical proximity in Gira’s life as well as Swans’ performative presence on-stage conceptually transforms the environment into a dangerous locale akin to the crossroads where gibbeted convicts were left to decompose well beyond the proposed safety of society. Archaeologist Sarah Tarlow suggests the potentially transformative aspects of the noose in the way it evokes an uncomfortable, indistinct feeling of transience wherever it hangs simply by association with the felonious corpse: [T]here is certainly an argument to be made that gibbeting the criminal body symbolises its liminality and that the enduring nature of the gibbeting process keeps it literally suspended between worlds. It is neither buried nor alive; neither human nor thing; and on occasions its landscape positioning also emphasizes its liminality. It is not at a place, but by a road. In the case of shoreline gibbets and Admiralty courts, it is at the boundary of land and sea. (Tarlow, 60–61)

In other words, the presence of a noose signifies not only the hanging place of a criminal, but also a crossroads where certain boundaries dissolve. A noose evokes a place where governing bodies cannot easily exist

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while at the same time the human body becomes a corpse un-mourned. Gira’s home, nicknamed The Bunker, stood at a similarly liminal point demarcating two areas of Alphabet City on 6th Street and Avenue B: the innocuous part of the city towards Avenue A, and the treacherous side towards Avenue C. Gira would warn people that taking a left turn out of his apartment would lead to certain death compared to the right side, which lead to the East Village—“Go that way, get killed. Go the other way, get cappuccino” (Soulsby, 84). The Bunker was a lawless location where bodies would initially become pulverized by devastating amplification before Swans would attempt to bombard audiences in public venues. Similarly, the noose’s prominence as the album art for Real Love indicated the album’s liminality as a bootleg made official, originally distributed after the 1986 tour for Children of God only to be officially released by Atavistic Records in 1996 when Swans was facing permanent termination (Soulsby, 190). Accordingly, the proximity of the noose as both a visual symbol and a physical object suggests the crucial significance of placing the body in a liminal space occupied by corpses, criminals, and wayfarers. Eventually, the same noose that evoked liminality throughout Gira’s career would find itself adopted semantically by the time he decided to leave Swans behind. In an interview with Dave Clifford of Alternative Press, Gira claimed Swans as an entity itself was “an ever-tightening noose” (1999). Consequently, the noose’s symbolism came full circle in representing the final death throes of the original incarnation of Swans. However, Swans attempted to shed their macabre aesthetic for a string of albums following Children of God (1987), which itself was an exercise in softening their creative approach with the inclusion of melodic sonic elements and flirtations with Christian iconographies. This conceptual shift garnered the attention of Mute Records, who released two albums of Swans material under the new moniker Skin—Blood, Women, Roses (1987) and Shame, Humility, Revenge (1988). This was an attempt to help commercialize Swans while maintaining their artistic integrity. However, after an expensive world tour supporting Children of God (1987), Mute Records unceremoniously parted ways with Swans. Their next album, The Burning World (1989), was an exercise in writing radio-friendly songs helmed by producer Bill Laswell, who populated the band with backing musicians from his own clique financed by Universal Music Group (Soulsby, 144–146). Emblazoned with a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph of a lily in soft, warm tones, the album was largely absent of the wretched, tormented body of early material, instead replaced by songs professing

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liberation and redemption. As such, the omission of bodily imageries and domineering iconographies of preceding albums symbolises Gira’s acceptance in being embraced by a higher power within the music industry. However, The Burning World (1989) was a commercial failure that ensured the dissolution between Swans and Universal Music Group. Subsequent albums, White Light From the Mouth of Infinity (1991) and Love of Life (1992), applied early Swans’ aggressive approach to the dynamic instrumentation introduced by Laswell in The Burning World (1989). In turn, the album art opted for an aesthetic centred on the anthropomorphic rabbits of painter Deryk Thomas, who depicted them in various states of malaise and violence with childlike innocence. Such a conflation of purity and trauma may visually signify Gira’s admitted humiliation arising from his recent experience in a string of record label rejections (Soulsby, 163). The band would reach what appeared to be a perfect synthesis of harsh and soft tonalities in The Great Annihilator (1995), bolstered by the return of band members from the era of Children of God (1987) as well as a return to the stark, graphical aesthetic of Swans’ early work. However, the subjugating iconographies of Swans’ early artwork were replaced with linear symbols such as radial light, concentric circles, a straight line, and the infinity sign. Replacing the worldly graphic of the dollar signs of Greed (1986) and Holy Money (1986), as well as the Christian iconography of Children of God (1987), these pseudo-­ mathematical symbols suggest a sense of movement away from mundane toil and towards abstraction. Throughout these albums, Gira’s thematic body remained abjected in tandem with Swans’ elusive engagements with financial success, but the body began questioning its own existence on such songs like “Mind / Body / Light / Sound” and “Where Does a Body End?” from The Great Annihilator (1995). Both songs place the body in hostile and vacant environments, calling for the abandonment of corporeality in the face of an unavoidable nothingness. Essentially, Gira posits that there is nothing for the body to engage with in the physical world, prompting the mind to abandon corporeality in search of a greater unknown. By the time Gira abandoned Swans in 1996, he also began to shed the macabre aesthetic that characterized the band for its entire career. For example, Gira expounds upon this sensation on the first album of his primary post-Swans outlet The Angels of Light, whose song “Fear of Death” from New Mother (1999) begins with a beckon to unravel the noose from Gira’s neck. When Swans eventually reformed in 2010 with the release of

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My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, the album title itself suggested the discovery of a new path for the body, this time guided by Gira’s deceased father in a heavenly afterlife. Painter Beatrice Pediconi evokes this through her celestial album artwork depicting star-like pinpoints in a white galactic haze over a deep expanse of blue. After an eleven-­year absence, Swans displays a redemptive course for the thematic body that had spent so many decades beaten and bewildered while the conceptual noose unravels to become an escape route from mundane toil. Subsequent albums, The Seer (2012) and To Be Kind (2014), experiment aesthetically with corporeality in their depictions of heads floating in an empty expanse—a canine creature in the former and weeping children in the latter. As the artwork incorporates very clear, naturalistic depictions of living beings, if not surrealistic depictions such as The Seer’s dog-like entity (2012), against vacant backdrops, it tacitly indicates Swans’ success in breaching a barrier between cultural obscurity and visibility. By the time Swans released The Glowing Man (2016), the artwork eschewed its naturalistic aesthetics in favour of a unique red graphic of what appears to be a human arm pierced by a line through its bicep. Kuźnicki describes these three albums as a conceptual trilogy characterised by the individual’s search for identity amidst an inhospitable, soulless reality (69), and each album’s artwork thematically follows suit in their portrayal of individualised presences in barren environments. Perhaps Heidi Yardley’s paintings in the live compilation We Rose From Your Bed With the Sun in Our Head (2012) most successfully evoke the negotiation between the thematic body and transcendence, depicting a sequence of several naked female bodies gesticulating in darkness. The final image, a woman facing the viewer with a glowing sun where her head should be, indicates the transformation from mundane body to celestial body. Having established the upward trajectory of Swans’ aesthetic in tandem to increased acclaim, it is worth noting that this essay is not the first to examine Gira’s intense fixation on labour. In Mute Records: Artists, Business, History, Dean Lockwood devotes an entire chapter to Gira’s nature as a labourer, specifically relating to the assumed workload involved in creating music and being a performer with global visibility (2018). Essentially, Lockwood depicts Gira as a sort of martyred public figure whose lifelong toil in the music industry was ultimately responsible for his transfiguration from a hostile brute to a utopian bard:

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Swans, I believe, aim similarly for a glimpse, through ‘sacred’ musicking, of such a brightening where all flows together in a medium of our own making and one in which we are taken up to momentarily become everything. Swans no longer feel the need to antagonize audiences. Instead, they work to invigorate, ‘breathing the air that the spirits breathe,’ and pointing towards transfiguration of the world as we know it into something better. (Lockwood 165)

Lockwood’s interpretation of post-millennial Swans is rosy in its approximation of the band as a commercially viable entity contrasting its long history as an underground act. Pursuant to this, Lockwood also touts Mute Records as a remarkable bastion for Swans, who worked with the record label twice—once in 1987 during the Children of God tour, and again in 2014 with Mute Records acting as a distributor for Gira’s own Young God Records (2018). According to Lockwood, Mute Records was drawn to Swans due to the Gira’s ethical and political sensibility regarding the role of the musician as a labourer in constructing a utopian phenomenon wherein the act of creating music is vital in maintaining a sense of interconnected “humanness” throughout society (2018). In other words, ideal musicians acknowledge their statis as labourers toiling for the greater good by instilling a sense of hope in listeners—or, minimally, an escape from reality. Much of Lockwood’s evaluation of Swans hinges on a dichotomous appraisal of the band’s aesthetic qualities, referencing the group’s early existence as a sort of aberration of New York’s No Wave scene in the early 1980s not quite similar enough to such groups as DNA, Mars, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks without being altogether different from them. Conversely, Lockwood asserts that the band has only become dynamic and expansive in its post-millennial existence, which he describes as the ideal culmination of Gira’s laborious artistic ethos. Without explicitly saying so, Lockwood outlines Swans’ transformation from ugly duckling to noble waterfowl. The passage of time, however, seems far less responsible for this transformation than hard work and dedication in Lockwood’s estimation. However, Lockwood overlooks an entire decade of Swans’ history characterized by dynamic orchestration, earnest—if unsuccessful— attempts to portray optimism, and fruitless encounters with record labels. In fact, the most obvious omission in Lockwood’s assessment is how Mute Records dropped Swans from their roster for lacklustre sales (Soulsby 2018, 138–139). Gira recalls that Mute Records were eager to promote the band until the record label’s financial losses forced an intercession:

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“[W]e did Children Of God, and I don’t think it bombed, but Mute had been very supportive of us and they had invested so much money in it that Daniel [Miller, founder of Mute Records]—being a good businessman— said ‘Enough!’” (Soulsby, 129). Lockwood’s continued omission of the band’s subsequent studio albums The Burning World (1989), White Light From the Mouth of Infinity (1991), Love of Life (1992), The Great Annihilator (1995), and Soundtracks for the Blind (1996) is a convenient historical revision in the context of Mute Records’ newly rekindled relationship as distributor for Gira’s personal label Young God Records. So, while Lockwood heralds Mute Records for its artistic egalitarianism by claiming the label’s high-profile acts like Depeche Mode to support the lesser-known bands on its roster, Gira himself reveals otherwise. As a matter of conjecture, Swans may have been merely a footnote in Mute Records’ history if the band’s 2010 revival had not been so wildly successful. Pursuant to this, it is worth noting that MCA Records re-­ released The Burning World (1989) in 2014 under its subsidiary Universal Music Special Markets entirely independent of Gira. After being out of print for 25 years, The Burning World, which was deemed a commercial failure shortly after its release, resurfaces only in the wake of Swans’ newfound commercial success and heightened visibility. The Burning World’s sudden re-entry into the realm of commodity without input from Gira, Swans, or Young God Records is a material indicator that Swans has entered a tier of cultural prominence wherein the music industry attempts to maintain the artist’s visibility—almost reflexively. Thus, record labels that had already severed their business relationship with Swans in the past suddenly embrace the band. Basically, once Swans began to financially support itself with a degree of self-sufficiency, the music industry required Swans to remain successful. However, Swans’ post-millennial existence would face a potentially damning public trial following accusations of sexual abuse levied at Gira by musician Larkin Grimm. On 25 February 2016, Grimm recounted her history with Gira in a lengthy public Facebook post (Helman 2016) detailing her living situation with him alongside his wife and children, in addition to a palpable affection that developed between her and Gira while he produced her album Parplar (2008). Allegedly, Grimm was invited to spend the night with Gira at the home of mutual friends after drinking heavily during a celebratory dinner marking the completion of her album; she crawled into bed while Gira slept on the floor in the same room. During the night, Gira’s asthmatic coughing prompted Grimm to

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drunkenly invite him into the bed with the caveat that he could not touch her (Helman 2016). Shortly afterwards, Grimm awoke to an equally inebriated Gira mid-attempt to have sex with her. Although Grimm claims he was instantly apologetic, she maintains that their relationship became awkwardly strained thereafter, especially following Gira’s attempts to rekindle their romantic feelings. Following the Parplar’s release and a promotional tour together with Gira, Grimm was dropped from Young God Records after confronting Gira about the incident. Grimm’s closing remarks compared her plight with that of Kesha Rose Sebert, whose legal battles with her abusive producer Dr. Luke had become highly publicised days prior (Ross 2016). At the time, Grimm remained unsigned to any record label while Sebert was legally obligated to remain signed to Dr. Luke’s label. Regardless, Grimm asserted that the ubiquity of rape culture in the music industry imposes boundaries upon women, creating situations that are outwardly impossible to navigate. Swans certainly seems to have briefly stumbled in the wake of such an accusation before returning to its successful trajectory in the music industry. The band was not dropped from any distribution channels, however, nor were any of their tours cancelled (Geffen 2016). Moreover, Gira faced no criminal charges for assault. Much of this exoneration is a direct result of Grimm’s decision to avoid criminalising Gira, claiming that her own abolitionist views negated any desire to see him punished (Helman 2016). Ultimately, Grimm sought to address an overarching flaw in American society in which sexual abuse is overlooked if not fostered in certain ways. Grimm described her motive: I am not here to attack Michael. I could not publish this story without using his name, because other beloved producers I have worked with, like Martin Bisi and Tony Visconti, might accidentally be blamed. I had to name him. But he is just a man. If you gather together ten friends, five male and five female, chances are at least one of the men has raped and one of the women has been raped. The abuse of women is so prevalent and accepted in our culture! This must change. I am here to protect other women. I am here to stand up for all victims of assault, be they male or female. I will not stand by and watch someone being abused and do nothing. This sacrifice of my privacy and dignity was WORTH IT. Anyone can be a rapist. All it takes is a moment of unchecked desire and a lack of self-control. There are good men out there who may have raped in ignorance of the effects of their actions. Rape is always harmful, regardless of the circumstances. It may not always be physically violent, but it is psychologically violent. We need to have compas-

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sion for the ignorance of the rapist as well as compassion for the ­extraordinary difficulty and danger in reporting a rape. This problem can be solved with compassion, patience, and education. (Payne 2016)

Rather than pinpoint Gira as a singular problem, Grimm asserts that his actions were the result of a tragically widespread social pathology capable of affecting anyone. Crucially, Grimm’s claim that good-hearted men may have committed abuses without awareness casts greater aspersion at the social climate that allows rape to occur so casually rather than against the abusive individual. Accordingly, Gira is an individual body adrift within a flawed system populated with individual bodies equally capable of succumbing to similar actions without great consequence. Nevertheless, a crucial difference lies in how the system supports the individual who behaves pathologically. When Grimm rebukes the flaws of the system, the system responds in kind by displaying Grimm’s flaws for public reproach. Responding to Grimm, Gira claimed the event in question was consensual between the two albeit awkward, ending in embarrassment; however, his final sentiment towards Grimm was a seemingly plaintive call for the accusing artist to confront “demons that have been darkening her soul since long before she and [Gira] ever met” (Hogan 2016). In doing so, Gira establishes a pre-existing condition within Grimm that is ostensibly responsible for the dire miscommunication between them. Thus, Grimm becomes pathogenic despite absolving Gira of his actions. That Gira and Swans were able to endure the scrutiny arising from Grimm’s accusations suggests their established place within a system dependent on maintaining successes at any cost. Grimm’s call for a compassionate revision of societal norms faces the criticisms of those who consider her pathogenic. Gira’s second wife, Jennifer Gira (née Church), claimed to have proof of Grimm’s dishonesty, going on to describe her as manic, bipolar, and prone to drug relapses (Helman 2016). Similarly, Margaret Morris, of the band Heroes Are Gang Leaders, said “Clearly Grimm is not well” in response to unspecified allegations made by Grimm against bandleader Thomas Sayers Ellis at the same time as her claims about Gira (Gaca 2016). Such responses seem poised at actively diminishing the likelihood that two men would misinterpret the same woman’s consensual boundaries, and thus bolstering claims that the woman in question is lying, evidently due to untreated mental illness. An attribution of illness has tremendous potential to segregate an individual from the ostensibly “healthy” regularised population, such that

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Grimm’s allegations almost immediately evoked responses questioning her health. Hence, Swans and Gira are protected by a form of semiotic armour informed by the rhetoric of Foucault’s biopolitics, effectively using the concept of normalcy to solidify an argument against Grimm, who is depicted as a disordered individual. Grimm’s dialogues not only addressed a cultural pathology, but incidentally highlighted the new fixation on masculinity in post-millennial Swans—most notably in the absence of influential bandmember Jarboe. When Frances Morgan interviewed Gira for The Quietus in 2010, she mentioned the diminished female presence in the newly released album My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky (2010). Gira clarified that his then-wife, Siobhan Duffy, sang in the background towards the end of the album, but otherwise admitted that the lessened femininity was intentional: Once we got together, it was like, “Let’s not get the girls in.” On every Angels of Light record, women have been heavily involved. It’s not like it’s macho or something. The kind of severity I wanted to go for, I didn’t want to nuance it much, I guess you could put it that way. It was a way to be in a different space, a different territory, which maybe was a little uncomfortable. Like, maybe I could rely too much on women doing background vocals, or the different approach women might have to a song. Maybe I’d been doing that too much. (Morgan 2010)

Even though his encounter with Grimm had already occurred, Gira’s deliberate exclusion of female presence in new Swans material would not have drawn suspicion since it had taken place six years before Grimm made her story known publicly. However, it may have prompted interviewer Morgan to later re-evaluate her engagement of Swans. Morgan discussed her feelings as a female music journalist in “Where Does a Body Begin?” in the edited collection Under My Thumb: Songs That Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them (2017). Directly citing a Swans song whose lyrical context focuses on the nature of a physical body engaging with its self-­ perceived identity, Morgan’s article questions how an emphatically female presence can exist in a male-dominated field like music journalism without caving into pre-conceived expectations appealing to masculine audiences. Morgan cites radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, who maintains the ease with which men are capable of interpreting isolated elements of existence itself as though they are all distinctly independent features. A bone removed from the body, for instance, is no longer part of the body; that

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same bone turns into a pile of splinters when fractured, becoming something no longer bone, and thus something even further removed from the body (Dworkin, 66–67). Dworkin posits that the female experience is not so easily fragmented, which is a sentiment Morgan upholds as she recalls difficulties in being asked by The Quietus to evaluate Swans’ The Glowing Man with impassivity while remaining critical of rape culture (Morgan 2017, 301). When Morgan responds—describing her inability to be dispassionate towards the subject—her editor asks for a recommendation of someone who can indeed become dispassionate (301). This prompts Morgan to describe her anxieties about the female body thrust into a context demanding an appeal to the masculine corpus, which, in this case, is the arena of music journalism. Morgan balks at the request to separate any concerns about violence perpetuated against women for the sake of placating a male-dominated culture whose cultural heroes are fully capable of acting violently without major consequence. Ultimately, Morgan feels the need to justify her enjoyment of transgressive artists like Swans with the hope that it will essentially temper her to universal cruelties (306–308). However, she still seems to feel bound to a gendered corporeality that she often wishes she could abandon, which only furthered her original connection to Swans and their continued fixation on the body. Overall, Morgan describes very complex reactions to Swans and her own direct encounter with Gira as an interviewer that prompt her to elucidate the notion of separating art from artists—when, she asks, can one isolate the two, and when is it necessary to do so (309)? Morgan has no answer, but she maintains it is an important thing to contemplate. Contrast Morgan’s ruminations with Lockwood’s estimation of Gira as a utopian labourer working to unite humanity: Lockwood easily separates art from artist in the service of Mute Records, effectively omitting crucial events from Swans’ history with the record label in order to bolster his idealistic appraisal. He writes confidently and authoritatively despite the gaps in his scholarship, effectively forming an antithesis to Morgan’s emotional and ultimately uncertain engagement with the same band. Although Lockwood’s estimation is not overtly gendered, the ease with which he disregards the concerns about rape culture that Morgan cannot bring herself to ignore supports the existence of a gendered dichotomy within music journalism normalised by a “masculine” capacity to fixate on isolated aspects of an artist’s entire existence. As of this writing, the Young God Records website contains a record of 57 Swans reviews and interviews with Gira that were published after the

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date of Grimm’s accusation on 25 February 2016. This collection of reviews and interviews includes sources from large-scale periodicals, student magazines, and independent publications, making it clear that Young God Record’s website manager makes little to no distinction between the purported clout of the reviewer. Pursuant to this, these sources may very well have been gathered via content aggregation and subsequently curated, as each one contains a URL to the original publication—several of which lead to defunct websites. Of these 57 reviews, 49 were written by people whose author profiles indicate masculinity based on the pronouns used in each author’s biography. Conversely, only four of these reviews were written by female-presenting authors, while four were of indeterminate identity. Of course, it is difficult—if not impossible—to suggest the existence of a direct causality linking the increased number of male-written reviews to Gira’s intention, nor is it my plan to speculate the man’s intention at all. However, the numbers do support Morgan’s claim that the venues for music journalism are primarily owned and edited by men (307). The statistics reinforce Morgan’s suspicions that the editor of The Quietus was hoping to find a woman who could write something easily digestible for a male audience—that is, an audience that is possibly ill-concerned with a female reception of Swans after Grimm’s accusations. Consequently, in a male-dominated system like music journalism, the gendered perspective that cannot adapt to any assumed masculinities risks becoming an outsider. Writing for MTV, Sasha Geffen recalls the mixed feelings relayed by Swans fans lining up for a concert taking place shortly after Grimm’s allegations went public, noting tremendous resistance in coming to terms with Gira’s actions although few fans denied Grimm’s claims entirely (2016). Like Morgan, Geffen does not profess to know how to contend with normalities that largely excuse violent behaviour of male celebrities— at the admission of avoiding Swans’ music ever since reading Grimm’s statement. As author of this essay, I regrettably offer no easy remedy to this conundrum. However, in Global Governance and Biopolitics: Regulating Human Security, David Roberts asserts that many societal changes occur unnoticed over time, resulting from shifts in normalities spurred by questioning the accepted realities of life that are taken for granted (147). Hence, the continued discussion, questioning, and reactions to the cultural contours of rape culture are necessary in altering the ease with which sexual abuse weaves through pop culture. And yet here, after surviving Grimm’s intrusion into Swans’ successful resurgence—itself marked by the band’s freshly shed skin of dejected,

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thanatological aesthetics—the emblematic noose returns in search of the thematic body made criminal. Swans’ newest album, Leaving Meaning (2019), is entirely graphical in its presentation, featuring the title in red typeface within a yellow square floating over the album’s brown cardboard packaging. The thematic body is visually obscured, mirroring an interior photograph of Gira’s hands—prominently bearing a gold wedding ring— presumably covering his face. Aesthetically bare, Leaving Meaning may be the conceptual culmination of the yearning discorporate individual’s experience as characterised by Swans’ previous three albums, suggesting how the abandonment of significance itself may lead the individual to better embrace reality. However, Gira seems to admit his own corporeal liminality in “The Hanging Man,” wherein the speaker describes himself as perpetually dangling body stealing unoccupied spaces, who both “is” and “is not.” Success, whether defined as financial freedom, cultural significance, or otherwise, can still direct one to the gibbet. The unmentioned noose declares this by keeping Gira’s hanged man suspended in unending penance, rendering both the musical and global stage a potential execution ground for the artist himself—and perhaps for any potential observers.

Works Cited Clifford, Dave. “Michael Gira | Interview.” Alternative Press, no. 132, 30 June 1999. Foucault, Michel. “Society Must be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976. Translated by David Macey. Picador, 2003. Gaca, Anna. “Heroes Are Gang Leader’s Margaret Morris Challenges Larkin Grimm’s Rape Allegations.” SPIN Magazine, 4 March 2016. Geffen, Sasha. “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Swans? Fans Wrestle with the Aftermath of a Rape Accusation Against the Band’s Leader.” MTV, 10 October 2016. Gira, Michael. The Consumer. 2.13.61 Incorporated, 1995. Gunn, Joshua. “Gothic Music and the Inevitability of Genre.” Popular Music and Society, vol. 23, 1999. Helman, Peter. “Larkin Grimm Accuses Swan’s Michael Gira of Rape.” Stereogum, 25 February 2016. https://www.stereogum.com/1862047/larkin-­grimm-­ accuses-­swans-­michael-­gira-­of-­rape/news/. Hogan, Marc. “Swans’ Michael Gira Issues Statement on Rape Accusations, Larkin Grimm Responds.” Pitchfork, 26 February 2016. https://pitchfork.com/ news/63799-­swans-­michael-­gira-­issues-­statement-­on-­rape-­accusations-­larkin-­ grimm-­responds/.

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Kuźnicki, Sławomir. “To See It All/To Hear It All: Michael Gira’s Songs of Experience.” Explorations: A Journal of Language and Literature, vol. 6, 2018, 67–78. Lockwood, Dean. “The Blessed Glow of Labour: Independence, Style, and Process in the Music of Swans.” In Mute Records: Artists, Business, History, edited by Zuleika Beaven, Marcus O’Dair, and Richard Osborne. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, 155–167. Miller, Michael T. “The Name of the Beast: Monstrosity and the Subhuman in Michael Gira and Nietzsche.” In Monstrous Reflection, edited by Petra Rehling and Elsa Bouet. Brill, (2019), 63–70. Morgan, Frances. “Supersonic 2010: Michael Gira Talks About Swans and Hair Shirts.” The Quietus, 15 September 2010. https://thequietus.com/ articles/04958-­swans-­michael-­gira-­interview. Morgan, Frances. “Supersonic “Where Does a Body Begin?” In Under My Thumb: Songs That Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them, edited by Rhian Jones and Eli Davis. Repeater Books, 2017, pp. 298–309. Payne, Chris. “Larkin Grimm Follows up on Rape Accusations Against Swans’ Michael Gira, Fixing Rape Culture.” Billboard, 28 February 2016. https:// w w w. b i l l b o a r d . c o m / a r t i c l e s / c o l u m n s / r o c k / 6 8 9 0 5 1 4 / larkin-­grimm-­swans-­michael-­gira-­rape-­response-­statement. Ratliff, Ben. “Never Say Never: Swans Return,” The New  York Times, 3 September 2010. Ross, Barbara. “Kesha Sobs as Judge Refuses to Cancel Contract With Producer Dr. Luke Who Allegedly Raped Her in 2006.” New York Daily News, 20 February 2016. Soulsby, Nick. Swans: Sacrifice and Transcendence: The Oral History. Jawbone Press. 2018. Wengrofsky, Jeffrey. “The Intimate Horror of Michael Gira.” Coilhouse: A Love Letter to Alternative Culture. 2009. https://coilhouse.net/2009/03/ the-­intimate-­horror-­of-­michael-­gira-­2/.

CHAPTER 3

Nafada: Industrial, Hip-Hop, and the Diasporic Condition Rachael Gunn, Susie Khamis, and Steve Collins

In September 2019, industrial band Konqistador released Nafada, a nine-­ track album notable for its collaboration with female Arab and/or Muslim hip-hop artists. This collaboration revealed the powerful synergies between industrial and hip-hop aesthetics that are centred on critiques of control and oppositionality. We argue that this dynamic fusion in Nafada worked to amplify the voices of marginalised women speaking out against oppression. This may be against societal rules, cultural norms, or the way in which Arab and/or Muslim women are represented. Grounded in industrial and hip-hop, Nafada tells life stories that both contradict and evade hegemonic narratives and, in doing so, reveals an oppositionality in women who are too often denied agency.

R. Gunn • S. Collins (*) Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] S. Khamis University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Whittaker, E. Potter (eds.), Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92462-1_3

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Konqistador was formed in 2005 by Reginald Tiessen and Elizabeth Graham, two Canadians who had relocated to Melbourne, Australia in 2001. Their debut album, Courage Riot, was released on Warthog Records that same year. Stylistically, Courage Riot was situated in the industrial-­ rock genre with noticeable elements of blues (unsurprising given Tiessen and Graham’s former band 72Blues). Since Courage Riot, Konqistador have released two full length albums and numerous EPs that mark an evolution in the band’s sound. In 2007, Tiessen and Graham began collaborating with Sydney-based producer INfest8 who remixed three Konqistador tracks.1 This led to an ongoing collaborative relationship that brought INfest8 into the songwriting process and introduced a sound more oriented towards electronic-industrial. Under the Konqistador handle, Tiessen and Graham have pitched themselves as ‘crusaders for hybridity’ (Konqistador 2013). This raison d’être emerged during the production of their sophomore album, Suada (2012), which was mostly written and recorded in Istanbul. Suada saw Konqistador go further in their approach to collaboration, especially with musicians outside of the traditions of Western music: “This not only required us to take risks, but to surround ourselves with creators that could teach us something. We achieved this by opening ourselves up to musicians and artists from multiple disciplines spanning across many forms of artistic expression” (Konqistador 2013). Tiessen and Graham blended industrial-rock with recitals of Afghan poetry, the sounds of Lebanese women, and samples of Turkish street musicians. Suada foreshadowed the collaborations and blending of genres, cultures, and aesthetics that would eventuate in the production of Nafada. Throughout Konqistador’s work, there is a social justice dimension that grows from a central theme of courage. For example, the lyrical themes of Courage Riot were teeming with metaphors of war, battle, victory, and defeat (Collins 2020). The thematic centrepoint of courage extends into other motifs such as empowerment, indignation, doubt, resistance, prevailing against challenges, oppression, and obstacles. As artists, Tiessen and Graham have committed Konqistador to “go beyond entertainment and into the realm of purpose … to be a crusader for humanity, an archive for tradition, an educator and student in the global 1  Authors’ note: One of the authors of this chapter is directly involved with Konqistador. Steve Collins (INfest8) is also a music producer and works with Konqistador as a remixer, producer, and songwriter.

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community, and a contributor to world music” (Konqistador 2013). Social justice would become a driving force in the conception of Nafada, as a relocation to Detroit placed Tiessen and Graham in the heart of the largest Arab-Muslim population in the United States, and one of the largest outside the Middle East (Rasmussen 2016, 110). Graham explains, “Nafada was really inspired by circumstance and our view of the indignation of women in crisis regions combined with current U.S. anti-Muslim rhetoric, the rise of a resistance movement and our duty to our local Arab community here in Detroit, Michigan” (quoted in Vile 2019). Enabled by their history of collaboration and hybridity, Nafada became a way for Konqistador to highlight the courage and resistance of Arab/ Muslim women. Nafada was conceived in late December 2017 as a return to the Eastern influences present in Suada and a “heavy, hard-hitting, celebration of Arab/Eastern/Muslim culture/themes and an all-around sonic assault” (Collins 2017). Production (unknowingly) began in early 2018 with the track ‘Eden, Woman’s War’, which originally featured only Graham’s vocals; a later version added rapping by Kid Vishis marking Konqistador’s first involvement with the hip-hop genre. As Tiessen explained via email, “[this is the] first time we’ve EVER done anything like this” (Collins 2018); this chance collaboration, however, provided a catalyst for the Nafada album by opening the doors to hip-hop. In April 2018, as Tiessen took on the role of Director of Intersections for the National Arab Orchestra, discussions began about potential collaborations with Middle East and North Africa (MENA) artists, and the shape of Nafada started to form. The word ‘Nafada’ is Arabic, meaning to ‘shake off’ or ‘to be rid of’. It is the root of ‘intifada’, a rebellion or uprising (Roberson 2013, p.42). Driven by wanting to highlight the experiences of Arab/Muslim women, Tiessen embarked on a recruitment drive to find female, Arab/Muslim hip-hop artists to collaborate with Konqistador on an album that would fuse industrial music, hip-hop, and the Arab world (in terms of sonic elements and lyrical content) to ‘shake off’ stereotypes and tell experiential life stories. These stories frequently involved subjects such as social oppression, censorship, sex-trafficking, and forced marriage, and were marked by expressions of outrage and resistance. As we will discuss later, the blend of industrial music and hip-hop aesthetics provided an ideal ideological vehicle for conveying such messages. Nafada featured seven female hip-hop artists who identify as Arab and/or Muslim: Medusa Tn (Tunisia), Meryem Saci (Algeria), Soultana

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(Morocco), Salome MC (Iran), Miss Undastood (USA), Sultana (Turkey), and Han Han (Philippines). A number of other artists such as Tendresse (Morocco), Sonita Alizadeh (Afghanistan), and Shadia Mansour (UK/ Palestine) were initially involved in tracks for Nafada but were replaced for various reasons ranging from lack of commitment to breakdowns in negotiations with managers. The release of Nafada was subject to much travail. Konqistador’s work has mostly been self-released through aggregation services such as The Orchard, but Nafada attracted the attention of Sony Middle East. While very supportive during its recording and production, Sony Middle East withdrew its interest in licensing the album two weeks before Nafada was due to be submitted. The reasons behind this decision were complex and semi-opaque. Music streaming in MENA has been largely dominated by Deezer and Anghami. Spotify and Apple Music were latecomers to the region, only establishing a presence in late 2018, but both are key partners for Sony (Eriksson et al. 2019, 5). Tiessen recounts that Apple Music and Spotify introduced a region-specific code of ethics that specifically targets “provocative messaging pertaining to: government, authoritarianism, rulers, Sheikhs, kings, kingdoms and politics in general” (Collins 2019). Sony Middle East expressed concern that some lyrical content might be too abrasive for the censorship policies of some MENA regions. This was also recognised by some artists: after a period of reflection, one artist replaced a lyric directly addressing and criticising a royal family; a similar act later landed one Moroccan rapper in jail (Safi 2019). Although its withdrawal from licensing Nafada was a disappointment, Sony agreed to supervise the album’s release through The Orchard, a digital distributor it acquired in 2015. It also committed to assist with marketing the album by organising a ‘homepage takeover’ whereby a banner advert for the album was pushed to every Spotify user in MENA for the week beginning 9 September 2019, and ensuring tracks were included on prominent playlists such as ‘Women Wa Bas’ (the only Spotify playlist dedicated to female Arab artists) and ‘New Music Friday Gulf’ (the fifth most popular playlist in Saudi Arabia). Ultimately, concern for any controversy caused by Nafada appeared exaggerated as the album easily nestled into MENA’s digital music platforms. The tracks ‘Nafada’, ‘Kahina’, and ‘Sahar’ were included on editorial playlists, ‘Eden, Woman’s War’ reached number 21 in Saudi Arabia’s iTunes charts, and ‘Karitha’ received over 140,000 plays on Radio Faryad, an uncensored Iranian music platform. Outside of MENA, the video for

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‘Visaya’ (along with mission statement videos with Elizabeth Graham and featured artist, Han Han) was featured as part of Urban Kingdom’s Generation W festival. Konqistador was offered a headline slot for the 28th Concert of Colors, an annual diversity-themed music festival held in Detroit (unfortunately postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic). These are formidable feats for an album that was produced without budget, in a home studio, and around day jobs and family commitments.

Industrial Music and Its Aesthetic As can be seen throughout this book, industrial is a nebulous genre; its artists and fans constitute a broad church (Woods 2007, 45–56). While elements such as heavily distorted and abrasive sounds, synthesisers, samples from television and movies, and distorted/shouted/screamed vocals are markers of industrial music (Collins 2002, 78–88), there is little immediate similarity between the sounds of, say, Ministry’s industrial metal and the electronic body music pioneered by Front 242, yet both would be at home on any industrial playlist. Industrial is more than just a genre of music, with some commentators arguing that ‘industrial’ is more accurately approached as a set of ideas or an aesthetic. Goddard (2008, 164) argues that first-wave industrial artists such as Throbbing Gristle were not primarily motivated as music-makers, but instead focused on “experimentation with forms of communication”. Jon Savage wrote of five ideas of industrial (Vale and Juno 1983, 5): (1) organisational autonomy, (2) access to information (the notion of an information war), (3) use of synthesisers and anti-music, (4) extra-musical elements, and (5) shock tactics. Some of these are more reflective of activities carried out by the first wave of industrial artists such as COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, SPK, and Cabaret Voltaire. For example, there is a rich history of (especially first wave) industrial artists using shock tactics in their imagery and performances. Blood and gore, sexual deviance, serial killers, fascism, and violence are just some of the ‘shocking’ elements that feature prominently in industrial works. As Savage states, shock tactics are “a time honored technique to make sure what you have to say gets noticed” (Vale and Juno 1983, 5). Industrial artists employ shock tactics as a form of protest, a means for revealing suffering and injustice, and to brutally highlight to the audience that “something is wrong with this world, and we are going to tell you; we are going to show you what it is” (Woods 2007, 32).

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Bands attempt to shock their listener with the horrors of something negative, instead of telling them the positive alternatives. For example, the band Skinny Puppy is well known for its stance against animal cruelty. But instead of telling the audience how they might contribute to this fight by purchasing animal safe products or living a vegetarian lifestyle, the band show graphic vivisection and slaughterhouse film footage on gigantic screens during its performances (Hanley 2004, 164). Shock tactics in industrial music are not as prominent (nor perhaps as effective) as they once were. From the 1980s, industrial music became less involved with the original avant-garde ideas, but “remained consistent with cultural criticism” (Oksanen 2013, 12). It is not necessary for us to recount the history of industrial music; as indicated in the introduction, this has been published elsewhere in far more detail (see: Reed 2013, Vecchio 2014, Woods 2007). Rather, in this section we focus on two ideas that are fundamental to and remain prominent features of the industrial aesthetic: dystopias and information war. Woods notes that early industrial bands like Throbbing Gristle were “spokespeople” critical of a “numbness” and “sameness” that they observed present in society (32). These dystopian qualities are often depicted in industrial music: “The concept of a dystopian future was a major technique used by industrial musicians that allowed them to present social commentary and suggest political action in a manner that was more powerful than simply discussing current events” (Hanley 2011, 196). These dystopian qualities are intimately linked to the notion of an information war. According to Oksanen (2013, 7) the preoccupation with fighting an information war against control entered the industrial aesthetic via the work of William Burroughs: “systems of control are practised through newspapers, radio, televisions and magazines, but also in terms of state institutions that serve to homogenise people. Control functions to deactivate people, to kill dreams, to modify them into dull existence”. Industrial musicians were acutely aware that “struggles in society were struggles of power, and the best place to combat this oppression was through waging ‘information war’ with music” (Woods 2007, 89). Genesis P-Orridge mobilised Throbbing Gristle as an antagonist in an information war that used media to combat messages of control disseminated by ‘the media’: “We think the real power lies with who controls the information … Real war has become information war. It is being fought by subtle informational media–under cold conditions” (Vale and Juno 1983, 9, 15). P-Orridge was not alone in seeing industrial music as a weapon in the

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information war, a way to counter control. Stephen Mallinder writes that Cabaret Voltaire “challenged ideas of authority and control” (Reed, ix). Ministry’s Alain Jourgensen states: “All we’re ever saying is ‘think for yourself, question authority’ … everyone wants things precut, homogenized, spoon-fed, and I won’t give it to them” (Hanley 2004, 168). An analysis of industrial music lyrics reveals that social critique and loss of control are sustained key topics (Collins 2002, 88). In the industrial aesthetic, artists are antagonists in a war using music as a counteroffensive against the control of information by those in power (Kromhout 2011, 23). Konqistador follows the industrial aesthetic by producing music that is designed to push back against dominant narratives; vocalist and lyricist Elizabeth Graham explains that Konqistador’s music stems from a central theme of courage—the courage to rise up, resist and prevail against control systems (Collins 2020). Nafada was designed to serve as a vehicle for female Arab/Muslim artists to freely articulate their stories and disseminate counter-hegemonic narratives without risk of censorship: In North America, artists have the freedom to express without fear while in places like Algeria, Tunisia, Iran and Morocco women can be banned from performing music or worse, they could be jailed or killed. Our extensive travels overseas throughout Northern Africa and those artistically censored regions was eye-opening for us and it was the start of us understanding the enormous challenges women artists face … We decided if we were to be the authors of an album that would resonate and make impact, we would hand the torch over to female artists from censored regions so that they could have a voice and tell their stories. Not only would it mean we share the songwriting process but also open ourselves up to the genre of hip-hop which we quickly learned is the genre of resistance in many artistically censored regions of the world. (Vile 2019)

It is against this context that hip-hop has often been used to speak out against systemic oppression and injustices, and there is a growing body of literature mapping its political potential in non-Western regions.

The Influence of Hip-Hop Hip-hop culture and its expressive practices of breaking, graffiti writing, emceeing (rap), and deejaying were developed by African American, Latinx, and Afro-Caribbean youth in the Bronx (New York) in the 1970s.

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Hip-hop is both a response to, and a product of, post-industrial urban America where marginalisation, social alienation, diminished opportunity, and systematic oppression were rampant (Rose 1994). Hip-hop’s stylistic bricolage and ‘do-it-yourself’ attitude infused with Black and Latinx cultural expressivity facilitated the framework for new forms of expression that could voice opposition, assert presence in new ways, and transform derelict spaces into sites of community and leisure. These characteristics have allowed hip-hop to proliferate, adapt to, and infuse with local cultures, politics, and identities around the world. There is a long and broad history of using hip-hop to advocate for social and political change. From Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s ‘The Message’ (1982) to N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton (1988) and the birth of ‘gangsta rap’, hip-hop has been used as a vehicle for social commentary and to inspire political action. Since the 1980s, a proliferation of genres have emerged, including ‘political hip-hop’ and ‘conscious hip-hop’, that embrace hip-hop’s capacity to speak to exclusionary systems of control, injustices, and invisibilisation of marginalised groups and issues. Nafada builds upon this tradition in the way it showcases marginalised voices rapping about personal, political, and social issues. The discursive power of rap music comes from its ability to articulate the local and the personal while also rendering visible the cracks in broader political and cultural spheres. Yet it is more than the lyrics and subject content in rap that so powerfully ‘represents’ the local. The centrality of the voice grounds rap in the personal, and the stylistic distinctions that emerge through changes in language and accents give further power and meaning to each performance. Specifically, language changes bring differences in registers, cadences, and stylistic conventions that (re)assert rich cultural histories (Isoke 2013). Nafada consists of raps in multiple languages: Turkish, English, Modern Standard Arabic, Algerian-French, Quebecois French, and Cebuano. Such ‘resistance vernaculars’ (Mitchell 2000) resist linguistic (and cultural) dominance, preserve, appreciate, and celebrate culture and heritage, and in doing so facilitate emancipatory potential (Alim et al. 2008; Isoke 2013; Khanjani 2020). For example, for the Dubai women interviewed by Isoke (2013), rapping in Arabic allowed them to maintain a connection to their home country, instil pride in being Arab, and make a statement against US cultural hegemony. The growing arena of global hip-hop studies is testament to the ways in which hip-hop continues to expand in a complex and dynamic interplay of local, regional, and global politics and identities. Hip-hop’s reach may be

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the product of its “connective marginalities”, that is the “social resonances between Black expressive culture within its contextual political history and similar dynamics in other nations” (Osumare 2001, 172). These connections may manifest as culture, class, historical oppression, or even the construction of ‘youth’ as outsiders (ibid.). Through hip-hop, fans and practitioners can transform their ‘outsider’ or ‘othered’ status into an oppositional positionality and use this platform to question and critique structures of power and systems of control. While hip-hop and industrial music share few sonic characteristics and sound very different, our aim here is to reveal their aesthetic synergies and show how their integration facilitates a novel and transformative voicing of political issues. What emerges is a common thread of oppositionality, one that is grounded in critiques of control. Like industrial music, the hip-hop genre is varied and multifaceted, and yet positioned to speak back to systems of oppression and control. As such, on Nafada, hip-hop’s political potential is augmented by its synthesis with industrial music. This point rests on how Nafada spotlights voices that are elsewhere diminished, denied, or condemned, by dint of their gender, faith, class, and language. That hip-hop should make space for them is not entirely surprising: in the growing literature on hip-hop in Africa and Asia, common themes include hip-hop’s capacity to advocate for social, cultural, and political change, to speak back to systems of oppression, as a form of cultural resistance, as a means for protest, and to offer new multidimensional representations of identity that challenge social norms (Clark 2018; Clark and Koster 2014; Isoke 2013; Khanjani 2020; Williams 2020). Much of this research has examined how women emcees use hip-hop to articulate empowerment within the confines of conservative patriarchal societies. This is not to homogenise the motivations of hip-hop practitioners across these highly diverse regions, but rather to illustrate the ways in which the lyrical tools of hip-hop have been utilised in locally consistent and specific ways. For example, while rappers in Iran are under strict surveillance and regularly at risk of arrest or incarceration, this risk is magnified for women, as Khanjani reveals how, “the female rappers are restricted in expressing themselves, not only because of legal restrictions but also for the social stigmatization they are subjected to. In this regard, the lyrics of Iranian female rappers rarely address sexual issues and instead they are filled with criticism about social and political restrictions on women, such as the obligatory hijab (Keir, 2010)” (4). Khanjani’s focus on Salome MC, Iran’s first female rapper who also features on Nafada, shows one way in which lyrics are a

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powerful tool to articulate resistance. In the next section, we show how Nafada, bolstered by the rich traditions and aesthetics of industrial and hip-hop music, articulates complex, hybrid, and fluid identities that challenge hegemonic narratives.

The Diasporic Condition and Resisting Hegemony Nafada is not only significant in its novel fusion of industrial and hip-hop, nor in its disarming array of female emcees of MENA origin. Rather, the album also speaks to the latitude and plasticity of diaspora. In this instance, diasporas of ethnicity, religion, and genre converge in ways that are both emancipatory and emblematic. Nafada’s artists spotlight the myriad ways that MENA identity manifests and morphs, as each emcee articulates a subjectivity that is at once unique and relatable; each woman’s ‘take’ on Islam is different, powerfully rebutting neo-Con attempts to homogenise the ‘Muslim women’s experience’; and both hip-hop and industrial are freed from hackneyed tropes and motifs, without forfeiting key concerns that have powered both genres over time. That these trajectories converge on Nafada reflects the cultural geometry of contemporary media, the emphatic intersectionality of identity politics, and the shape-shifting nature of all artistic genres. For these reasons, Nafada is the ultimate example of the diasporic condition, a way of being that rests on postmodern notions of the hybrid, the liminal, and the hyphenated. Following Budarick (2014), this approach to diaspora shifts the focal beam from ‘place’ (fixed) to ‘culture’ (not fixed) and considers imagined transnational communities that exist beyond both a homeland and a host state; and calls on deterritorialised ties that bend and stretch across different geographical, social, and cultural zones. While Budarick was most concerned with diasporas of people, here the logic covers genre as well, as both hip-hop and industrial are seen to honour history and heritage, as well as carry emerging sites of dynamic expression and iconoclastic art. By any reckoning, Nafada is a triumph of multinational enterprise and initiative, logistically and symbolically. From Konqistador’s Tiessen and Graham criss-crossing the globe (Canada/Australia/US—colonial outposts that now boast multicultural metropolises), to its various emcees, almost every contributor has a diasporic backstory: Salome MC relocated from Iran to Japan; Medusa TN from Tunisia to France, Han Han from the Philippines to Canada, and Meryem Saci from Algeria to Montreal. By this measure alone, there is distinct emphasis on personal perspectives that

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are neither static nor stable, and are instead fashioned from movement and adaptation. These MENA voices are joined on Nafada by arguably the world’s first Muslim female rapper, Tavasha Shannon, aka Miss Undastood—from New  York. All this matters because in this diversity Nafada forces open cracks in systems that were hitherto closed or policed, or where access was conditional. Effectively these emcees mount a collective challenge to tired clichés of the ‘oppressed Muslim woman’ (i.e., hijabed, silenced, and without agency), and in their ‘glocalised’ biographies, they confound expectations or assumptions associated with culture. By virtue of the textured melange at work in each woman’s narrative, it is impossible to locate a centralising axis with precision or certainty; they frustrate attempts to define what it means to be Arab or Muslim. This openness permeates every emcee’s story: each has previously collaborated on projects that were both inspired and inspiring. At the same time, while each woman has built a profile in the hip-hop ‘scene’, they confront the bulwarks and divisions that mark multiple contested spaces. Concepts of femininity, piety, and citizenship run through their oeuvres, with each woman’s truth parsed through matrices of wider shared experiences—of discrimination and bigotry, of joy and pride. Nafada canvasses a spectrum of lived experience and tests any attempt to contain any of these voices to limited (or limiting) rubrics governing identity, affiliation, or ambition. There are common stories of Islamophobia, misogyny, sexism, and wage struggle—a generation of women that have lived through the xenophobic rhetoric post-9/11, Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo. Yet these are commonalities, not defining characteristics. Therein lies the emancipatory potential of this project: as a compelling counterpoint to dominant narratives that otherwise flatten the MENA woman to stereotype and filter her voice through Orientalist schemas. It is supremely ironic then that of all the emcees featured on Nafada, only one wears a hijab—Miss Undastood, a New Yorker. She has long made religiosity central to her gritty lyricism, as well as self-love, feminism, and a ‘trailblazer’ sensibility (Khabeer, 133).

Hip-Hop and Muslim Identities By showing how industrial, hip-hop, and Islam can so comfortably coalesce, Nafada adds to what has already become a rich sub-genre of Muslim-inspired hip-hop. Historically, this makes much sense. As noted, hip-hop has long conveyed experiences of oppression, urban malaise, and

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discriminatory public policy. In the US, tenets of Islamic faith surfaced through artists that fused their Muslim religion with Black consciousness. From Afrika Bambaataa, Ice Cube and Public Enemy to Q-Tip, Mos Def, Busta Rhymes, and Lupe Fiasco, US hip-hop culture is replete with Muslim rappers that channel their frustrations and ideals through a genre primed for lyrical catharsis. In turn, hip-hop allowed them to protest not just white supremacist institutions but fault-lines within US Islam— namely, an Arab and South Asian cultural hegemony that sees Arab Muslims presume greater piety or authenticity through a perceived proximity to the Prophet’s birthplace, language, and scripture (Grewal 2013). In this way, it fostered a discourse, an aesthetic, an epistemology, and an embodiment that Su’ad Abdul Khabeer calls ‘Muslim Cool’, a “way of being Muslim that draws on Blackness” to contest “two overlapping systems of racial norms” (Khabeer 2016, 2). For these Black Muslims, hip-­ hop carries a baton passed on by the civil rights and Black Power eras to fight systemic inequality (Khabeer 2018, 155). By the late 1980s, hip-hop had travelled from the Bronx to inner cities across the US, a consonant and charismatic salve for disenfranchised youth (McMurray 2008). By the early 2000s, though, hip-hop was a truly global phenomenon, and found traction in precincts around the world. It is now a dominant art form in countries as diverse as Egypt, Brazil, Japan, Australia, Germany, South Africa, France, China, Columbia, Norway, Senegal, and Cuba. What had become a mainstream genre in the US spread globally, through the commercialisation and marketing of its biggest stars, as well as organically as youth saw their own identity narratives so potently captured and were thus emboldened to rearticulate hip-hop on their terms (Collins and Bilge 2016). As with the US, hip-hop resonated particularly with Muslim youth, whose everyday conditions resembled those that helped birth hip-hop in New  York just decades earlier: poor housing, poor health, and high unemployment (Saeed 2013, 185). In France’s ghettoised banlieues, for instance, marked by underfunded schools, rampant delinquency, and routine police brutality, hip-hop thrives. In these suburbs, over-represented by French Muslims, there is the added tension of laïcité—the secularist policy that ostensibly excised religious symbols from public life, but effectively deemed veiled Muslims incompatible with French national identity (Nyawalo 2019, 169–171). The heightened debates around veiling and the extent to which it ‘proved’ a cultural chasm between Islam and the West raged not just through France, but the UK, much of Europe, and Australia. Particularly in the

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decade after 9/11, the veil became the most visible marker of Muslim presence in traditionally ‘non-Muslim’ regions; a recurring reference point for those that saw in Islam vestiges of a mediaeval theocracy, and the symbolic erasure of Muslim women. Not surprisingly, this preoccupation with the veil as a defining (and demeaning) aspect of Muslim identity had several consequences: at the very least, this mindset stubbornly ignored the many and varied ways that Muslim women express themselves and their religion (i.e., not just sartorially); and it hardened perceptions that Muslim women lack voice and volition. That Nafada’s emcees articulate and occupy such distinct sites of expression and experience does not disavow the magnetic pull of diasporic connections. Rather, they show how the diasporic condition—as a psychological, emotional, and intellectual state—belies reductionist assumptions. In turn, diasporic connections are best seen as porous and pliable. Once the jarring effect of this convergence subsides (industrial/hip-hop/Islam), a bracing truth finds form: their stories are nuanced and irregular precisely because cultural currents are almost never uniform or symmetrical, so any encounters between, say, industrial, hip-hop, and Islam inevitably produce fresh, exhilarating and, in this case at least, edifying insights. The malleability of genre here sees both hip-hop and industrial extended in terms of representation and connotation. At the same time, whatever political bite (or didactic edge) that pulsates throughout Nafada is hardly foreign to either genre. For emcees to speak back to power is a defining feature of hip-hop; and industrial has long spotlighted the dystopian existentialism of contemporary life—mechanisms of control that privilege the technological over the human, the standardised over the eclectic, and the state over the individual (Collins 2005, 173). The ideological affinity at work in Nafada might be novel, but it is not implausible, nor an aberration. As such, the diaspora of genre comes to the fore; like people, hip-hop and industrial have both ‘roots’ and ‘routes’. Particularly telling here are not just how genres travel around the world but how they are transformed via bold change-agents, and new scenes blossom, not to replicate or imitate the ‘original’, but to reflect the material, cultural, and interpersonal conditions of hyper-local milieus. This invariably inflects genres with voices and views and that had been otherwise ignored or denied, as well as artistic flourishes that bespeak these new contexts.

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Rewriting MENA Identities It is not just that Nafada is a sonic revelation, a ‘next-gen’ spin on hip-­ hop or industrial. It champions emcees that have battled (and survived) interlocking systems of discrimination, and now constitute seminal game-­ changers. Salome MC was the first woman in Iran to make hip-hop music, even though its urban hubs had underground hip-hop communities in the early 2000s, and a ‘mainstream’ one by 2009 (Golpushnezhad 2018). Still, in Iran, all cultural products need clearance from the Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance, and large sections of the population would deem hip-hop anathema to female propriety and virtue. Salome MC, who was also Iran’s first female graffiti artist before emceeing, and is also an experimental multimedia artist and peace activist, now lives in the US. For Toronto-based Han Han, hip-hop was born out of her poetry, inspired by her experience as a first-generation immigrant, and the child of a single mother. An operating nurse ‘by day’, Han Han writes in the two main Filipino languages (Tagalog and Cebuano, with occasional English), an act of resistance to assimilation. Therein lies the activist potential of these women, whose mere presence is both provocative and pioneering. Miss Undastood’s work has catalogued her litany of battles over almost 20 years: single parenthood, surviving domestic violence, 9/11, and most recently, quarantining in the age of coronavirus. All the while, as she recounted to Vogue Arabia, being told that she was “hip-hopping my way to hellfire” (quoted in Khan 2021), her outspokenness coupled with hijab was seen as a quixotic (read: impossible) combination by many in her community. By this measure alone, these emcees are rewriting MENA identity. For Tunisian rapper Medusa TN, rapping is more than an art-form; it is a responsibility and pledge she made to Afro-Arab women. Growing up, she was inspired by both the ‘American dream’ as well as the burgeoning hip-­ hop scene in nearby France. Grafted onto a Tunisian context though, she found her chosen themes (of women’s experiences and oppressions) galvanised critics, to the point that Medusa TN received death threats from religious extremists. She pressed on: “the more I toured in Arab countries, the more I would see women come up to me, many times in tears, saying they were influenced by my music. That’s when I really began to understand what rapping is actually about” (quoted in Eshrati 2020). All these emcees share this trait: an ability to distil what is otherwise a highly personal journey into a clarion call for action—addressed by women, to women. Meryem Saci arrived in Montreal in 2000 with her mother,

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aged just 13. They were political refugees from the civil war that raged through Algeria. From an early love of soul, 90s R&B, and gospel, she joined the multicultural super-group Nomadic Massive in 2005—rated the top hip-hop act in Montreal for five years in a row, and opening for Mos Def, Public Enemy, Busta Rhymes, and Wyclef Jean. For Saci, even ‘hip-hop’ does not cover the diversity of her collaborations and outputs: “I am influenced by so many cultures and sounds that I find myself short of labels and boxes to fit in. I just wanna make good timeless music” (quoted in Fama 2016). That is arguably the overriding point here: the diasporic condition does not recognise or abide by boxes; it is sinewy and singular, and whatever art that emanates will be similarly conceived—breaking boundaries, smashing conventions and blithely indifferent to precedent or protocol. These emcees cohere around the broad parameters of genre, identity, and experience, but cannot be reduced to stereotype, and will not conform to conventions. As such, they are powerful change-agents. At the same time, as hip-hop and industrial meet on Nafada, genre itself is shown to be elastic, inclusive, and reimagined. Like these emcees, hip-hop and industrial have travelled around the world, received, and rearticulated by fans, artists, and communities that find in them the tools for creative expression and cultural resilience. Konqistador’s Tiessen and Graham intended for Nafada to be a countermeasure in an information war, to ‘shake off’ hegemonic portrayals of Muslim and/or Arab women, and to hand them emancipatory control over the narrative of their lived experiences. In this chapter we have shown the powerful synergies between industrial and hip-hop music—synergies that coalesce around a mutual aesthetic rooted in resisting and countering oppressive control systems. Nafada works to resist and undermine hegemonic depictions of MENA women, and to instead highlight their complex, multifaceted, and shifting identities.

Works Cited Alim, H. Samy, Ibrahim, Awad, and Pennycook, Alastair (Eds). Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language. New York: Routledge, 2008. Budarick, John. “Media and the limits of transnational solidarity: Unanswered questions in the relationship between diaspora, communication and community”. Global Media and Communication 10.2 (2014), pp. 139–153.

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Khabeer, Su’ad Abdul. “Hip Hop Matters: Race, Space, and Islam in Chicago”. City & Society. 30(2) (2018), pp. 141–164. Khabeer, Su’ad Abdul. “Hip Hop Matters: Race, Space, and Islam in Chicago”. City & Society. 30(2) Muslim cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States. New York University Press: New York, 2016. Khan, Aina. “Meet the New Generation of Black, Female Muslim Emcees”. Vogue Arabia, 2021. [online] Available at: https://en.vogue.me/culture/ black-­female-­muslim-­emcees/. Khanjani, Mehrnaz. Voicing the Subaltern and Inspiring Change: Critical Discourse Analysis of the Autobiographical Song by the First Iranian Female Rapper. Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 16(1) (2020), pp. 1–17. Konqistador, 2012. Suada. [Online] The Orchard. Available at: https://konqistador.bandcamp.com/album/suada [Accessed 2 April 2021]. Konqistador, 2013. Crusaders for Hybridity. [video] Available at: https://vimeo. com/61464032 [Accessed 23 March 2021]. Konqistador, 2019. Nafada. [Online] The Orchard. Available at: https://konqistador.bandcamp.com/album/nafada [Accessed 2 April 2021]. Kromhout, Melle Jan. “Over the Ruined Factory There’s a Funny Noise”: Throbbing Gristle and the Mediatized Roots of Noise in/as Music. Popular Music and Society 34(1) (2011), pp. 23–34. McMurray, Anaya. “Hotep and Hip-Hop: Can Black Muslim Women Be Down with Hip-Hop?” Meridians 8(1) (2008), pp. 74–92. Mitchell, Tony, “Doin’ Damage in My Native Language: The Use of ‘Resistance Vernaculars’ in Hip Hop in France, Italy, and Aotearoa/New Zealand”. Popular Music and Society 24(3) (2000), pp. 41–54. Mitchell, Tony (ed.). Global Noise: Rap and Hip-Hop Outside the USA. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001. Nyawalo, Mich Yonah. “Negotiating French Muslim Identities through Hip Hop.” Journal of Hip Hop Studies 6(2) (2019), pp. 166–183. Oksanen, Atte. “Anti-Musical Becomings: Industrial Music and the Politics of Shock and Risk”. Secessio, [online] 2(1) (2013). Available at: https://secessio.net/vol-­2 -­n o-­1 /anti-­m usical-­b ecomings-­i ndustrial-­ music-­and-­the-­politics-­of-­shock-­and-­risk/. Osumare, Halifu. “Beat Streets in the Global Hood: Connective Marginalities of the Hip Hop Globe”. Journal of American & Comparative Cultures 24(1–2) (2001), pp. 171–81. Rasmussen, Anne. The Music of Arab Detroit: A Musical Mecca in the Midwest. In Kip Lornell and Anne Rasmussen, eds. The Music of Multicultural America: Performance, Identity, and Community in the United States. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016, pp. 109–136. Reed, S.  Alexander, 2013. Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Roberson, Mary K. Birth, Transformation, and Death of Refugee Identity: Women and Girls of the Intifada. In Ellen Cole, Esther D Rothblum, and Oliva M. Espin eds. Refugee Women and Their Mental Health: Shattered Societies, Shattered Lives. New York: Routledge, 2013, pp. 35–53. Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Saeed, Amir. Between Hip-hop and Muhammad: European Muslim Hip-hop and identity. In Geoffrey Nash, Geoffrey, Kathleen Kerr-Koch and Sarah Hackett, eds. Postcolonialism and Islam: Theory, Literature, Culture, Society and Film. London: Routledge, 2013, pp. 181–192 Safi, Michael. 2019. “Moroccan rapper jailed for one year over track about corruption”. The Guardian, [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2019/nov/25/moroccan-­rapper-­gnawi-­court-­track-­corruption-­viral. Steirer, Gregory. “The Price of Existence is Eternal Warfare”: Industrial Masculinity and Coil. In Scott A. Wilson ed. Music at the Extremes: Essays on Sounds Outside the Mainstream. North Carolina: McFarland and Co. Inc., 2015, pp. 77–194. Vale, V. and Juno, Andrea (eds.). RE/Search: Industrial Culture Handbook. San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 1983. Vecchio, Ruth. Exploring the Evolution of Industrial Music: A Historical and Analytical Perspective. Master of Music. Texas State University, 2014. Vile, Sarah-Alice. Crossing the Divide to Speak Truth to Power. [online] Insights 2019. Available at https://www.insights.uca.org.au/crossing-­the-­divide-­to-­ speak-­truth-­to-­power/. Williams, Angela S. Hip Hop Harem: Women, Rap and Representation in the Middle East. New York: Peter Lang, 2020. Woods, Bret D. Industrial Music for Industrial People: The History and Development of an Underground Genre, Master of Music, Florida State University, 2007.

CHAPTER 4

“The Odds of the Body”: Clipping. and Escaping the Power Hold on the Black Body Daniel Gillespie

Themes of oppression, state violence, and torture are staples of industrial music, but the industrial-rap group clipping. presents these in a distinctly Black American context. As such, this chapter is concerned with relationships of exertions of power and Black bodies throughout their two albums—Splendor & Misery (2016) and There Existed an Addiction to Blood (2019)—and music videos to examine an as-of-yet unexplored perspective on the horrors encoded in the power structures that crush Black bodies and how it may be expressed in industrial music, and how clipping. enhances the narrative scope of industrial music with their unique perspective. As seen throughout this volume, they are radically altering how the listener will listen to discourses on bodies and power in industrial music— both past and future.

D. Gillespie (*) Idaho State University, Pocatello, ID, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Whittaker, E. Potter (eds.), Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92462-1_4

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Though the roots of industrial hip-hop may date back to the early days of the genre in the 1980s, it is difficult to deny that this subgenre has really come to prominence in the 2010s. This is due in large part to the popularity of Death Grips, whose album The Money Store (2012) helped put the subgenre of industrial hip-hop (sometimes called noise rap) on the broader musical map. Popular music channels on YouTube, such as The Needle Drop, further helped grow the profile of the genre, as Anthony Fantano’s review of The Money Store remains among his most popular and talked about almost a decade later. In the wake of The Money Store, other hip-hop albums like Kanye West’s Yeezus (2013) and Danny Brown’s Atrocity Exhibition (2016) borrowed heavily from the sound of industrial music and were both met with positive reception and acclaim. Right around this same time, we see the emergence of clipping., whose major debut CLPPNG (2014) found an audience among hip-hop fans that had already gravitated toward Death Grips or the mechanized harshness of Yeezus. However, it is with their 2016 album, Splendor & Misery, that clipping. cemented their place in the world of industrial hip-hop, as this album used the genre to communicate an Afrofuturist narrative of insolation. This album was significant enough to garner a Hugo award nomination for Best Dramatic Performance, Short Form; it was the first, and so far only, musical album nominated for the award. Their most recent projects—There Existed an Addiction to Blood (2019) and its companion album Visions of Bodies Being Burned (2020)—continued in this concept-­ album framework, exploring police violence and drug systems in the Black community while drawing on horror aesthetics from John Carpenter to Candyman and everything in between. The sound in these most recent works is familiar to industrial hip-hop, but the content operates in previously uncharted territory for the genre, exploring power dynamics in a decidedly narrative—and decidedly Black— context. In this way clipping. is doing something entirely new, blending the sound of industrial music with a narrative framework long in place in hip-hop music. Clipping. does this to raise Black concerns about the white power structures that destroy the Black body in a genre (industrial music) that has, historically, been very white. In this way clipping. fits with people like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Christina Sharpe and their recent theoretical work in Between the World and Me and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, respectively. These sources, as well as work on necropolitics and necrofuturism, are important to explore what clipping. is saying about the Black body in the face of white power structures. I conclude that, taken

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together, There Existed an Addiction to Blood and Splendor & Misery form a narrative in which power does not ultimately destroy the Black body, but the Black body is able to escape power structures at least insofar as it can step boldly into an unknown and uncertain future. The bulk of this chapter will concern the albums in question as they build a narrative relating to power and the Black body, but it is necessary to begin by laying a framework for discussing industrial music in the context of Coates’s and Sharpe’s work. Industrial music, like many music genres, is famously hard to define, though all agree on some sonic aspects, such as a heavy use of electronic elements. The definition from Allmusic. com is a good summation. It defines industrial music as “The most abrasive and aggressive fusion of rock and electronic music, … initially a blend of avant-garde electronics experiments … and punk provocation.” They note that over time, the emphasis on avant-garde experimentation decreased helping it transform into “a darker alternative to the hedonism of mainstream dance music.” All music notes that industrial music’s “trademark sound was harsh and menacing, but its rage was subordinate to the intentionally mechanical, numbingly repetitive qualities of the music, which fit the lyrics’ themes of alienation and dehumanization quite well.” In this definition we see a clear emphasis on sound—as abrasive, electronic, menacing, repetitive—in contrast to only one comment on lyrical themes. Industrial music is also, historically speaking, a very white subgenre of music. With origins in the post-punk world of England in the late 1970s and 1980s, a working class mindset of punk rebellion and electronic experimentation has followed the genre through various waves and developments. There are echoes of industrial music in some hip-hop of the 1990s—especially Three 6 Mafia and the short-lived era of Memphis-­ based “horror core”—but industrial hip-hop has really come into its own in the 2010s due in large part to access provided by the internet. As noted by Mark Braboy (2020), YouTube provided a place to circulate albums, such as Three 6 Mafia’s Mystic Stylez (1995), allowing them to influence a new generation of rappers including Travis Scott and Denzel Curry. Given the emphasis on experimental electronic production, and lyrics addressing alienation and monstrosity, it is somewhat surprising that it took industrial hip-hop as long as it did to find its niche in the broader music landscape. However, with prominent artists such as Tyler, the Creator and Kanye West borrowing either industrial hip-hop’s sound, menace, or both, the genre seems to have found a place at last. Enter

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clipping., ready and able to bring a level of narrative complexity previously unknown in industrial hip-hop. Coates’s 2015 book, Between the World and Me, is particularly useful in understanding the role of the Black body in There Existed an Addiction to Blood. Part essay and part memoir, this book does an excellent job theorizing around the Black body and the white—and usually capitalistic—forces that seek to crush it at every turn. Coates begins by couching American democracy and even the concept of racism in the context of people who “believe that they are white” (7). He uses this framing throughout to state clearly that race is a social construct and that the categories of “Black” and “white” are useful in terms of the oppressor sowing division. He elaborates on this point in language that could have come straight out of a clipping. song: The destroyers [of the Black body] are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. (7)

In his exploration of America’s often brutal racial history, Coates elaborates on the considerations that similarly affect clipping., noting a collision between racial rhetoric and the very real impact on the Black body. In a sense, he is noting a kind of speech act, whereby racial “phrasing” actively creates a screen separating the users of language from tangible violence inflicted on the Black body. Coates then connects this dissonance to “the Dream”—by which he means the American dream—which “rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies” (11). The theoretical framework of the Dream (and that is how Coates always refers to it) rests, literally and figuratively, on the Black body just as rhetorical language, literally and figuratively, destroys the Black body. Coates continues this point while addressing “criminal forces” and systems at play in the world. He notes that the particulars of these systems don’t matter, “what matters is our condition, what matters is the system that makes your body breakable” (18). Coates further explains this, saying: White America is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of

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domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, “white people” would cease to exist for want of reasons. (42)

In a book full of incendiary statements, this one still stands out as particularly impactful. To Coates, “White America”—that is the people who believe themselves white and live under the Dream—is a syndicate; it is a carefully constructed criminal enterprise designed to retain power and regulate the status quo. Lynching and redlining serve the same end: the domination and exclusion of Black people in service of maintaining the syndicate that is “white America.” If we condense all of Coates’s ideas together we get something to the effect of: “White America” is a rhetorical construct operating like a crime syndicate to wield power over Black bodies, continually reminding Black people that they are breakable, as it is on their broken bodies that the Dream of “white America” rests. We could then consider recent impulses in Black art to be Coatesian to the end that they emphasize the illusory nature of “white America” and the destruction of the Black body. Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly, released the same year as Between the World and Me, is an excellent example, as the narrative of the album concerns a protagonist reckoning with the American Dream and the reality of his breaking Black body (a breaking that is sometimes self-inflicted). clipping.’s horror projects could be said to share the same Coatesian impulse, but whereas Kendrick’s album puts great emphasis on the American Dream, clipping. focuses much more on the breaking of the body, both in the content of the lyrics and the sound of the music conveying the lyrics. It is with this framework that we approach There Existed an Addiction to Blood. Generally speaking the progression of this album is a slide into deeper depths of darkness and danger. The narrative doesn’t seem to follow one specific protagonist but rather exists as a series of horror snapshots in which the narrative gets increasingly more disturbing and the music gets increasingly more pained (and painful on the ears). Two senses of the body—that of the character in the song and that of the listener—are continually at play. This emphasis on the listener’s bodily discomfort becomes more pronounced in the second volume, Visions of Bodies Being Burned. There Existed opens with a track simply titled “Intro,” a minute-long burst establishing the themes of the album. The vocal sounds like it’s on a tape recorder, interspersed by sounds of what could be shovels as if

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digging a grave, as if the listener is entering a dark underworld. The lyrics similarly convey the two main themes of album: the (Black) body and monstrosity. The clipping. verse turns on the description of dead bodies that would be all too familiar from the days of the Atlantic slave trade. Additional themes reverberate history and the idea that this very rap was penned in blood. Similarly, we might recall Coates’s notion of the American Dream built on the bodies of Black people, as here clipping.’s Daveed Diggs articulates the idea that “scary stories,” such as those populating There Existed, were also built on the backs of Black people. One such notable mythos of Black horror is, of course, the zombie/zombi tradition, which originated from Haitian people terrified of being trapped in their bodies eternally (Mariani 2015). Now the sound of shovels in the background seems even more menacing. Clearer shovel noises at the end of the track and a haunting alien tone give way to “Nothing is Safe,” which opens with a half minute of a repeated piano note and synth-tones heavily inspired by John Carpenter’s Halloween. An official lyric video drives this obvious parallel home even more forcefully, as it features a burning trashcan with a Jack-O-Lantern face cut out of it and lettering exactly like that of Carpenter’s film. The clear Halloween invocations have listeners immediately thinking in terms of the slasher genre, and this is largely what the song provides. We meet a group of “homies” who have bolted themselves up in their drug hideout. However, in the course of the first verse, these “homies” are changed to “bodies sleeping in shifts” while “other bodies keep watch.” Even before the presence in the narrative of an outside instigating force, the dehumanization has already started, as homies turn to bodies. The next line, invoking bullets “caught runnin’”, makes it clear that in this slasher narrative, the homies will soon literally be the bodies, and the outside force of  a gun will be the one to make it that way. Our only glimpse of this figure comes at the end of the song, described there as “a gun, a man with no face.” This killer lacking a face should remind us of Michael Myers from the Halloween franchise and his iconic blank hockey mask. In the context of “Nothing is Safe,” it is strongly implied that this agent with a gun is some kind of law enforcement force. Given this fact, the lack of face is meaningful, as it allows this man with a gun to stand in for the entire system of police. This is quite significant when you consider that the great mythic figures of the slasher film—Michael Myers (Halloween), Jason Voorhees (Friday the 13th), even Norman Bates (Psycho)—are known by their individuality. They have tragic backstories,

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haunting familial connections, and other bits of character that help to “explain” their homicidal behavior. The Gun Man in “Nothing is Safe” has none of those things, operating as a nameless, faceless, and unknowable system. It is because of this nameless they-live-among-us quality that Diggs raps that “Nothing is safe / Nothing is sacred.” The song posits that the scariest slasher movie killer is the one without an identity, who can move silently and undetectably, and will unlikely be held accountable for their violent actions. Space in this chapter will not allow for such thorough and detailed analysis of every track, as they are all rich in complexity, but I do wish to draw attention to several more that present Black bodies under the oppressive weight of white power systems, and that continue the narrative of growing danger and destruction laced through the album. One such track is “La Mala Ordina,” which brings capitalistic thinking into the narrative as another force of Black oppression. It opens with a harrowing line that the bags before the speaker are for body parts, before sketching an image of Hollywood mafia movies and contrasting that to the reality of drug gangs and violence. The music video underscores this, borrowing clips from the 1972 film La Mala Ordina and a genre of hyper-violent Italian mob movies similar to the Giallo horror movement of the same era. Diggs raps “Crack is what a skull do,” again connecting drugs and parts of the human body. This is pursued as a multivalent play on words: as well as a violent act against the head, crack as a drug was an act of violence against a community and something that involved was epitomized as reducing the body to a head (or skull). The final verse outlines various ways one might die at the hands of the mafia. The mafia is, of course, another structure of (mostly white) power. The song’s repeated mentions of “crack,” such as above, bring a racial tone to the song as crack cocaine is the drug most often associated with the Black community. This is specifically true in connection with the Ronald Reagan-era 1980s in which a white power structure allowed harm to spread to—and through—the Black body. Throughout this last verse of “La Mala Ordina” the track grows more and more distorted with an increasing presence of loud static in the background. By the 3:50 mark of the song, the distortion is so great that one can barely understand many of the lyrics in the song. The music video, which had been fairly straightforward until this point, here similarly devolves into a high-speed blur of the words in the album title over and over in a frenzied loop during the song’s final two minutes of crackling static. This is one of the most notable times

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on the album that clipping. leans into the noise aspect of their industrial sound. After two minutes of this droning and crackling static, the listener is very much feeling something, possibly developing a slight headache or a ringing in the ears. A verse about different ways to be murdered has morphed into a kind of murder on the listener, akin to what Luis Velasco-­ Pufleau describes as the auditory experiences of noise as conflict which “shift the limits and thresholds of the usual soundscapes” (par.7). Such “sonic remnants of violence”, as Velasco-Pufleau describes them, are less intense on the next two tracks, “Club Down” and “Run for Your Life”, though still populated with drug zombies and laced with paranoia. However, by the “Prophecy” interlude, the narrative of the There Existed has taken a very dark turn as “The Show” finds listeners in a Saw-esque “torture porn” world. Disturbing though it may be, this song warrants deeper analysis as it is, perhaps, the song on the album that most concerns the collision of power and the body. The song is set in a “red room,” a likely fiction, urban legend space of torture and death. Being urban legend, details can differ, but consistent within the mythos of the “red room” is its existence on the “deep web” and crowd involvement—likely with a monetary cost—to decide how the person will be tortured and killed. In terms of bodies and power, we have a body at the center which is the victim of pain, torture and death, and power that has been outsourced to numerous, anonymous, paying customers. One can see already how such a legend aligns with There Existed’s efforts to re-contextualize horror tropes in terms of contemporary threats on the Black body. Significantly though, in this track, the speaker (Diggs) is not the victim but the showman, shedding light on the room’s horrific proceedings. Compared to other songs, the rapping is incredibly simple and easy to understand, devoid of the hyperfast lyrical blur present on much of the album. This is to ensure that every word gets through to the listener. The chorus is similarly easy to hear, with a simple three-sound beat repeating at regular intervals in the background. In other words, when Diggs says that the voyeurs have paid to watch the show, the listener hears his words in painful clarity. This clarity makes the message particularly easy to grasp. As listeners, we are here to “watch the show” and as such are partakers in, and thereby complicit in, the violence that will continue to unfold throughout the song. This chorus speaks plainly to a capitalistic system, especially one which exploits the bodies of Black people in music, sports, and entertainment more generally, and the complicity of many people within it. As paying customers, we are the power structures

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deciding the events of the rest of the song. The song positions us as people observing such a room on the deep web. We are not the people physically wielding the torture implements, just as we are not  usually the people physically killing Black people. That said, our dollars in service to the system—be it a red room, the record industry, or any other aspect of capitalism—make us complicit in the violence as people wielding power structures for our benefit and for the destruction of the Black body. Or, in Coates’s terms, every paying member of white America is part of the syndicate. With these ideas established, the second verse of “The Show” deepens the depravity with more visceral images of pain and torture and increasingly loud, electronic-infused production. This builds to the line “Y’all came to see the amygdala,” emphasizing the laying bare of emotion and brain matter. This also hearkens back to the skull imagery present throughout “La Mala Ordina.” The second chorus of “The Show” is lyrically identical to the first, except this time the production is dominated by a single persistent ringing sound as if the listener has tinnitus (or as if part of their brain or nervous system is now disconnected or improperly functioning). In other words, as listeners remain complicit in the power structures at play in the song, the torture intensifies for us, too. This sound places us simultaneously in the place of the perpetrating system and the torture victim. Here it is useful to briefly consider Achille Mbembé’s theory of necropolitics, that is, the intersection of death through systems of capitalism and social and political means to bring about such ends, especially via execution. Mbembé considers how Nazi gas chambers are a logical extension of industrial progress. From here he talks about the French innovation of the guillotine before noting that “In a context in which decapitation is viewed as less demeaning than hanging, innovations in the technologies of murder aim not only at ‘civilizing’ the ways of killing. They also aim at disposing of a large number of victims in a relatively short span of time” (Mbembé 19). This is useful to consider at the end of “The Show” which presents a dehumanizing death sequence in relation to the “civilized” means of capitalism. This leads one to consider the role of time as it relates to death and capitalism. By juxtaposing these concepts in “The Show,” clipping. forces listeners to consider the long, torturous, and pain-filled death associated with capitalism. To contrast with Mbembé’s observations about execution, perhaps death-by-capitalism is more civilized, but “The Show” suggests that it is also a long and slow death. This theme will return with the album’s final track, “Piano Burning.”

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I turn attention now to the last two tracks of There Existed, “Attunement,” which concludes the narrative arc of the album, and “Piano Burning,” which ends the album with a long and pained track vigilantly aware of time. Coming at the end of the narrative of There Existed, “Attunement” presents one of the album’s darkest songs, as the speaker considers death and suicide. The song begins with a half minute of discordant sound and static, setting the listener in an atmosphere of chaos, with the speaker on the verge of hanging himself, making sure he tied the ropes properly and considering the nothingness that waits for him. At the end of the first verse, and again to open the second verse, the speaker thinks about the time “Before the damage done is irreversible but isn’t terminal,” before considering that the body could slip. Much of the second and third verses exist in this uncertain and questioning posture. Questions of the speaker aside, the song is relentless as an echoing beat propels the song ever forward. Similarly, Diggs’s verses follow immediately after each repeat of the chorus without a moment of pause, maintaining the ominous momentum of the song. There is finally a break before the fourth verse as the beat and flow of the song change considerably. When the final verse returns, death is clearly quite close as the speaker is positioned “looking over the edge,” contemplating the “one more step” it would take to face the unknown. This verse seems to be spoken by some kind of devil-on-your shoulder voice continually posing questions to the speaker about why he hasn’t jumped yet. This voice strongly emphasizes the bodied nature of the speaker, saying, “You’ve been saying you hated this skin, why you stuck there?” The verse ends with the line, “You are not a body, you’re a metal shell and you can see the rust.” This line speaks to the overarching themes of the album, as various forces of power have eroded the sense of the Black body. By these final moments, the body has been dissolved completely, leaving a “metal shell” on which rust is visible. Here we might recall the first mention of bodies on the album in the line “bodies hit the flo’” (“Intro”). Now, at the album’s narrative conclusion, we have another image of a body dropping, except now the body is a shell. The chorus plays one final time, except now “nothing beneath the surface” speaks to the shelled-out speaker of the song as well as to his considerations of the nothingness on the other side of death. The shovels that introduced the album’s first track have given way to this final image of death, not of cracking skulls and tearing flesh, but of existential nothingness.

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This ends the narrative of There Existed, a linear and thematic journey deeper into the depths of danger and violence leading to ultimate, willing, death. However, there is a final track, “Piano Burning,” which warrants a brief note as we leave the album. The track is an 18-minute composition, the longest yet in the band’s discography. Clipping. is known for ending most albums with a piece of avant-garde composition, though this is arguably the most daring one they have done to date. “Piano Burning” is a piece composed much the way one would expect. First done by Annea Lockwood in the late 1960s, to perform “Piano Burning” one simply takes a piano and sets it on fire. Lockwood (2009) specifies that the piano should be an upright and must be “irretrievable…that no tuner or rebuilder could possibly bring back.” The clipping. song is simply this, an 18-­minute recording of a piano burning (it is unclear if this is the full length of the event or a portion). The sounds of this piece are fascinating, as a relatively consistent crackling fire is occasionally punctuated by the sound of crunching wood or springing strings. The piece is, of course, very concerned with the reality and almost tactile experience of time as the moments of things “happening” are unpredictable and unexpected. This, perhaps, ties in slightly to the slow death I addressed in relation to “The Show.” But most interesting to the purposes of this study is what a piano is not: industrial, mechanical, electronic. Being a project of industrial sounds and textures, There Existed has frequently made listeners aware of the droning, crunching, churning, and fizzling sounds that have dominated the production throughout. Yet here, at the album’s end, we are asked to think about the absence of such things and instead consider a wooden piano whose burning was in no way altered by electronic forces. If we wish to tie this concept into the narrative of There Existed, we could say that the world of monstrous forces, dominated by mechanized sound and bodily dangers, gives way, in death, to a nondescript space of nothing where time is the main focus. I buy this interpretation in the context of There Existed, but I think it is more useful to consider “Piano Burning” as a period of extended, un-electronic break. I believe we are meant to just sit with the un-­industrial nature of the song. This interpretation makes sense when you consider that clipping. intended originally to release a follow-up project, Visions of Bodies Being Burned, only a few months later before it was delayed presumably due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I would note that its themes and tone are much the same as There Existed. Songs like “Say the Name” and “’96 Neve

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Campbell” continue to riff on horror tropes and genre conventions. “Pain Everyday” and “Eaten Alive” are songs that address themes like lynching and gentrification. In addition to this, songs such as “Make Them Dead,” “Invocation (Interlude),” and “Looking Like Meat” see the band push their experimental sound to new places. To this end I should also mention their recent live album, Double Live, which chops together ambient sound recorded from many places—such as bathrooms or lofts—during one of their tours, edited together to sort of be versions of their songs. It is truly a unique accomplishment and a testament to their musical ingenuity and folks more interested in exploring clipping.’s sound rather than narrative should check it out. With the empty “metal shell” sense of “Attunement” in mind, I turn attention to clipping.’s 2016 album Splendor & Misery, an Afrofuturism character study concerning a newly conscious “cargo” #2331 and the ship’s on board computer. As Coates provided a theoretical framework for understanding There Existed, in this section I use Christina Sharpe’s brilliant theorizing of “the wake” to understand the dynamics of Splendor & Misery as they relate to the Black body and the power structures that desire to crush it. At the end of There Existed, escape from such forces took the form of a hollowed-out bodily suicide. Splendor & Misery similarly ends with its protagonist opting for near-certain death, though the final moments here carry with them a sense of hope in the face of existential threat. In her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Sharpe probes the range of meaning inherent in the word “wake.” For the purposes of this analysis, most pertinent is her emphasis on wake as “the track left on the water’s surface by a ship” and “being awake…consciousness” (Sharpe, 21). These emphases are clear in Splendor & Misery, as the ship is linked to a slave ship through the choir on the album opener, “Long Way Away (Intro),” and the untimely awakening of Cargo #2331. The narrative of Splendor & Misery is one that will take place in the hold, theorized by Sharpe as “the slave ship hold; … is the prison; is the womb that produces blackness” (27). This notion of the hold-womb giving birth is useful when we consider the waking of Cargo #2331. Though this album was released several years prior, I see the narrative of Splendor & Misery as an extension of There Existed. As we have seen, There Existed ends with a “metal shell” of a person committing suicide; here the metal shell of a space ship/hold/ womb is giving life/awake-ness to Cargo #2331.

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This happens in the opening moments of “The Breach” as Digg’s AI communicates with incredible speed the notion that “there is spiking in the pulse of a member of the cargo”. This is similar to the reality of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, as expressed by James Walvin (qtd. in Sharpe), who writes: Everyone involved in the slave trade…knew that there were times when the crew might have to kill the very people they had been sent to trade for and for whom they paid high sums. Though no one would admit it openly, a crude human calculus had evolved at the heart of the slave trade and was accepted by all involved: to survive, it was sometime necessary to kill. (36)

Walvin’s quote helps to bring into clarity the economic terms lurking behind the lyrics of “The Breach.” The shipboard AI does not seem concerned with financial implications, focusing on the as-of-now unspecified cargo’s “rage,” the need for “physical restraints” and a reminder that “these beings were selected for their strength.” The AI is nervous and apprehensive, wanting to sedate the situation and avoid the danger. Being technology, it is not concerned with the economic facts of the situation, though the factual emphasis on the beings’ “strength” emphasizes the fact that the cargo is valued for their physical bodies. This notion then returns us to Coates’s “white America syndicate” present throughout There Existed. Splendor & Misery provides no lore or details into the nature of the company moving the cargo, but the opening tracks on the album make the connection to slavery unmissable. There is a power structure transporting bodies/cargo for the purpose of economic gain, and the content of “The Breach” (a ship term as well as a term of disconnect) codes these structures and bodies white and Black respectively. “All Black” sees us staying with the perspective of the AI, now self-­ referred to as the “mothership.” He identifies the cargo of the previous song as Cargo #2331. Initially the AI perceives Cargo #2331 to be “armed and dangerous” but by the end of the song has a change of heart, telling his superiors that Cargo #2331 is “not a danger.” This “last transmission” cuts the AI off from outside communication, isolating him and Cargo #2331  in their own world, floating through space. This dynamic—of observation by the AI and possible escape by Cargo #2331—will constitute the rest of the narrative of Splendor & Misery. “Wake Up” sees Cargo #2331 preparing for hypersleep, and “Baby Don’t Sleep” sees the AI criticizing Cargo #2331 for not wanting to wake up again.

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The narrative culminates with the album’s closing track, “A Better Place.” Unlike other clipping. releases, the final track is not an experimental piece but a crucial conclusion to what Splendor & Misery has had to say about the body and the powers affecting it. It begins by returning to “Long Way Away (Intro),” except now the song is much faster, sung over an almost cheery instrumental. The bright synths that open this track are easily among the most optimistic sounding notes of a clipping. song. What began as the wail of a prisoner on a slave ship has been transfigured into something decidedly more hopeful. This hopeful sound then seems to clash with a verse of indecision— Black optimism being a defiant (and often criticized) rhetorical move. Diggs’s raps that “Inside the mind of a man is a massacre” and then of Cargo #2331 who makes the best of the universe. Despite the sense of optimism conveyed by the music, and the hook that insists there must be better places, this ending does not seem entirely fortuitous. As was hinted at on “Baby Don’t Sleep” and is addressed directly here, the only escape possible for Cargo #2331 is out into the unknown void of space. Earlier on the album “Wake Up” started with the observation that the chances of reaching a planet capable of supporting life are low. “A Better Place” returns to this concept of chance in its final reference to the “ungodly” low odds of surviving a descent through gravity shifts. As the AI knows, Cargo #2331 is almost certain to die out in space upon leaving the ship. His end—death—will be the same as the similarly indecisive man from “Attunement,” yet “A Better Place” is positioned, sonically and lyrically, as a much more hopeful ending, so much so that the band often uses it to close live shows. This seeming contradiction is what Lauren Berlant (2011) terms “cruel optimism”. Gerry Canavan applies this concept in his article on Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer (2014). Similar to Splendor & Misery, Snowpiercer is a science fiction narrative of a capitalistic force—in this case, a super-­ train—continuing on. The film ends with the train crashing and a few humans venturing out beyond it into an unknown snowy world. We see, also, a polar bear, an ambiguous final image that could signal either the promise of new life or a danger to those recently freed from the train. Canavan argues for the former, suggesting, “What is utopian about this [final] moment is precisely the realization that there can be a future, both for animal life and for human life, but only outside the self-defeating hopelessness of capitalist realism” (61 emphasis original). The escape of Cargo #2331 is, similarly, a movement away from a capitalist system; however,

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the utopian texture of Snowpiercer is lacking as Cargo #2331 has virtually no chance of surviving. Alongside Canavan it is helpful to turn again to Sharpe who, citing Edwidge Danticat, emphasizes the contradiction inherent in the living/ existing of Black bodies. Danticat writes, “The past is full of examples when our foremothers and forefathers showed such deep trust in the sea that they would jump off slave ships and let the waves embrace them. They too believed that the sea was the beginning and the end of all things” (Sharpe 105). Danticat’s language here is that of trust and embrace. This is similar to the tone of “A Better Place.” Cargo #2331 is propelling himself out into space and into near-certain death, but he is also embracing the unknown. Like his forefathers jumping from slave ships, Cargo #2331 is exercising agency and taking control of his body in the face of a capitalistic system. This ending is hopeful and positive as it sees Cargo #2331 rebel against the power structures that so often crushed and restricted the body. He is asserting his own power over his body in the face of all other forces. It is a harrowing fact that clipping. presents this option only with the end of death. This final track seems to suggest that, in all circumstances, the Roulette wheel odds are stacked against Black people. The forces that enslave the body—law enforcement, capitalism, systemic racism—are strong and powerful. Splendor & Misery harbors no fantasies that these forces can be beaten. But whereas There Existed an Addiction to Blood suggests that the monstrous forces will always win, will always crush and consume the Black body, Splendor & Misery suggests that escape is possible only through taking agency of yourself and your body. But clipping. and Cargo #2331 understand what their ancestors understood when jumping from slave ships: under capitalism, the only escape of the Black body is through death, but you can decide the terms of that death by trusting and embracing the sea, space, unknown.

Works Cited Berlant, Laurent. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Braboy, Mark. “How Three 6 Mafia’s ‘Mystic Stylez’ Became A Southern Horror Classic & Provided A Blueprint For 2010 Underground Rap”, Okayplayer, 2020, https://www.okayplayer.com/music/three-­6-­mafia-­mystic-­stylez-­album-­ impact.html (Accessed 25/6/2021).

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Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. London: Text Publishing Company, 2015. Lockwood, Annea. “Bonfire of the Ivories: Visualize Your Piano—Burning”, White Fungus, 2009, https://www.utne.com/arts/bonfire-­of-­the-­ivories-­ visualize-­your-­piano-­burning/. Mariani, Mike. “The Tragic, Forgotten History of Zombies”, The Atlantic, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/10/how-­america-­ erased-­the-­tragic-­history-­of-­the-­zombie/412264/.

CHAPTER 5

All Too Human: Industrial Bodies and Anti-­ bodies in the Time of AIDS Jason Whittaker

Count 12: … The victim had his body hair shaved. He was hit with stinging nettles. He had 36 cuts to his back and buttocks causing blood to flow … Count 14: … The victim had hot wax dripped into the urethra of his penis. The penis was burned with a candle flame and then a syringe needle was inserted … Count 17: … [a co-defendant] had his penis nailed to a bench. He was caned, hit and rubbed with a spiked strap, then cut with a scalpel by [one of the appellants]. There were five lateral cuts together with further cuts to [one of the co-defendant’s] scrotum. There was a free flow of blood. Count 28: The victim … had his penis hit and rubbed with sandpaper, then his scrotum was clamped and pinned to a board with three pins. His foreskin was nailed to a board. (R v Brown (1992), cited in Wealt, 68)

J. Whittaker (*) University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Whittaker, E. Potter (eds.), Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92462-1_5

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In September 1989, sixteen men were arrested following a two-year-long national police investigation which had run under the codename Operation Spanner. According to The Times, the men—who came from a wide area across the UK and included a UN lawyer, a preacher and a missile designer—were taken into custody as part of one of the largest operations conducted by the obscene publications squad following the discovery of a number of videos involving consensual sadomasochistic practices (Rowan, 6). Against a rising tide of negative sentiments towards homosexuality in the wake of the AIDS pandemic and the introduction of Section 28 prohibiting local authorities from “intentionally promoting homosexuality”, they were tried at the Old Bailey a year later. Despite the defence’s argument that no offence had been committed because all parties had consented, Judge James Rant ruled that consent was not a defence and, in the December of that year, handed down eight sentences of between twelve months and four and a half years. Extreme as the acts appeared to many—the Daily Mail described the defendants as “the most horrific porn ring to ever appear before a British court”—many of those detailed, such as genital piercing, were becoming increasingly prevalent among gay and other subcultures, as noted by Lois Bibbings and Peter Alldridge in their reflections on the rejection of the appeal against conviction in 1992. Indeed, the trial notes resembled more than anything the quest for a body without organs which, as Deleuze and Guattari had noted in A Thousand Plateaus, had long been part of the algorithmic attitude towards sexual pleasure among fetishists: Mistress, 1) You may tie me down on the table, ropes drawn tight for ten to fifteen minutes, time enough to prepare the instruments; 2) One hundred lashes at least, a pause of several minutes; 3) You begin sewing, you sew up the hole in the glans; you sew the scrotum to the skin of the thighs. Yew sew the breasts, securely attaching a button with four holes to each nipple. You may connect them with an elastic gand with buttonholes…. (Michael M’uzan, cited in Deleuze and Guattari, 151)

This is not a phantasy—a representation of reality which is always somehow lacking, referencing absent desires that are inevitably restricted by psychoanalysis to the “dreary parade” of Oedipus. It is, rather, a programme, an “antipsychiatric experiment” that does not seek to represent reality but to produce it via the desiring factories of the body that is no longer categorised and territorialised by the checklist of its organs.

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To the authorities and mainstream, Operation Spanner had little obviously in common with the alternative music scenes of the 1980s. It did, however, demonstrate the ways in which queer subcultures had been operating just beneath the skin of conventional society, with practices around the body that had become increasingly important to the industrial scene. In the Industrial Culture Handbook, first published in 1983, bands and individuals such as Throbbing Gristle (TG) and Johanna Went recounted how they engaged in extreme performances that sought to shock their audiences and which, in their use of blood and bodily fluids often invoked post-war performance artists such as the Viennese Actionists. Spanner did have a more immediate connection with Genesis P-Orridge, co-founder of TG and later Psychic TV: one of the men charged, Alan Oversby—better known as Mr Sebastian—was a former art teacher turned tattooist and body piercer who was heavily involved in the gay community in London and also modded Genesis and Paula P-Orridge (Alaura O’Dell). Psychic TV had also become involved in producing a series of videos that frequently employed sadomasochistic imagery as part of an application of William Burroughs’ cut-up techniques to television, breaking and abusing visual images “in order to see what happened” (Dwyer, 79); what happened was that the Obscene Publications Squad, increasingly useful as a tool for social control of subversive groups as pornography itself became more and more mainstream (Bleakley 2019), raided the P-Orridges’ home in Brighton in 1992, searching for a video that supposedly depicted Satanic ritual abuse. Under a long period of Conservative governments, many of the activities of a wide range of subcultures were being increasingly policed as under the operations of a new form of state biopower, enforcing a variant of biopolitics that sought to restrict “deviant” practices and, as we shall see in this chapter, made queer bedfellows of many in the industrial and gay scenes. As well as a reconfiguration of the notion of obscenity (stemming as that did from the slippery definitions of the Obscene Publications Acts of 1959 and 1964), this new biopower saw a significant reconsideration of the role of consent. Section 20 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861 defines assault as an act whereby the perpetrator “unlawfully and maliciously wound or inflict grievous bodily harm upon another person with or without a weapon or instrument” (Beckman, 78), and this clause is what the defendants at Operation Spanner were charged with. As Beckman observes, the notion of consensual sado-masochism would possibly have puzzled Jeremy Bentham, for whom the distinction between

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pain and pleasure was the foundation of a rational plan for an ethical and legal code. According to the judgement of the House of Lords on the Spanner case, the defendants “did all sorts of painful things to each other from which it is hard to imagine that pleasure could be derived” (Beckman, 77). Two decades after that judgement, a workshop on the trial demonstrated the fundamental dichotomy of the approaches of the judges and police versus the defendants, an “ars erotica” drawn from the experience of pleasure itself in whatever form it may be encountered versus the “scientia sexualis” of knowledge-power, cataloguing sex in order to categorise its ability to tell truth in prescribed forms (Dymock and Lodder, 321). For Lord Templeton, in dismissing Regina v. Brown, the scientia sexualis of truth was very clear: “the infliction of pain is an evil thing. Cruelty is uncivilised.” The ars sexualis of the body without organs demarcated by the clear boundaries of pleasure versus pain was not merely impossible in civilised British society in the 1980s and 1990s: it was incoherent and thus evil. While the Spanner Case represented an extreme version of the pain and pleasure matrix of the ars sexualis, a much more common challenge to the scientia sexualis of pain versus pleasure that was prominent among a number of subcultures at that time was the rise of body modding in all its forms, from tattooing and scarification to body piercing and implants. While by no means restricted to (in the widest definition of the term) industrial subcultures, the assemblage of steel and flesh was appealing to a significant number of artists and performers who were involved with the scene at the time in some shape or form, as evidenced by their appearance in V. Vale’s and Andrea Juno’s Modern Primitives. For Vale and Juno, this desire for transforming the body stemmed from the imagination of the body: “Our most inestimable resource, the unfettered imagination, continues to be grounded in the only truly precious possession we can ever have and know, and which is ours to do with what we will: the human body.” (Vale and Juno, 5) This is mysticism with a Thelemite twist (“ours to do with what we will”), and situates the practices of tattooing, piercing and scarification as the essence of an individualistic selfhood rather than the assumption of costly social rites to promote group solidarity and commitment (Sosis, Kress and Boster, 235). Indeed, as becomes clear when reading Modern Primitives, the social—even religious—compact of ritual as a tool for signalling commitment to a subculture is a prominent feature of the acts of pain-pleasure that fill its pages: yet the Cartesian trick of a self that thinks and thus exists remains prevalent. By contrast, I would argue,

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the appeal of the pain-pleasure of the body is precisely that of the ars sexualis, the accumulation of pleasure experienced as pain and pain as pleasure that dissolves and folds the boundaries of body and self, individual and group. In many respects, Lord Templeton was correct: the infliction of pain is an evil, an uncivilised thing, but as William Blake observed, energy, called evil by the religious, “is the only life” and “is Eternal Delight” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell).

Anti-human Biopower The events of 1989 and 1992, which saw the arrest of those targeted by Operation Spanner and the raid on Genesis P-Orridge’s home in Brighton, were an act of a conservative biopower in the service of an equally conservative scientia sexualis to discipline and punish what was increasingly seen as a queer and deviant ars sexualis. From the 1970s onwards, P-Orridge— first with Cosey Fanni Tutti in COUM Transmissions and then as part of Throbbing Gristle with Tutti, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson and Chris Carter, had engaged in a series of performances and provocations that had been tolerated as part of a wider post-war liberalisation. Not that TG were ever especially popular: at their final UK gig at the Lyceum. London, in February 1981, half of the set comprised what Simon Ford described as “an exhausting 20-minute rendition of ‘Discipline’” (11.6). As P-Orridge (now Genesis Breyer P-Orridge) told Artforum in 2013, “We wanted rebellion that reinforced our cultural alienation.” This was very much of a piece with his earliest observations, as in an interview conducted with V.  Vale after TG’s final show in San Francisco in May 1981, when P-Orridge noted that the group was “also being deliberately perverse by doing the opposite of everything everyone else said was feasible or practical or acceptable” (Vale and Juno 1983, 11). Alienation was a fundamental part of the industrial scene—as it had been of punk and many other post-punk formations. Yet there was always a danger that notion of embracing alienation as a route to transformation could always end up as a dead end, just as it had become for heavy metal: for Karen Halnon (2006), the consumption of alienation is pursued as an authentic act against “vapid” pop music but which ultimately, like so many variants of punk or hip hop, ultimately becomes recuperated as a means of commercialising oppositional politics. To be fair to Throbbing Gristle, their deliberately difficult, antagonistic performances and releases during the late seventies and early eighties is

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closer to what Simon Reynolds has pithily described as “anti-music”, a “delivery system for their ideas” rather than something to be listened to (240). As such, their own consumption of alienation was more like that of Goya’s image of Saturn devouring his children. A more successful—at least in the sense of longer-lasting—critique was provided by Laibach. As Alexei Monroe observes, the infamous image of the group’s lead singer, Tomaž Hostnik, at the time of their first performances in Ljubljana in 1982, his face framed by military uniform with blood running down his chin from a bottle thrown by someone in the crowd, embodied Laibach’s “infamous coldness in relation to its audience” (198). Hostnik used these early performances to rant at the crowd and after his suicide Laibach and the NSK continued to court controversy in a fashion very similar to Throbbing Gristle. One means of doing this for both groups was to use the forms and symbols of totalitarianism as a manifestation of anti-human biopower. Throughout Laibach’s career, ironic statements such as “We are fascists as much as Hitler was a painter” provoked commentators and audiences, but Monroe is correct to assert that the group and the NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) are better understood as “interrogation machines”, confronting the everyday practice of totalitarianism. Slavoj Žižek suggested in 1993 that leftist support of Laibach was always a tentative one, shaped by the fear that perhaps—after all—the group’s use of a mix of Stalinism and Nazism was not ironic: Žižek’s reply to this was that their use of such symbols and rituals was not ironic at all, but an overidentification with the apparatus of the state, bringing to light the “obscene superego” of the system that requires darkness to operate more effectively. Žižek’s work as part of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, influenced as it was by Lacan, Foucault, Derrida and Althusser, was sympathetic to an anti-humanist conception of the unconscious (Jones 2016; Homer 2017). In the early performances and music of Laibach, this anti-­ human overidentification with the state was immensely clear, engaged as it was in a reductio ad absurdam of the demands of the state apparatus. Yet while this form of anti-human biopower is immensely sophisticated, in the end Laibach may have over-intellectualised the body by reducing it to the authoritarian site of spectacle in relation to the exercise of power. Once they moved from the culturally specific location of Slovenia, the sophistication of their approach was increasingly doubtful, for example the dubious reception of their music in the United States where many of their fans are white supremacists (Herman), or the 2015 tour of North Korea where they seemed to sometimes become little more than spectators themselves

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of the phenomenon they had generated. The levels of alienation that could be celebrated by Žižek do not, in the end, always translate well: this kind of anti-human biopower can be powerful as a critique of the body as spectacle, but for the purposes of this chapter, it represents something of a dead end—not least because there is something curiously static about Laibach’s performances in which still bodies watching carefully posed authoritarian performances. In their superb 2006 soundscape, Concerto for Magnetophone, Gramophone, Radiophone and Megaphone, for example, the listener is transfixed as an intellectual interpreter of noise produced from redundant technologies, a perspective that stretches back to their early works such as “Perspektive” in which the group forced “the compliance of a dissident audience” (Reed, 130) through the overt use of sound to manipulate the masses. In the end, Laibach is a band of eternal critique—that interrogation machine again—rather than of endless transformation, exemplars of the scientia sexualis rather than of the ars sexualis. Žižek is correct in his observation that Laibach—like anti-humanism— forms a question rather than an answer. An alternative route into embodiment in industrial culture came to light with the publication of the Re/Search book, Modern Primitives, in 1989. Throughout the 1980s, the Re/Search series had been an influential contributor to the industrial music scene, beginning with the Industrial Culture Handbook first issued in 1983. This title had brought together a variety of artists, such as Monte Cazazza, the Australian noise group SPK, and the performance artist and founder of Survival Research Laboratories, Mark Pauline. Founded in San Francisco as a post-punk zine, in 1982 Re/ Search had moved to a larger, glossy-covered format and began to issue a series of manuals for alternative lifestyles that, because of the Industrial Culture Handbook, also had a profound influence on the development of that subculture. Thus publication of books on William Burroughs and J. G. Ballard (including an illustrated edition of the latter’s The Atrocity Exhibition), built on the reputation of these authors as essential writers of the postmodern—and posthuman—condition that was being reflected in music as well as art and literature. If these various titles offered a variety of guides for conceptualisation and aesthetic practice, it was Modern Primitives that most captured a new means of embodiment. More than thirty years later, some of the practices encountered within the pages of V. Vale and Andrea Juno’s book have become relatively mainstream, especially in terms of tattooing and some of the milder aspects of body piercing; much, however—particularly genital bisection or the extreme body

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modding of figures such as Fakir Musafar—are still considered extreme. Modern Primitives was extremely influential in terms of introducing such underground activities to a wider audience at the same time that the ruling in the Spanner case criminalised those practices among gay men in the USA. In the 1970s, body piercing had been growing in popularity among fetishists in gay communities in cities such as Los Angeles and London, but at the end of the 1980s the atmosphere towards such communities was increasingly hostile, as evidenced by the implementation of Section 28 of the Local Government Act (1988), which prevented the promotion of homosexuality. While a few cities in the United States could be more liberal, the publication of Modern Primitives took place against a cultural backdrop that viewed body modification as innately perverse and uncivilised. Body modification as an activity was spread much more widely than the industrial scene, and could frequently be problematic. The “Modern Primitives” catalogued by Vale and Juno often alternated between cultural bricolage and cultural appropriation. This latter was less likely to be experienced as an overtly hostile act of colonisation while it remained a marginal practice, but it also slowly acclimatised society for wholesale acts of appropriation, as in the example of Whitmill v. Warner Bros (2011) where an artist sued Warner Bros for pirating a Maori-inspired tattoo (Tan 2013). Yet the use of a face tattoo design to help sell The Hangover Part II is a world away from the participation of Fakir Musafar in a Kavadi Aattam ceremony, piercing his flesh with the “Spears of Siva” to repay a spiritual debt or experience a sense of ecstasy. As Musafar explained to Vale and Juno, the pointed spears would penetrate the skin more deeply during dance: So you don’t feel pain, as you once knew it—you can get into a great sense of ecstasy and you can flip off, which I’ve done a couple of times, into a totally altered state—in two cases I had a real out-of-body experience. (Vale and Juno, 34)

On one level, it would be easy to view this ecstasy as a variant of the wish to escape the body. As Craffert (2015) observes, despite a stream of academic articles in recent years exploring reports of near-death or out-of-­ body experiences (OBE), there is no evidence to support the idea of a nonlocal consciousness separate from the brain. Certainly there are examples of OBEs in people who do not display a known pathological or

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psychiatric condition, and Milne et al. (2019) suggest that these may have a physiological causation in cortical differences in clinically healthy people. OBEs are a crude neurological problem for the much more interesting phenomenon of ecstasy—ekstasis, to be out of place, whether bewildered or insane or in a state of mystical trance. In her fascinating study of eastern orthodox traditions, Brandy Daniels explores the ways in which the apophatic tradition of achieving union with God through an eschewal of cognitive knowledge is also akin to the ways in which sex—particularly queer sex—can achieve a transcendence of the body that goes beyond jouissance (Daniels, 91). An apophatic and ecstatic approach to the body allows us to experience it as a body without organs, an illegible body, emptied of what MacCormack calls “the immobilized significations of the function, meaning and capacity” of corporeality that are meant to be fixed in place reliably and permanently (MacCormack, 60). For MacCormack, the permanent marks of tattoos deterritorialise bodies—particularly those of women, rendering them illegible, unfixed. Such illegibility, the wordlessness of body art, was recognised in a different—and, indeed, very ordinary—way by Genesis P-Orridge in his conversations with Vale and Juno, in which he suggested that some would seek the symbolism of their own bodies through tattooing, scarification and piercing because they lack a “mastery of words”, and that the performances of COUM Transmissions offered an opportunity of marking the body without a plan, rendering it shocking both to the spectators as they watched the acts of Genesis and Cosey, and to the performers themselves as the pain shocked them out of themselves (Vale and Juno, 164, 167). Much of Genesis P-Orridge’s more explicit examples of deterritorialising the body, through body modding and then surgical transformation and gender reassignment as part of the pandrogeny project with Lady Jaye (Jacqueline Breyer), occurred after the break-up of Throbbing Gristle; yet while his bodily and gender experimentation took place more actively in the Psychick TV period, it can be clearly traced back to the early performances of COUM Transmissions, while Throbbing Gristle would itself reform in the twenty-first century, breaking down rigid genealogies. Body modding as a form of making the body illegible, of re-embodying it, is important as a means of escaping the impasse of the pain/pleasure complex. The tattooed body is the ephemeral project that re-marks and resignifies the previously comprehensible corpus as a new body without organs, while piercing literalises the body as a component of machines not to be escaped from but internalised, as with the fetishist in the opening

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scene of Tetsuo. When the body is legible—when it is legislated and articulated as part of the scientia sexualis—then pain is a great evil and thus uncivilised, leading to what Blake describes as the error of religion and of the law, that “God will torment man in Eternity for following his Energies”. And yet, for the ars sexualis, not only can pain be a source of pleasure but also of ecstasy, the putting out of the body by means of which the body rediscovers itself. This, of course, reeks of mysticism, but it is worth bearing in mind T.  E. Hulme’s comment regarding Romanticism as “spilt religion” (71), that if the emotions channelled by religion are dammed up—as they were by rationalism—then the repressed will seek its return via other means. The energies of the body are not always legible to the boundaries of reason.

Coil’s Tainted Love Reed describes Coil as the “most consistently beloved and ‘industrially’ relevant of the ex-Throbbing Gristle excursions” (143). Formed in 1982 by Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson from Throbbing Gristle and John Balance (Geoffrey Rushton) from Psychic TV, Coil evolved from a side project for these two into a full-time group with additional musicians until Balance’s death in 2004. Balance had met and befriended Christopherson at a TG gig in the late seventies, and as Cosey Fanni Tutti writes in her memoir, the pair became “lovers and lifelong companions and collaborators” (217). Their first release, How to Destroy Angels, was an experimental pressing that was included multiple B-sides, one of them comprising unlistenable noise, but it was with Scatology that they first began to attract a wider audience, using the medium of industrial music to develop both the occult themes that had been part of Genesis P-Orridge’s activities and a highly individualistic response to their own sexuality. While Genesis increasingly moved away from industrial music with Psychic TV, Coil continued many of the obsessions of TG. As Reed explains, their first album, Scatology, recorded in 1984, was “quite the big-budget affair for industrial music”, one which also “proudly politicized their identity as self-declared gay, pagan men” (143). Reed is correct to note that while the spiritual connotations of their work did not immediately resonate with listeners, to be so openly queer in 1984 would obviously affect the reception of their music. In an obituary for Balance in The Guardian, Richard Smith observed that gay pop was coming out of the closet but that “Coil were the first resolutely queer group” (cited in Reed, 144). David Keenan traces

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the intertwined threads of Coil’s interest in Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare, alchemy with the life, art and violent demise of Pasolini, as well as “shit and its transubstantiation” through noise as ritual (124). For their early trilogy—Scatology, Horse Rotorvator and Gold is the Metal with the Broadest Shoulders—a dominant theme running through all three albums was the use of alchemical symbolism to enact the transformation of queer selfhood at a time when gay sexuality was seen as increasingly deviant within the mainstream, nor were the conflicts over perceptions of homosexuality those between queer and straight culture. As Rand observes, the activism of Larry Kramer to mobilise support for those who were dying of the disease had a much stronger effect among many queer theorists who sought to distance themselves from his conservative politics, as with Douglas Crimp whose 1987 essay, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic” refuted Kramer’s espousal of monogamy as virtually an invitation to restigmatise AIDS as spread by promiscuous gay men (82–83). Like the infliction of pain, promiscuity was an evil act, barbaric in the context of the scientia sexualis. Against such a backdrop of condemnation within mainstream culture but also parts of the gay community, Coil used the visceral, disturbing effects of industrial music to reconfigure the queer body as part of a transgressive ars sexualis. The transmutation from literal shit to gold also represented a more mystical movement within their music as it developed away from harsh, atonal noise to experimental patterns, a common factor to many of the spin-off groups that emerged following the disintegration of Throbbing Gristle. By the time of their fourth album, Love’s Secret Domain (1991), Coil embraced acid house music in a fashion similar to Psychic TV’s Towards Thee Infinite Beat (1990), but during the early to mid-eighties, industrial as a medium appeared much more effective at representing alienation and a critique of humanism, qualities that are very much in evidence on Scatology. Balance and Christopherson were at this point using the disenfranchisement of their sexuality to explore queer love as evil, beginning with the cover image of an inverted crucifix in which was framed a naked male backside: the closest they came to popular tastes was their astonishingly disturbing version of “Tainted Love”, described correctly by Reed as “terrifying ultra-slow cover” (144). This was the climax to an album that contained even more disorienting tracks such as “The Sewage Worker’s Birthday Party”, which overlaid textured noises of excretion and suction alongside samples from a scat-themed gay pornographic story, or the erotic sado-masochism of “Tenderness of Wolves”.

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As both Keenan and Reed observe, the album is far from successful in all its experiments. Keenan considers the album to “sounds tentative” as Balance tries to find his voice and Christopherson searches for a way to put into effect the techniques he’d learned with TG (126), while for Reed many of the tracks display the lo-fi quality “of 1984’s not-yet-perfected technology” (143). And yet the continuing critical respect that Scatology commands is as much due to the exploratory and experimental nature of this music. The opening track, for example, is a much less overt—but in many ways more profound—example of noise as deviancy. Taking its title, as the liner notes indicate, from a play on Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, ‘Ubu Noir’ is an instrumental track that, on a superficial level, does not appear to be an obvious example of industrial music and yet which could not have been made without the processes that Christopherson developed during his time with Throbbing Gristle. By oversampling a classical piece of music, distorting and clipping the original, the effect draws to mind elements of Pasolin’s final film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a mixture of elegance and perversity which is intended to disorientate the listener. The melody comprises two simple, chromatic motifs, repeated obsessively in a format that resembles the form of earlier American musical minimalism or later, loop-based techno. By means of this compulsive repetition, the melody of ‘Ubu Noir’ (for it does, indeed, remain a melody rather than being an example of serial or atonal composition), functions as noise. On a fundamental level this is because the sample relies on multiple seconds for its intervals, disrupting the typical gradation of what Schoenberg considered harmonious sounds (21), and also because it uses a plagal cadence to create a sense of anticipation in the listener, of foreboding—particularly as the resolution does not occur within phrases but between them as the repetition of the sample moves from subdominant to tonic. When the track simply ends, the effect is of a deceptive cadence, with the listener waiting for a resolution that never arrives. Strictly speaking, this melody is dissonance rather than noise, per se: an unresolved tension that seems unstable and unsettles the listener—a common tactic in much of Coil’s music. What makes it more authentic as noise, and the reason why it should be considered as industrial music rather than simple minimalism, is that the counterpoint harmony is not simply a series of chords but consists of textures—soft, squelching noises as though of a body trapped in a machine, sounds that are clearly recognisable as pitches but whose timbre refuses classification. It is a sound of penetration, of an orifice being stretched and excreting its contents, and the effect is to turn the body of the listener

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inside out, to make apparent those internal organs usually disguised. It is the first act of sodomy on the album—the anal staircase (to steal a title from Horse Rotorvator) down which Coil will lead their listeners. Dissonance and tension are common factors on many of the tracks of Scatology. “Tenderness of Wolves” is an example of what would later become known as dark ambient music, once more drawing on the experimentation with synthesiser effects that Christopherson had tried on previous albums—in this case D.o.A: The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle—deploying low, resonating droning sounds that continue the dis-­ affectation begun in “Ubu Noir”. More clearly industrial elements are evident on the seventh track of the album, “Solar Lodge”, which opens with sampled percussive effects, themselves reminiscent of the music generated by Einstürzende Neubauten and Test Dept. This in turn is quickly overlaid by atonal, metallic distortion and Balance’s deliberately harsh voice repeating a single line over and over. As Stanton Marlan observes, the black sun referred to in Coil’s song can be seen as a “shadow light” that heralds developing sexual consciousness (121), and it is a recurring visual image on both the front cover and liner notes of the album. When it is placed as a radiant solar symbol beneath buttocks framed by an inverted crucifix on the cover, its queer meaning could not be more clear: the anus as a locus of magical, heathen sexuality. In the liner notes, the track is accompanied by a quotation from the 1973 pamphlet by Charles Manson, Your Children, culled from his rambling courtroom defence in which he recorded that he and other members of the Family had found a “bottomless pit” in the desert which they called “The Devil’s Hole”. As with so much of Scatology, the effect is clearly intended to be transgressive, even evil, attacking what Donald Nathanson described as the “hard-wired, preprogrammed, genetically transmitted mechanisms” responsible for our earliest forms of emotional life (58). The most notorious attempt to re-programme the listener, however, came in the following track: “The Sewage Worker’s Birthday Party”. Taking its title from a story in the Swedish pornographic magazine, S&M, “The S.W.B.P” used a series of samples from what the liner notes describe enigmatically as “private recordings”, as well as from How to Destroy Angels. Presenting the opening of the S&M story, the notes introduce the scene as Steve—a worker in a sewage plant in Scunthorpe—is tied to a lavatory in what he thinks will be a prank on his twenty-first birthday, but which will descend into a punishing ritual involving the other men who “were fed up with his arrogant ways”. Unsurprisingly, considering its

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source material, the track is the darkest on the album—although as the few distorted lyrics, referencing swallowing piss and shit, are almost inaudible, its disturbing elements for most listeners without the framing title and story would come from the fact that it is completely atonal, a slow, drawn out disembowelment of sound with obscure squelches and disgusting noises layered below notes recorded of Balance playing a Chapman Stick bass with a bow and manipulated through a Fairlight synthesiser. This barely comprises what could be thought of as music, but, as noise, operates away from the usual abrasive and harsh sound common to the industrial genre. Indeed, in an interview with Scott Lewis, Balance said that “The mood of those particular experiments [recorded on The S.W.B.P.] was quiet and meditative in the dirtiest possible way, and that came through in the music. Our state of mind and our obsessions tend to permeate their way through, from our personal lives into the subject and the way we make the music.” As the interview with Lewis made clear, one of the predominant obsessions of Balance and Christopherson at the time was AIDS. The proceeds of their cover version of “Tainted Love”, the last track on Scatology and the first single from the album, were donated to AIDS research, while the accompanying video is beautiful, restrained and still deeply shocking decades after its release. While Balance sings the deliberately slowed lyrics to minimal accompaniment, a young man is shown being taken on a wheelchair to a hospital bed where he strips to the waist—his body emaciated—and he lies down to slowly die. In one scene, his face covered by a respirator, the patient is visited by a smug, sexualised Marc Almond, a pointed reference to the hit recording by Soft Cell in 1981 which had offered a high-energy, synthpop rendition of the Ed Cobb/Gloria Jones original: although only recorded three years separated the Coil and Soft Cell releases, already the relative innocence of Almond’s queering of the original song had given way to a song of deadly experience. Three months before Soft Cell’s version hit number 1, the U.S.  Center for Disease Control had recorded cases of a rare lung infection in five young, previously healthy gay young men; throughout July and August, members of the gay communities in San Francisco and New  York were becoming aware of rare and aggressive cancers affecting their friends, but it was not until September 1982 that this new disease was named as AIDS. By 1983 there had been over three thousand cases reported in the United States and a thousand deaths: while the situation did not seem as dire in the UK, where 108 cases and 46 deaths had been recorded by the end of 1984, it

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was becoming clear that this new epidemic was not restricted to the other side of the Atlantic. Awareness was only growing slowly, however, and, as Coil explained to Lewis, when the video was played in gay clubs people would stop dancing and watch it ashen faced. This, then, becomes the surprising effect of the transgressions of Scatology. For all that industrial music could appear anti-human, it is the body of a dying, gay man that was in the end all too human. The body as hedonistic machine was breaking down in the face of AIDS as the bathhouses of San Francisco were closed, and yet the aim of Scatology is not to cast into darkness the necessary evil of the ars sexualis: pain is evil, death is barbaric, and yet the scientia sexualis that condemned queer sexuality was—in the end—as useful a solution to AIDS as the denunciation of sex outside marriage was to teenage pregnancy: the body desires what the law describes as evil. Of course, for many of those involved in the biopolitics of sex in the 1980s, what was wanted was less a cure for AIDS than a system of regulation to ensure that gay and other transgressive communities were regulated and made legible, an attitude that sometimes extended towards more conservative-minded members of those communities. If the conclusion drawn by Larry Kramer among others was to re-inscribe a legibility of the body among the homosexual community that would make them more acceptable to those in power—to make gay men monogamous and safe—Christopherson and Balance recognised, like Blake (who was particularly influential on Balance), that the threat that God will torment man in eternity for following his energies is no deterrent in the end. What they sought instead was an alternative ars sexualis, one that profoundly understood the perversion of those energies, that would rewrite these as the ejaculations and excretions of a new flesh, one that instead of repressing those desires would embody them less the old law of repression literally destroy it.

Works Cited Bleakley, Paul. “Cleaning up the Dirty Squad: Using the Obscene Publications Act as a Weapon of Social Control”, State Crime Journal, 8.1(2019), 19–38. Craffert, Pieter. “Do out-of-body and near-death experiences point towards the reality of nonlocal consciousness? A critical evaluation”, TD: The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in South Africa, 11.1 (2015), 1–20. Halnon, Karen. “Heavy Metal Carnival and Dis-alienation: The Politics of Grotesque Realism”, Symbolic Interaction, 29.1 (2006), 33–48.

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Homer, Sean. “The Persistence of Theoretical Antihumanism, or, The Politics of the Subject in Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek”, in T. Tsimpouki & K. Blatanis (Eds.), War on the Human (pp. 150–173). Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. Jones, Irwin. ‘Beyond Naïve Leftist Philosophy in Education—On Žižek’s Lacanian Politics and Pedagogy’, JOMEC Journal, 10, 2016, ‘Teaching and the Event’, ed. Éamonn Dunne. https://doi.org/10.18573/j.2016.10087. Milne, Elizabeth, Dunn, Stephanie, Zhao, Chen, Jones, Myles. ‘Altered neural dynamics in people who report spontaneous out of body experiences’, Cortex, 111: 87–99, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2018.10.019. Tan, Lee. “Intellectual Property Law and the Globalization of Indigenous Cultural Expressions: Maori Tattoo and the Whitmill versus Warner Bros. Case”, Theory, Culture and Society, 30(3) (2013), 61–81. Vale, V. and Juno, Andrea (eds.). RE/Search: Industrial Culture Handbook. San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 1983. Wealt, Matthew. “Sadomasochism and the Law”. Safe, Sane and Consensual: Contemporary Perspectives in Sadomasochism. Ed. Darren Langridge and Meg Barker. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2007.

CHAPTER 6

Chance Meeting: Disembodied Voices in the Work of Nurse with Wound and Cabaret Voltaire Rupert Loydell

Premonition In which we channel Ovid, are instructed in how to unlisten and consider remixology and recontextualisation.1

1  Section headings are track titles from Nurse With Wound or Cabaret Voltaire albums: ‘Premonition’, Cabaret Voltaire (1980), The Voice Of America; ‘A Precise History Of Industrial Music’, Nurse With Wound (1989), A Sucked Orange; ‘The Dadda’s Intoxication’, Nurse With Wound (1996), Crumb Duck; ‘Ghostalk’, Cabaret Voltaire (1985), Drinking Gasoline; ‘(I Don’t Want To Have) Easy Listening Nightmares’, Nurse With Wound (2000), Alice The Goon; ‘Messages Received’, Cabaret Voltaire (1980), The Voice of America; ‘The Power (Of Their Knowledge)’, Cabaret Voltaire (2020), The Shadow Of Fear; ‘Double Vision’, Cabaret Voltaire (1983), The Crackdown; ‘Scissor Rock Bicycle Revelation’, Nurse With Wound (1989), A Sucked Orange; ‘The Continuous Accident’, Nurse With Wound (2008), The Continuous Accident; ‘From Another Source’, Cabaret Voltaire (1992), Plasticity.

R. Loydell (*) Falmouth University, Falmouth, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Whittaker, E. Potter (eds.), Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92462-1_6

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I want to speak about bodies changed into new forms. (Ovid (8AD) 2000)

‘[L]istening has always in a way meant unlistening. You need ears cleared of that rattling debris to receive new signals. Blow the tunes out, avoid classifying, distrust the old information. […] Sabotage your own expectations. Abandon the shapes and rhythms you keep expecting the music to fall into. Having destroyed your thoughts, destroy your feelings too, destroy every impulse to classify a random cluster of sounds as “cheerful,” “mournful,” “defiant,” “wistfully bewildered,” “laid-back,” “seductive,” “transcendent.” Move into the country where feelings are as unreadable as mountains in a stretch of country unknown to you. Become hollow. Make room. Learn to despise your own internal protests at what bores or irritates you with its unfamiliarity. Be shaped by strangeness. Love what abrades. The future can come into being only by stripping away what was formerly locked in place’ (O’Brien 2004, 286). Rupert Loydell: Why is cut up such a great tool? Steve Mallinder: Perhaps it’s because like energy nothing is really created, nothing is lost and everything becomes transformed. Everything in essence is a remix, a recontext. (In Loydell 2018, 97)

A Precise History of Industrial Music The band Cabaret Voltaire are introduced, we recall their name’s Dada origins, and discuss their use of cut-ups.

‘No story of the Sheffield music scene is complete without mention of Cabaret Voltaire, the post-punk outfit whose approach to electronic music was so feral it felt like you could hear it degrading in real time. The band formed in 1973, a time when one of their formative influences, Roxy Music, were in their Eno-inspired pomp. Fired up on a diet of J.G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, and Brion Gysin, Cabaret Voltaire borrowed their name from a Zurich nightclub that was a gathering spot for pivotal figures in the Dada movement’ (Neyland 2014). ‘Like their Sheffield pals Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh of Heaven 17, Mallinder and his cohort Richard Kirk sought to meld avant garde electronics with soul and funk influences; but what made them diverge significantly from the path that Heaven 17

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ultimately took was their allegiance to Burroughsian cut-up technique. Their willingness to juxtapose content that was not necessarily related in order to create a “third mind” scenario that was richly evocative for its unplanned randomness’ (Post-Punk Monk 2012). ‘[T]his was a band fascinated by the bridge between high and low culture, particularly in the desensitizing effect of TV news, which would spew out the topical fare Cabaret Voltaire would often pick up on in their songs, beaming it out to an audience steadily anesthetized to shock’ (Neyland 2014). ‘Cabaret Voltaire was a seminal group. The Cabaret Voltaire inaugurated Dadaism in the back room of a Zurich tavern 1916, the owner agreeing to its use in order to increase the sale of beer, sausages and sandwiches. The entertainment included music, dance, manifestos, theory, poems, pictures, masks and costumes by the likes of Hugo Ball and Hans Arp. Dadaism’s anti-art stance sought to mirror the confusion wrought by the First World War’s senseless slaughter. More than five decades later, Stephen Mallinder, Richard H. Kirk and Chris Watson formed Cabaret Voltaire in Sheffield. They were horrified and mesmerised by the power of the ever-expanding media, fascinated by the control it exercised and in response they developed strategies aimed at loosening its grip. Their audiovisual output should be seen as a meditative protest that connects directly to the cutup techniques first explored by the Dadaist Tristan Tzara and later developed by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Cabaret Voltaire simultaneously enacted and interrogated the corruptive power of the media’ (unknown author 2007).

The Dadda’s Intoxication We meet Nurse With Wound and discuss the nature of the voice, sound, listening and the imagination.

‘It is through the doubled face of surrealism, with one eye on the world and the other to structures of the subconscious, that we can turn to Nurse With Wound’ (Jorgenson 2009). ‘Just as the body could be manipulated for the purpose of instilling order and unity, so it could be torn apart in order to underscore the violence being done to individuals in the name of social stability’ (Lyford 2000, 53): [The Sensoria 12” is] ‘[a] rare musical example of a whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Relentlessly pounding machine energy is given an injection of funk and ironic reactionary commentary via the preacher, who by giving a sermon on obeying

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your superiors, plays right into Cab Volt’s fascination with exposing and disrupting the control process’ (Post-Punk Monk 2012). ‘The collections of Val-de-Grâce [hospital] proposed’ ‘a grammar of the human body that parsed the human form into pieces that could be manipulated for aesthetic purposes just as words and parts of speech were mobilized in the process of poetic construction’ (Lyford 2000, 51). ‘The voice is elusive. Once you’ve eliminated everything that is not the voice itself—the body that houses it, the words it carries, the notes it sings, the traits by which it defines a speaking person, and the timbres that color it, what’s left? What a strange object’ (Chion 1999, 1). ‘Our propensity to imagine, to fill the vacuum, whether with the intention of covering the silence with imaginary sounds, or to extrapolate the source or meaning of a sound-event, is crucial to the understanding of how we listen to (and by extension capture) our sonic environment’ (Spinelli 2016, 165); ‘[i]t is to provide some residual psychic comfort that pockets of the past are kept alive’ (O’Brien 2004, 295). ‘Acoustic space structure is the natural space of nature-in-the-raw inhabited by non-­ literate people. It is like the “mind’s ear” or acoustic imagination that dominates the thinking of pre-literate and post-literate humans alike’. ‘It is both discontinuous and nonhomogenous. Its resonant and interpenetrating processes are simultaneously related with centers everywhere and boundaries nowhere. Like music, as communications engineer Barrington Nevitt puts it, acoustic space requires neither proof nor explanation but is made manifest through its cultural content. Acoustic and visual space structures may be seen as immeasurable, like history and eternity, yet at the same time, as complementary, like art and science or biculturalism’ (Marshall McLuhan 1989, 71), ‘[t]here is no analog for the creation of music or sound among the subconscious states that Breton induced within his surrealist circle, no banging on pots or hollering through pipes. The night of consciousness was without tone or rhythm’ (Jorgenson 2009).

Ghostalk We venture in to and assist in the making of unknown and imagined musical landscapes.

Do you have a definition yourself of what music is?

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CW: Organised sound… I mean I don’t really know, what’s music to me is not music to somebody else. It’s a definition, it depends on which part of the world you’re in and what you are doing at the time. I wouldn’t know what it needs.

You mention organised sound. Would you consider the noise of the car that just drove by to be music or would it have to be put together as a composition? CW: I wouldn’t know if it was music or not, but it is set in a composition. The sounds surrounding us at the moment of the car going past, whether they’re deliberate, random, or organised—exist, and that’s all they need to do really. It could well be music, yeah. If it is interesting to you, then yes. (‘The Hafler Trio’ [interview with Chris Watson, ex Cabaret Voltaire] in Neal 1987, 190)

‘The avant-garde is at once the vanguard of the “main cultural body” and its opposition’ (Atton 2012, 349), ‘[t]he mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by what happens to him. The agonizing question of possibility is no longer pertinent’ (Breton 2011, 246). ‘[M]y better self prefers not to speak about music at all or sound, come to that, and think instead about people and objects working together visibly and invisibly in spaces both intimate and infinite where reverberation is not so much cosmic as a lullaby space that incites both dreaminess and the hard realities of matter and movement’ (Toop and London 2019, 144); ‘[i]n the tourism of imagined spaces, everybody is somewhere else, always’ (O’Brien 2004, 301). ‘Ensnared in webs of sound, those of us living in the industrialized West today must pick our way through a discordant, infinite-channeled auditory landscape. Like a radio stuck on permanent scan, the culture lashes us with skittering bits and bytes, each dragging its piece of historical or emotional context’ (Slouka 1999, 41). ‘There is a world of sound, true, but it is our world. We don’t automatically fit in to it, we have to work to fit in, to roam and listen. A world of many human musics also invites us to listen and to learn’ (Rothenberg 2002, 111). ‘[S]ound is a haunting, a ghost, a presence whose location in space is ambiguous and whose existence in time is transitory. The intangibility of sound is uncanny—a phenomenal presence both in the head, at its point of source and all around—so never entirely distinct from auditory hallucinations. The close listener is like a

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medium who draws out substance from that which is not entirely there’ (Toop and London 2010, XV). ‘Cabaret Voltaire used funk to create a pulse, a dynamic urgency that was just one component of their overall intensely colourised sound, its mix of serrated guitars, sheet-metal electronics and found tapes creating a mood of heightened, paranoiac awareness in the listener’ (Stubbs 2018, 318), ‘the use of appropriated material and the programmatic absence of clear relations between successive components—prompts the attentive reader to become a virtual co-author of its meaning’ (Dra ̨g 2019: 112). ‘The sense of hearing is as subtle as it is archaic. We most often relegate it to the limbo of the unnamed; something you hear causes you to feel X, but you can’t put exact words to it’ (Chion 1999, 17): ‘[m]usic is the art where sudden meaning can be invented, where immediate expression can take place’ (Rothenberg 2002, 191). ‘We knew what we wanted—but not how it would sound’ (Mallinder, in Darlington 1983).

(I Don’t Want to Have) Easy Listening We consider the creation and classification of unclassifiable music and sound.

‘Can a voice tell us anything or does it simply persuade our own voices to tell us what they want us to hear?’ (Toop and London 2019, 145) ‘Everything hangs on whether or not the acousmêtre has been seen. In the case where it remains not-yet-seen, even an insignificant acousmatic voice becomes invested with magical powers as soon as it is involved, however slightly, in the image’ (Chion 1999, 23). ‘[W]e must begin to think about surrealist practice: the emphasis upon the partial, the fragment, and the traumatic might suggest more than willful violence; such emphases might define a technique for exposing the inconsistencies in official stories about the return to order’ (Lyford 2000, 55). ‘Mapping hypnagogic dream states via disembodied ghost voices, detourned easy listening and what sounds like cattle being flayed, Merzbild Schwet, with a title that gives the nod to Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, contains the seeds of the contemporary Nurse sound’ (Keenan 2013/2016, 89–90); ‘we have here non-intention coupled with aesthetic appreciation of random noise’ (Condon, ‘NOTE’ in 1991). ‘Thus it is that in searching for a musical Surrealism we arrive at a record that contradicts the premises by which Surrealism established its rejection of music, and yet would appear to be musical. Its

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defamiliarisation of music’ ‘is this marvelous rediscovery of the familiar as unfamiliar, the unexpected out of the expectations of music’. ‘Its Surrealism lies in its automatism, in a multiple series of chaotic associations whose negation of sense is not necessarily a negation of the structures by which sense comes about. One sound leads to or is imposed upon another, one musical form turns to another without being music. The vitality of the album lies in this will to compose without composition, to make a record without making a record, in order to reveal that the subconscious structures of music may not be musical at all’ (Jorgenson 2009). [Luigi Russolo] ‘wrote symphonies for factory sirens. He got off his arse and actually made loads of “intonomatauri”—noise machines. He loved the random mechanised cacophony of modern city life. NWW’s early music often seems composed of this detritus, turning it into streams of expressive consciousness (c.f. Kurt Schwitters’ collages made from bits of rubbish found in the street)’ (Condon 1991). ‘The voice reconciles the dichotomy between scientific psychiatry and traditional ritual healing, partly by making sense of madness by engaging with the sense of hearing’ (Basu 2014); ‘[t]hrough the process of schizo-narrative—embracing nonsense, anacoluthon and contradiction—the focus is shifted away from the ostensible authority of the spoken voice to allow for a more playful, mysterious, malleable, unstable, and indeterminate phenomenological object to emerge: a territory. I refer to this assembled field of interaction as the “territory of disembodied voices”. Here, the concept of territory is to be considered in the Deleuzian sense: both as a field, a domain of enquiry, interaction and study, and as a topology. It is always a terrain of socialisation, movement and identity formation’ (Spinelli 2016, 148). ‘In his manifesto for a new theatre of signs, gestures, unearthly sounds and images, The Theatre and its Double, Artaud wrote about breaking “the intellectual subjugation of language, by providing meaning with a new and more profound intellectuality, hidden beneath gestures and signs, and raised by the dignity of particular exorcisms”’ (Toop and London 2019, 161). [Cabaret Voltaire’s] ‘use of found audio collage, overlaid a deliberate moral ambiguity atop their primitivistic, rhythmic, industrial grooves’ (Post-Punk Monk et al. 2012). ‘[T]he first five NWW albums are furiously angry’ (Condon 1991); ‘Random synth noises have given way to interweaving sequencer parts and polysynth melodies, the drum machine patterns have become clearer and better defined, and now, just to make a change, the eccentric treatments have been removed from Mallinder’s vocals’ (Goldstein 1984). ‘Sound is

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a composite, moving through an environment like a bird building a nest, rigging transient sculptures from the material it collects’ (Toop and London 2010, 54). ‘Eventually all the old recordings will become ethnographic. The inheritors will be left with a museum of sounds now beyond producing’ (O’Brien 2004, 295), ‘[b]ut the resonance of this music, of the spirit it distils, extends beyond the merely personal and wistful. It’s about lost futures’ (Stubbs 2018, 345).

Messages Received We re-evaluate how we perceive messages and meaning in relation to their cultural and musical context, in the light of Cabaret Voltaire’s ‘conceptual drive’.

‘The first association we make then with a voice is its source—the existence of a physical body. However, a characteristic of voice is its ephemerality; as soon as a voice is uttered, it disappears with that moment in time. Therefore, the existence of voice always creates a certain level of illusion’ (Li and Lai 2013, 351). ‘Most crucially, at an individual level, the territory of disembodied voices is also metaphorically a psychological one’ (Spinelli 2016, 148). ‘Why all these powers in a voice? Maybe because this voice without a place that belongs to the acousmêtre takes us back to an archaic, original stage: of the first months of life or even before birth, during which the voice was everything and it was everywhere’ (Chion 1999, 27). ‘Anthropological and psychiatric challenges, it is argued, are crystallised in the voice, a medium that signifies the intersection of models of occult madness and schizophrenia’ (Basu 2014). ‘Small sounds are too quick, too slight, to leave any sense of overcrowding air or imposing authority, yet they form wisps into solids, glue fragments into forms, keep people sane, or shield them from loneliness and the void’ (Toop and London 2010, 160). ‘Noise then, occurs when language breaks down. Noise is a wordless state in which the very constitution of our selves is in jeopardy. The pleasure of noise lies in the fact that the obliteration of meaning and identity is ecstasy (literally, being out-of-oneself)’ Reynolds 1990, 56). ‘If music is like a language, if it communicates some kind of emotional or spiritual message, then noise is best defined as interference, something which blocks transmission, jams the code, prevents sense being made’ (Reynolds 1990, 55); ‘difficulty resides in the social situation and popular cultural experiences of the listener. This is to propose a more contingent

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notion of difficulty that can be much more inclusive of a wider readership’s listening experiences’, ‘[d]ifficulty becomes an aesthetic dimension of listening as a process that is located within particular histories of popular music where the social histories of audiences and their listening experiences over time intersect with the cultural experiments of the musicians’ (Atton 2012, 359). ‘Given its contradictory properties, the most sensible approach to sound is through incoherence’ (Toop and London 2010, 48). ‘Cabaret Voltaire were excited by this idea of recontextualisation as a political weapon and embraced it. Tape would be a key weapon in their arsenal, a means of capturing excerpts of, say, American clansmen or TV evangelists, which could help ‘recondition’ the listener, make them more conscious of the media environment. It was a form of counter-subversion’ (Stubbs 2018, 314): ‘fragmentation has a multifarious, perhaps contradictory, character’: ‘the fragment is a ruin, a snippet, a shard, a scrap; it evokes and induces disintegration, deterioration, discordance, disharmony’ (Gibbons 2019: 197). ‘That’s originally all we do have—the idea of an atmosphere or an effect’, ‘[s]o you compose and decompose, construct and deconstruct. There are checks and balances, and a substratum of some logical but intuitive development’ (Kirk, in Darlington 1983). ‘The naive, Burroughsian electro cut-up of that era sounds almost ancient in that it was achieved with crude sonic collage and the earliest, cheap synths that had filtered down from Mount Olympus to the streets of Sheffield. The band had a conceptual drive in their attempt to confront the control process with their art that was honest, invigorating, and bracing’ (Post-Punk Monk et al. 2014).

The Power (of Their Knowledge) We consider how Cabaret Voltaire embraced early video technology and applied their musical composition processes to the visual.

‘Essentially for Cabaret Voltaire at this point in their history, video enabled the articulation of a synaesthetic mode of expression, capable of expressing a sense of rhythm, not restricted to being a merely sonic phenomenon. This is especially clear in their early video work for tracks like “This Is Entertainment” in which primitive video effects, screen text, and cut-up photographic images operate as a synaesthetic remediation of the medium of video itself’ (Goddard et  al. 2009: 165), ‘a dream in which images

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appear and transform themselves unexpectedly’ (Lyford 2000, 64). ‘[T]hey spent much of their time championing the potential of video— both by reinventing the music video as a piece of twisted art (see Peter Care’s brilliantly out-there video for the 12” version of “Sensoria”, which ended up in New  York’s Museum of Modern Art), and founding their own label, Doublevision, which specialized in releasing both 12” vinyl and VHS videos’ (Annis 2013). ‘No one had more exciting videos than Cab Volt’, ‘[t]he repetitive use of looped sequences in much of the material is visually analogous to the band’s sonic modus operandi’ (Post-Punk Monk et al. 2013): ‘[s]ynaesthetic combinations of sound and image accompanied music video from its beginnings, and it is hardly accidental that the groups [sic] Cabaret Voltaire, founded a video rather than a record label’. ‘If the video work of Cabaret Voltaire was at the beginning lo fi and DIY, it soon developed a complex audiovisual language in which visual and audio cut up techniques operated in parallel and complementary ways’ (Arnold et al. 2009: 144). ‘A treasure from the musty vaults of post-punk, Doublevision Presents Cabaret Voltaire was made in 1982 as a long-form video to accompany music by one of the movement’s primary incubators’. ‘The video’s makeup is simple: 14 more or less classic songs from Cabaret Voltaire’s prime early years, presented amid a dense, murky collage of images and abstractions. Some of them serve as straight music videos: A great clip for “Nag, Nag, Nag” intercuts live band footage with colored overlays of static made to mimic different singed synthesizer tones. Others are more impressionistic: The arch proclamations in “This Is Entertainment” meet their visual match in words and cursor trackings made on a wonderfully archaic computer screen. There’s little sense to be made from the film as a whole, but its disparate images—military marches, torture, slow-motion night drives, bugs, monkeys, faces bathed in blue—make more arresting music that continues to slither out of history with handcuffs at the ready’ (Battaglia 2004). ‘Most of the video footage are shot in a William Burroughs cut-up style, and they include images of Nazis, and footage of oral and anal sex and monks inflicting self abuse on themselves. The music that goes along with this sounds like primitive Human League and New Order. At its best some of it sounds like very dark punk post rock, but on the whole it is very much of its time and the only track that stands out is 1979’s “Nag, Nag, Nag”. At its worst it is the worst bad trip since David Lynch’s “Eraserhead”’ (Strutt 2004).

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‘For these 14 videos, Cabaret Voltaire utilized nascent video editing technology, splicing together television clips, performance videos and archival film footage, gluing it all together with low-tech early video effects. The interesting thing about watching these videos in 2004 is that the primitive video techniques, which probably seemed piss-poor at the time of their release, now play into the current avant-garde video art obsession with early 1980’s low budget pirate video aesthetic. 20 years on, this collection of random video cut-ups and ugly, jagged editing techniques seems positively vanguard’. ‘Televised nature and anthropology programs are intercut with images of war, death and destruction from new broadcasts. Clips of Leni Riefenstahl films and videos of surgeries rub shoulders with grainy, decayed video images superimposed over each other in a weird Burroughsian collage of overlapping transmissions, giving rise to a mysterious “third mind” of accidental coincidences and synchronicities. As experimental video, it all works amazingly well. As music videos, the effect is somewhat more muted, as the edits are often out of sync with the beat structures of the music. Still, it would be hard to imagine a more appropriate visual accompaniment to Cabaret Voltaire’s abrasive, subterranean, low-fidelity electronic music’ (Dean 2004). ‘Mal: With video I’m interested more in its abuse at the moment. I mean I’m getting very tired of how video is actually supplementing the imagination’ (‘Cabaret Voltaire’ [Interview] in Neal 1987, 153).

Double Vision We continue with the visual theme and hear how Cabaret Voltaire regarded their videos as a form of artistic and cultural subversion.

‘It’s good to be reminded of these videos, however crude they appear today. As with any early use of technology you need to bear in mind the limitations of the time. The tape was released in 1982 but the group had been experimenting with video equipment from about 1979 onwards. At that time commercial music video was just getting started but most of the examples on TV were paid for by the big record companies. Cabaret Voltaire and some of their associates in the UK Industrial scene—notably Throbbing Gristle and 23 Skidoo—were ahead of the game in acquiring equipment to make their own video recordings and promos. These videos were seldom shown on mainstream TV: I recall being thrilled to see a clip from the Nag, Nag, Nag promo on a pop programme but that was a rare

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one-off moment. The music industry was being forced to accommodate the awkward DIY merchants but the gates of broadcast television remained heavily policed’ (Couthard 2013). ‘This long-form video captures Cabaret Voltaire at the end of this invigorating era; self-released and self-­consciously experimental, the quality of presentation is somewhat low, but the material is exciting, especially since it has been unavailable for so long. It’s easy to forget that electronic music as we know it today was spun from some very bizarre and unpleasant threads. Seeing Cabaret Voltaire in action provides a quick reminder of how dangerous these sounds were at one time’ (unknown author, 2004). ‘Kirk and Mallinder’s motivation for their video output was, like with their music before it, a desire to challenge orthodoxy and push the boundaries of what was acceptable. It was, as Kirk points out, another form of dissent’ (Annis 2013). ‘Basically, I’ve been collecting things, taping things from TV, collecting movies, ever since I got a video player in the late 70s’, he says. ‘I’ve got a huge source to draw upon in terms of finding dialog or spoken work or whatever. Also stuff from radio, from shortwave radio, or whatever. It really depends, sometimes you get a piece of dialogue and then you construct some music underneath it. Or other times you construct a piece of music or a rhythm, then maybe you want to sample just one word and repeat that in rhythm with the track. There’s no rules’. (Kirk, in Gourley 1993)

‘The video is indie as hell. Being an industrial band from the days when that meant being a dab hand with a soldering iron, the Cabs used whatever footage they could get their hands on and put it together using whatever equipment they could get their hands on. The amazing thing is not only that it worked well enough at the time, it still works now; the visual equivalent of lo-fi punk rock that still rocks. It really is what the sound of their music at the time would have looked like: a disquieting noise not quite from here’ (Gerard 2017); ‘a near perfect document of Richard H. Kirk, Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson’s evolving musical and video style, a dynamic combination of Dada non-sense aesthetic and William Burroughs’s cut-up technique that sampled eclectically from documentary, pornography, newsreels and home movies’ (Clarke 2004). ‘“We knew that there was something to be done with that technology,” Kirk reminisces. “The first ever long form video we did, Doublevision presents Cabaret Voltaire, that’s how it came about. There were these really

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crude pieces that we were able to edit together on these two VHS recorders. When home video first came in, there was this flood of ‘video nasties’, which didn’t require certification at the time. That interested us because it meant we could put anything out on video and we wouldn’t get prosecuted. Of course Thatcher changed that a little later on and they did tighten up the rules where videos did need certification, the same way as film did. But for a short period it was totally open… and open to abuse I suppose”’ (Annis 2013). ‘[W]e were all into the montage work that George Gross and John Heartfield had done, but also the more conventional collage approach of Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst’. ‘[I]t was as much a visual extension of “cut up” that we’d used in text and spoken word, and splicing sound and Super-8 film’ (Mallinder in Loydell 2018, 96). ‘People’s approach to video is so hampered in a lot of ways—the whole idea of the music business promo video we find annoying. We haven’t produced a perfect video, but we’ve given some idea (just a sketch) of an alternative. And now we’ve started Double Vision which is not just an outlet for Cabaret Voltaire videos; we want it to be a total alternative video label which will bring out films and performance which might not be mass-marketable (but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be available). Where if we don’t do it, there’s a fair chance no one will’ (Mallinder 1985). ‘I think it goes back to the Dadaist notion of being mischievous, just playing around juxtaposing different images and sounds and seeing what the end product is’ (Kirk, in Fish and Hallbery 1989, 116).

Scissor Rock Bicycle Revelation We establish a wider artistic context for Cabaret Voltaire’s work and revisit surrealism in the light of 21st century technology. What have some of your influences been outside music? Mal:  It’s just a whole mishmash. From being interested in Dada, Duchamp, and getting interested in other things, Man Ray, fifties things, certain photographers. R Kirk: Some of the things that Fellini’s done and some of Fritz Lang’s films… I’ve got most of Bunuel’s films on videotape now, I like most of that stuff. It’s not as if I take it as any kind of gospel, but it’s quite a large influence. And I think the way that the music was

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formulated was just by unexplainable things, just chance elements and things like that. And that’s still happening a lot in the music that we’re doing. I mean we’ll just run a tape of something in with a track and then maybe dub parts of it in at random. (‘Cabaret Voltaire’ [Interview] in Neal 1987, 155)

‘Breton’s ear was tuned to the netherworld of the subconscious, to a psychic region that transcends the concerns of the senses. The expressions of surrealist practice, whether visual or poetic, remain in varying degrees a degradation from this intuitive domain’ (Jorgenson 2009). ‘Like Breton, Stapleton despises the conservatism of instrumental music, describing the process of learning an instrument as the demise of “pure sound, music with no limitations, actual freedom from musicianship”’ (Jorgenson 2009; quoting Levermore 1982), ‘[t]he lack of a semantic (or narrative) coherence resulting from the incongruity of constitutive elements is, beside the inclusion of appropriated content another crucial characteristic of collage’ (Dra ̨g 2019: 111). ‘I’ve always identified with the way the surrealists looked at things, with the world not being quite as it seems, which ties into experimentation with psychedelics. Once you’ve visited that place you never see the world in the same way’ (Kirk 2017); ‘[e]ach collage, after all, enacts a clash of distinct, often opposing voices and incompatible elements, which results in their uneasy coexistence and tension’ (Dra ̨g 2019: 120). ‘In the strange museum that technology opened for us, we relive earlier stages of the mixing process, wind the tape back in godlike fashion to one segment or another of the flux, tracing tones and patterns as they bounce from Swiss yodelers to Jimmie Rodgers and from Jimmie Rodgers to Doc Watson, from Blind Lemon Jefferson to Bob Dylan to the Four Tops, from gamelan music to Debussy to the Ivory Snow commercial, from Arnold Schönberg to Ennio Morricone to Lee Perry and the Upsetters. We are drawn to the beginning of our world—understood as somehow synonymous with the core of feeling—only to find a past that changed forever in being captured. The technology that lets us hear the songs also rapidly undermines the conditions in which they were created in the first place. Go back as far as possible and you already find only an echo of some unknowable music, wilder and richer’ (O’Brien 2004, 125), ‘an aesthetic experience that offers multiple directionality for the reader’ (Atton 2012, 353).

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The Continuous Accident We consider the role of the DJ in contemporary music and how it is akin to Steven Stapleton’s organization of sound, and how the listener creates their own meaning from what they hear.

‘The most interesting music is always a hybrid of different influences and backgrounds’ (Mallinder, Goldstein 1984). ‘In the electronic milieu that we all move in today, the DJ is a custodian of aural history. In the mix, creator and re-mixer are woven together in the syncretic space of the text of samples and other sonic material to create a seamless fabric of sound that in a strange way mirrors the modern macrocosm of cyberspace, where different voices and visions constantly collide and cross-fertilize one another. The linkages between memory, time, and place, are all externalized and made accessible to the listener’. ‘Thus, the mix acts as a continuously moving still frame camera lucida capturing moment-events. The mix, in this picture, allows the invocation of different languages, texts and sounds to converge, meld, and create new medium that transcends its original components. The sum created from this audio collage leaves its original elements far behind’ (Miller 1996, 351–352). ‘Defamiliarised listening recalls Schafer’s notion of clairaudient listening, a process that requires training in the appreciation of silence’; ‘the familiar is revitalised through exposure to a music that, far from inducing calm or detachment, is “almost unlistenable”’ (Atton 2012, 357). ‘Although the more abstract and noise-derived pieces clearly ruffled feathers, the borrowing from sounds of the time such as reggae and dub, and even a few punky numbers (“Nag Nag Nag”), clearly show the Cabs were attempting to be somewhat accessible in their wanderings’ (Freeman 2013). ‘[L]ike his dadaist heroes, Stapleton makes arresting sequences out of utter chaos’ (Linhardt 2006) ‘The first three [NWW] albums are the most nakedly surrealistic, each containing wandering ever-changing treks through the collective psyche of the unknown’ (Thornburg 1993), ‘[b]y 1982’s Homotopy to Marie Stapleton had developed a genuinely idiosyncratic way of organizing noise, using the studio-as-instrument to create bizarre sound-worlds as gorgeously grotesque as a Quay Bros animation’ (Reynolds 2005: 242). ‘Homotopy to Marie is a uniquely disturbing record’. ‘Less conventionally “musical” than its predecessors, Stapleton’s jumpcuts set up some chilling juxtapositions. Children’s voices float through the fog while gongs and metal percussion curdle the air. His use

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of silence is also highly unnerving, especially when it is usurped by distant groans and long, arching drones’ (Keenan 2013/2016, 114). ‘Closer to thoughts, emotions, memories and fleeting, peripheral sensations than to tangible objects and reassurances of the known world, sound slips into the territory of the mind to settle at unknown depths, to stir up intimations of other futures’ (Toop and London 2010, 170); ‘[n]oise is about fascination, the antithesis of meaning. If music is a language, communicating moods and feelings, then noise is like an eruption within the material out of which language is shaped. We are arrested, fascinated, by a convulsion of sound to which we are unable to assign a meaning. We are mesmerized by the materiality of music’ (Reynolds 1990, 57). ‘What comes together through sound is emergent and passing time—a sense of duration, the field of memory, a fullness of space that lies beyond touch and out of sight, hidden from vision. Sound must be trusted, cannot be trusted, so has power. When sound that should be present seems to be absent, this is frightening’; ‘we strain to hear what can never be there’ (Toop and London 2010, XV); ‘[l]istening entails far more than an exercise in correspondence (and its corollary of incomprehension when correspondence fails)’ (Atton 2012, 354), ‘polyphonic, fragmentary, non-linear, multimodal and metafictional writing displays an obstinate resistance of the fragments to cohere into a whole, and profound distrust of the possibility of reassembling a unitary meaning, narrative and identity’ (D’Ambrosio 2019: 27).

From Another Source In which we gather our thoughts together and re-affirm the importance of fragmentation, collage and curation.

‘Any understanding of fragmentation necessarily entails a cognitive conception of a unified whole’ (Gibbons 2019: 201). ‘Entering the surreal dream world of Nurse with Wound’ ‘nothing ever really happens and yet somehow there’s a feeling of accumulating psychic discomfort that can only be relieved by surrendering yourself to the incomprehensible but strangely compelling logic of the moment’ (Van de Kree 2008) ‘Steve Stapleton’s haunted tape-loop collages infect the subconscious before dissolving like nightmares. A painter first, Stapleton’s greatest inspirations are

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Dada and surrealism. Like Dalí, he draws directly from dreams, and his ability to sublimate an everyday object into a new form is reminiscent of Magritte’s hypnotically impossible images and Duchamp’s absurd readymade sculptures’ (Bowe 2018). ‘Avant-garde music has often used the pre-recorded sounds of the world in order to render these sounds and this world strange’ (Jorgenson 2009). ‘We see our music as sound sculptures unhindered by preconceived ideas, where any sound may be used whether natural or manmade, untreated or treated electronically, and motivated only by aesthetic consideration’ (from John Fothergill’s letter to a fanzine, in Keenan 2013, 84). ‘It is incumbent upon us … to try to see more and more clearly what is transpiring unbeknownst to man in the depths of his mind, even if he should begin to hold his own vortex against us’ (Breton 2011, 270): ‘music should reserve the right to be violent, invasive, disruptive, and certainly vulgar’ (Stubbs 2018, 308). ‘Cut-up was such an effective creative tool, going right back to Tristan Tzara’s automatic poetry. So much interesting language and ideas emanate from the technique’ (Kirk 2017); [Andre Breton] ‘listens only to the murmur of inner creativity that the orchestra threatens to down with its hoots of instrumentation’ (Jorgensen 2009). ‘Everyday sounds—barking dogs, TV transmissions, children’s toys, and the wooden creaks and metallic clangs that can sound so alarming in the middle of the night—stretch to form monstrous shapes, while conceptions of time become painfully distorted’ (Bowe 2018). ‘Collage is not a refuge for the compositionally disabled’: [its] ‘thematic investigation is manifest from the beginning’, ‘collage teaches the reader to understand that the movements of the writer’s mind are “intricately entangled with the work’s meaning”: are the work’s meaning’ (Shields 2013, 160). ‘The first point is about collage as a technique: the selection, arrangement, and juxtaposition of the found bits of prior culture is the art. The fragments “impact upon each other to explosive effect”— through the artist’s selection and arrangement she generates novel information’. ‘The second point … is that it may be a culturally productive act simply to discover and draw attention to a fragment of text, image or sound. Part of the mosaic—or collage-creator’s art lies in the very process of rescuing the fragment from obscurity and showing it to people’ (Kieller 2008: 143).

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Works Cited Annis, Matt. ‘“Everything takes longer when you’re older”: An interview with Richard H.  Kirk’, Juno Reviews, 30.10. 2013, https://www.juno.co.uk/ reviews/2013/10/30/everything-takes-longer-when-youre-older-an-interviewwith-richard-h-kirk/. Arnold, Gina, Cookney, Daniel, Fairclough, Kirsty, and Goddard, Michael (Eds). Music/Video. Histories, Aesthetics, Media. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Atton, Chris. ‘Listening to “difficult albums”: specialist music fans and the popular avant-­garde’, Popular Music, Vol. 31, No. 3, 347–361, 2012. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, https://www.jstor.org/stable.23325782. Basu, Helene. ‘Listening to disembodied voices: anthropological and psychiatric challenges’, Anthropology & Medicine, Vol. 21, Issue 3, 2014. https://www. tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13648470.2014.928095. Battaglia, Andy. ‘Cabaret Voltaire: Doublevision Presents Cabaret Voltaire’, AV Club, 12.27.2004, https://music.avclub.com/cabaret-voltaire-doublevisionpresents-cabaret-voltair-1798200272. Bowe, Miles. Untitled review of Homotopy to Marie, Pitchfork, 19 July 2018, https:// pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nurse-with-wound-homotopy-to-marie/. Breton, André, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’. Danchev, Alex (ed.) 100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists, 241–250. London: Penguin, 2011. Cabaret Voltaire. The Voice of America, Rough Trade. 1980. Cabaret Voltaire. The Voice of America, Rough Trade. The Crackdown. Some Bizarre/Virgin. 1983. Cabaret Voltaire. The Voice of America, Rough Trade. Drinking Gasoline. Some Bizarre/Virgin. 1985. Cabaret Voltaire. The Voice of America, Rough Trade. Plasticity. Plastex. 1992. Cabaret Voltaire. The Voice of America, Rough Trade. The Shadow Of Fear. Mute. 2020. Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Clarke, Jocelyn. ‘CABARET VOLTAIRE.  Double Vision Presents Cabaret Voltaire Mute Film’, Irish Times, Oct 1, 2004, https://www.irishtimes.com/ culture/musicdvds-1.1160049 (accessed 8 January 2020). Condon, Paul. ‘Post Operative Medicine Nurse With Wound’, Fractured #2 (1991), revised edition now online at http://www.uncarved.org/music/nww.html. Couthard, John. ‘Doublevision Presents Cabaret Voltaire’, {feuilliton}, Aug 24, 2013, http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2013/08/24/doublevisionpresents-cabaret-voltaire/. D’Ambrosio, Mariano. ‘Fragmentary writing and polyphonic narratives in twentyfirst-­century fiction’ in Gibbons, Alison (ed.), The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction. Delaware: Vernon Press, 2019, 19–32.

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Darlington, Andy. ‘Record Talkback’, Electronic Soundmaker, Oct 1983, http:// www.muzines.co.uk/articles/record-talkback/3160. Dean, Jonathan. ‘“DOUBLEVISION PRESENT CABARET VOLTAIRE”’, Brainwashed, 30 October 2004, https://brainwashed.com/index.php?option= com_content&view=article&id=3352:qdoublevision-present-cabaretvoltaireq&catid=15:home-theater&Itemid=138 (accessed 8 January 2004). Dra ̨g, Wojciech. ‘Collage manifestos: fragmentation and appropriation in David Markson’s This is Not a Novel and David Shields’s Reality Hunger’ in Gibbons, Alison (ed.), The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction Delaware: Vernon Press, 2019. 107–122. Fish, Mick and Hallbery, Dave. Cabaret Voltaire: The Art of the Sixth Sense, Harrow: SAF, 1989. Freeman, Albert. ‘Cabaret Voltaire. #8385 (Collected Works 1983–1985), The Quietus, November 22, 2013, https://thequietus.com/articles/13954-cabaret-voltaire-8385-collected-works-1983-1985-box-set-review (accessed 8 Jan 2020). Gerard, David. ‘Cabaret Voltaire: Doublevision Present (1983)’, rocknerd, 16 January 2017, https://rocknerd.co.uk/2017/01.16/cabaret-voltaire-doublevision-present-1983/ (accessed 8 January 2020). Gibbons, Alison. ‘Fragments of a Postscript’ in Gibbons, Alison (ed.), The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction. Delaware: Vernon Press, 2019. 197–207. Goddard, Michael. ‘Audiovision and Gesamtkunstwerk: The Aesthetics of Firstand Second-­Generation Industrial Music Video’ in Arnold, Cookney, et  al. (eds) (2009), 163–180. Goldstein, Dan. ‘Life is a Cabaret’, Electronics & Music Maker, Nov 1984, http:// www.muzines.co.uk/articles/life-is-a-cabaret/8008. Gourley, Bob. ‘Cabaret Voltaire’, Chaos Control, 1993. https://chaoscontrol. com/cabaret-voltaire/ (accessed 8 January 2020). Jorgenson, Darren (2009). ‘The Marvellous Surrealism of Nurse with Wound and the Sylvie and Babs Hi-Fi Companion’, Sound Scripts, 2.1, https://ro.ecu.edu. au/soundscripts/vol2/iss1/11 (Accessed 13 January 2020). Keenan, David, England’s Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground. London: Strange Attractor, 2013. Kieller, Daphne. ‘The Musician as Thief: Digital Culture and Copyright Law’, in Miller, P.D. (ed.), Sound Unbound. Sampling Digital Music and Culture, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, 2008, 135–150. Kirk, Richard. ‘Under the Influence’, Electronic Sound 31, 2017, https://electronicsound.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/ES_31_DIGITAL.pdf (accessed 8 January 2020). Levermore, Gary. ‘Interview with Steven Stapleton’, Tone Death 3, November 1982, cited in Levermore, Gary (1982) at http://brainwashed.com/nww.

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Li, Yueh-Tuan & Lai, Wen-Shu, ‘Voice, object and listening in the sound installations of Laurie Anderson’, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 9:2 (2013), 347–361, https://doi.org/10.1386/ padm.9.2.347_1. (Accessed 2 December 2019). Linhardt, Alex, untitled review of Livin’ Fear of James Last, Pitchfork, 10 January 2006, https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5872-livin-fear-of-james-last/ (Accessed 2 December 2019). Loydell, Rupert. ‘Open for investigation: An interview with Stephen Mallinder’, Punk & Post-Punk Journal, 7.1 (2018), 93–101, Bristol: Intellect. Lyford, Amy, ‘The Aesthetics of Dismemberment: Surrealism and the Musée du Val-de-­Grâce in 1917’, Cultural Critique, No 46 (2000), 45–79, https:// www.jstor.org/stable/1354408. Mallinder, Stephen (1985), ‘RE/Search #6/7: Industrial Culture Handbook Excerpt: Cabaret Voltaire’, https://www.researchpubs.com/products-page-2/ hardback-research-67-industrial-culture-handbook-excerpt-cabaret-voltaire/ (Accessed 8 January 2020). McLuhan, Marshall (2006 [1989]), ‘Visual and Acoustic Space’ in Cox, Christopher and Warner, Daniel (eds.), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. London: Continuum, 67–72. Miller, Paul D. (as DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid; 1996), ‘Algorithms: Erasures and the Art of Memory’ in Cox, Christopher and Warner, Daniel (eds.), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. New York: Continuum (2006), 348–354. Neal, Charles (ed.) (1987), Tape Delay. Harrow: SAF. Neyland, Nick. ‘Cabaret Voltaire, Pitchfork, June 30 2014, https://pitchfork. com/reviews/albums/19551-cabaret-voltaire-7885-electropunk-to-technopop-1978-1985/. Nurse With Wound A Sucked Orange, LP, Coolarta, County Clare: United Dairies, (1989). Nurse With Wound Crumb Duck, CD, Coolarta: United Dairies, (1996). Nurse With Wound “Alice The Goon, 12” EP, Coolarta: United Dairies, (2000). Nurse With Wound The Continuous Accident, CDR, Coolarta: United Dairies. (2008). O’Brien, Geoffrey. Sonata for Jukebox. An Autobiography of My Ears, New York: Counterpoint, 2004. Ovid (2000). Metamorphoses. Trans. A.S. Kline, Poetry in Translation. https:// www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/Metamorph.php#anchor_ Toc64105451 (Accessed 13 March 2021). Post-Punk Monk (2012), ‘Seminal Single: Cabaret Voltaire – Sensoria’, August 6, 2012, https://postpunkmonk.com/2012/08/06/seminal-single-cabaretvoltaire-sensoria/ (Accessed 15 January 2020). Post-Punk Monk. ‘Seminal Single: Cabaret Voltaire—Sensoria’, August 6 ‘A Young Person’s Guide to: Cabaret Voltaire—Drinking Gasoline/Gasoline In

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Your Eye’, May 23, 2013, https://postpunkmonk.com/2013/05/23/ayoung-­persons-­guide-­to-­cabaret-­voltaire-­drinking-­gasolinegasoline-­in-­your-­ eye/ (accessed 15 January 2020). Post-Punk Monk. ‘Seminal Single: Cabaret Voltaire—Sensoria’, August 6 ‘A Young Person’s Guide to: Cabaret Voltaire (The Short Form)’, June 26, 2014, https://postpunkmonk.com/2014/06/26/a-­y oung-­p ersons-­g uide-­t o-­ cabaret-­voltaire-­the-­short-­form/ (accessed 15 January 2020). Reynolds, Simon (2005), Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-punk 1978–1984, London: Faber. Reynolds, Simon (2006 [1990]), ‘Noise’, in Cox, Christopher and Warner, Daniel (eds.), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. New York: Continuum, 55–58. Rothenberg, David, Sudden Music. Improvisation, Sound, Nature, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002. Shields, David, How Literature Saved My Life. London: Notting Hill Editions, 2013. Slouka, Mark (2006 [1999]), ‘Listening for Silence: Notes on the Aural Life’ in Cox, Christopher and Warner, Daniel (eds.), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. New York: Continuum, 40–46. Spinelli, Emmanuel, 2016 ‘Composing with Schizo-narratives and Sonic Chorographies: The Territory of Disembodied Voices and the Perception of Acousmatic Identities’, https://research.gold.ac.uk/17033/1/MUS_thesis_ SpinelliE_2016.pdf. Strutt, Anthony. untitled review of Doublevision Presents Cabaret Voltaire, Penny Black Music, 14.11.2004, http://www.pennyblackmusic.co.uk/MagSitePages/ Article/3481/Cabaret-­Voltaire-­Doublevision-­Presents-­Cabaret-­Voltaire. Stubbs, David. Mars by 1980. London: Faber, 2018. Thornburg, Harvey (1993), ‘Article 191 of alt.surrealism: Surrealist Music: Nurse With Wound’, http://www.madsci.org/~lynn/juju/surr/music/NWW.html (Accessed 29 November 2019). Toop, David. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. London: Continuum, 2010. Toop, David. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. London: Continuum Inflamed Invisible. Collected Writings on Art and Sound 1976–2018. London: Goldsmiths Press, 2019. unknown author (2004), ‘Review—Double Vision Presents. Artist: Cabaret Voltaire’, Orlando Weekly, October 28, 2004, https://www.orlandoweekly. com/Blogs/archives/2004/10/28/review-double-vision-presents (Accessed 8 January 2020). unknown author (2007). ‘Cabaret Voltaire. double vision 1982’, Soundohm. https://www.soundohm.com/product/double-vision-1982/pid/10381 (Accessed 8 January 2020). Van de Kree, Charles, untitled review of ‘Nurse with Wound—“Images/Zero Mix”’, Aural Innovations #40, 2008, http://www.aural-­innovations.com/issues/ issue40/nww.html (accessed 28 November 2019).

CHAPTER 7

The Last Attempt at Paradise: Early Industrial Culture in Kansas Francis X. Connor

On 28 April 1982, the Australian industrial band SPK played a concert in Lawrence, Kansas’ Off-the-Wall Hall, the college town’s most important performance space for small punk and post-punk acts. It was a relatively tame affair: although SPK had earned a reputation for theatrically shocking onstage acts like eating from a sheep’s head or wielding flamethrowers, this show was fairly straightforward, with the group’s paramilitary garb and usual array of mortuary and anatomy slides being the most shocking musical paratexts.1 At the time, the group was transitioning from the harsh electronic noise of Leichenschrei (1983) to the beat-driven sound of their 1  Asked why they didn’t “split goat heads” in Lawrence, SPK singer/bassist Oblivion (Graeme Revell) explained that “we kinda got bored with that,” and “when you’re touring it’s real hard to pick up those kind of props” (Blur 2 (1982), 13, 16–19; 16).

F. X. Connor (*) Wichita State University, Wichita, KS, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Whittaker, E. Potter (eds.), Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92462-1_7

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forthcoming Auto-Da-Fé LP; this was reflected in their performance, which alternated between taped electronic howls and rhythms, overlaid with live bass and percussion, punctuated with the occasional vocal or scream. The band considered it the “best performance to date” on their 1982 American tour, adding that they had “FLATTENED ENTHUSIASTIC AUDIENCE WITH MASSIVE P.A.  AMPLIFICATION OF FX BASS REGENERATION” (WFMU 2012). Reviewing the show for the Lawrence Journal-World, Doug Hithcock somewhat bemusedly described it as a “[r]eal ‘orror show,” and that “SPK’s music undoubtedly stretches the definition of the term, for good or bad.” He reported that some in the audience “were visibly shaken, shuddering at what they’d seen and heard,” emphasizing this reaction in the sub-headline: “Fakers Fade as SPK outrages new wave rave” (Hitchcock, 11). After his interview with SPK for his  Lawrence fanzine Blur, Mike Blur similarly observed that “[m]any people expecting ‘just another band’ was [sic] shocked and left the gig” (Blur, 13). Kansas is not usually associated with American industrial or experimental music scenes—“the show must have really fried their brains in Lawrence, Kansas,” according to Steve Spinalli (1982) in the California-based zine MaximumRockandRoll—and these reactions to the concert may support this claim. However, Kansas had become a small but significant center for industrial music  in America. One catalyst for this was William S. Burroughs’ permanent move to Lawrence in 1981, motivated by his desire “to get out of New York and get a new ambience” (Burroughs 1981, 18). His pioneering of cut-ups as a recording technique influenced many early industrial musicians, a number of whom—ranging from SPK to Al Jourgensen—would make the pilgrimage to Lawrence to visit Burroughs. Among the first were Peter Christopherson and Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle, whom Burroughs had invited to catalogue his sprawling tape archive, a project that would result in the LP Nothing Here Now but the Recordings, released on TG’s Industrial Records in 1981. One of Burroughs’ close friends in Lawrence, Bill Rich, founded the local music zine Talk Talk and the record label Fresh Sounds. Rich booked local shows, including the SPK concert. The final issue of Talk Talk included a flexidisc that included a track “Abandoned Artifacts,” by Burroughs and local musician Marty Olsen, that overlaid  three versions of Burroughs reading the same text a top a rhythm track; this has claim to be the first industrial-minded record released in Lawrence.

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Beyond Burroughs, the University of Kansas’ KJHK had by the early 1980s established a reputation as one of America’s most forward-thinking college radio stations, with programs like “Tesco Disco,” hosted by Rick Schneider, focusing on industrial music and interviews with artists like Throbbing Gristle. A local experimental music scene featuring electronic and cut-up artists influenced by Burroughs began to emerge, which Rich featured on the second volume of his cassette compilation series Fresh Sounds From Middle America, which collected music from indie Kansan artists. His  Fresh Sounds label would later distribute  videos by SPK, Nocturnal Emissions, Psychic TV, and others. SPK’s records were enthusiastically reviewed in the local zines Talk Talk and Blur. In short, Lawrence had a small but notable industrial framework in place by the time of SPK’s show. In 1983, Rich released a recording of the SPK concert titled The Last Attempt At Paradise as part of his Fresh Sounds cassette series, preserving a musical event in Kansas rather than an artist or artists from the state. Lawrence musician and DJ  Marc  Burch contributed an essay about the band as liner notes for the tape, offering a regional interpretation of this international act. In his essay, he accepted SPK’s argument that the gruesome body images of the live set are designed to “shock you out of complacency.” Describing the concert as a “procedure,” he re-imagined the Off-the-Wall Hall space as a religious and medical theater in which the oppression of hegemony was revealed to the faithful who attended and remained: taped Gregorian chants became primeval screams, the screams of the corpse. Huge shock-absorber springs were beaten with hammers and chisels unceasingly and mercilessly, like the implements of exorcism. Sparks and a hot, oily metal smell flew from them. A casting out of demons. Sensory flagellation reaching into the minds of some in the audience: those who were willing to leave the protective, often deceiving ring of normality. Many became participants in the phenomenon generated.

The combination of SPK’s stark industrial sounds and mutilated images bludgeoned “normality” out of those brave few in the audience who witnessed the spectacle. This explanation of the live phenomena is a fairly conventional paraphrase of the ideology of industrial music, as expressed in SPK’s various Dokuments and Jon Savage’s précis of “Industrial Culture” (Vale and Juno 1983, 4–5). By including this statement in the liners of a

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cassette by a Kansas record label preserving a performance in Kansas, Burch’s essay treated the concert as a demonstration of the relevance of and potential for industrial culture in the state. Indeed, Lawrence was not the only place in Kansas where musicians were drawing from the musical and conceptual toolboxes of industrial music. In Wichita, a little under three hours south of Lawrence, Jim Skeel and Greg Cowper, refugees from the recently disbanded progressive band Dr. Doom and the Victims of Circumstance, joined Staci Stull, from another newly defunct band, the all-female punk group The Inevitable, to form a new group influenced by the region’s emerging post-punk scene. They called themselves The Buckthrusters, the name of an imagined machine to be used in concert: The Buckthruster—a device comprised of a hydraulic arm attached to a magnetic cumberbund worn by willing band members. The arm rhythmically elongates to first project a musician up out over and into the audience, then withdraws returning the player to their stage position … Wichita, Lawrence, Kansas City, MO/hydraulic arm into the audience/thrustin thru the show yea yea yea, Buckthrust! The Buckthruster is a noteworthy alternative to glitter and flash pots and an elaboration of it might be the singer who hovers over the crowd in a cherry picker.2

On one hand, the Buckthruster machine parodied the increasingly excessive stagecraft of 1970s rock shows, offering a small-scale technological interface between band and audience. But it also seems indebted to the automatic agricultural machinery prevalent in the Wichita area, such as the silo unloaders that locals might find near the grain elevators on 21st Street. The device seems both local and whimsically dystopian: a mechanical hand capable of moving band members in and out of place onstage and into the audience, and the promise that it will “[return] the player to their stage position” evoked corporate promises of technically precise and efficient employment of human capital. Around this time, Mark Pauline’s Survival Research Laboratories was employing “maniac machines with personalities” to San Francisco’s avant-garde scene, depicting “the graveyard of the Industrial Revolution.” The buckthruster, a local technology imagined to 2  “The Buckthrusters,” Talk Talk Tape Talk (Lawrence, 1981), 4. A mini-zine included in copies of the second Fresh Sounds From Middle America cassette. Though uncredited, Greg Cowper and Jim Skeel wrote the Buckthrusters’ entry according to an interview with Skeel, 11 November, 2019. Italics, spelling, and ellipses as in original.

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heave in Wichita, Lawrence, and Kansas City, was the continuity between the Industrial Revolution and late capitalism; rather than a machine that destroys, it is a machine capable of enforcing order. The Buckthrusters were also concerned with the destructive potential of machinery, an issue specific to another of Wichita’s industries. The trio’s initial jam session produced several mostly improvised tunes, two of which, “Wash Your Troubles Away” and “No More Kansas,” imagined the threat of nuclear annihilation. In the 1980s, many artists anxiously addressed the potential horror of nuclear destruction,3 and in Wichita it would be a local concern as well: McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita housed nuclear bombers and a small nuclear missile stockpile (Arkin and Norris, 16). The band explicitly and wryly articulated this in a concert flyer for a 1981 show at Hobo’s Pizza at Wichita State University that positioned the band staring into the camera, oblivious to the mushroom cloud exploding to their left. Despite the impending nuclear holocaust, the flyer implies, the band will move on—they will play that gig at the pizza place. The Buckthrusters’ recorded sound draws from the conventional musical grammar of rock, but Skeel’s electronics and Cowper’s unconventional instrumentation (his accordion plays a key and often unexpected role in their canon) tie the band sonically to some of the less outré work of Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle. They hew closest to industrial music on “Wash Your Troubles Away,”4 a purely electronic track that features synth pulses that would not sound out-of-place in the SPK show, and washes resembling a lo-fi Tangerine Dream, all underlying Stull’s aggressively plaintive lyric and a vocal that goes from a soft, spoken-word invocation, to Alan Vega-styled screams. The fragmented lyrics infer the massive loss of human life as well as the toxic atmosphere that figuratively caused this crisis and will literally linger afterward. “No More Kansas” is more musically and lyrically conventional, emphasizing the absurdity of nuclear war more than the tragedy of “Wash.” The song uses triplets that recall a 1950s swing record, pitting Stull’s guitar against Skeel’s and Cowper’s synth squiggles, recalling Devo singing blues. Lyrically it imagines the materiality of a post-nuclear-strike Kansas, listing what has been lost—animals, furniture, food, music, wind, and Kansas itself—possibly 3  According to Skeel, in these songs “nuclear holocaust was certainly the main theme from my perspective” (email interview, Nov. 2019). 4  The Buckthrusters’ songs can be found on their Fresh Sounds From Alien Hands collection on Bandcamp, which compiles their early studio, demo, and live songs.

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from the perspective of a final survivor. The final line of the song is interrupted by a plane taking off or a missile launching—or both—being very plausible that a nuclear bomber would take off from McConnell Airbase. In contrast to the millions of missing people evoked in “Wash,” this song focuses on the smaller pleasures lost (chips, cats, guitars), offering a more dryly cynical account of the aftermath of nuclear disaster. Most of all, Kansas itself is gone, leaving some survivors behind: “no one knows/What to do,/What to say/Where to smoke/Where to spit….” The song fits nicely with the matter-of-fact approach to nuclear war on the Hobo’s flyer, an acknowledgment that the modern machinery of destruction will not spare Kansas, an acceptance of the inevitable. This is the opposite approach to SPK’s use of physical and especially bodily destruction used as an aural form of shock therapy. While SPK uses industrial tropes to incur revolutionary change in individuals, The Buckthrusters offer a more Modernist sense of the Absurd, that even in the face of oblivion it remains important to figure out where to get cigarettes. The Buckthrusters’ imagined hydraulic device and very real nuclear anxiety, taken together with Burch’s localizing of SPK’s industrial aesthetic, together offer a useful framework for addressing how industrial and experimental artists in Kansan postpunk scenes of the 1980s (which inevitably overlapped with Kansas City, MO) used industrial music as a form of relating to and resisting a state that had become shorthand for American Values: while appropriating some of the philosophies, tropes, and/or performance strategies of SPK, Kansan industrial artists filtered these ideas through regional concerns. To understand how this approach manifested itself in a distinct industrial scene, the remainder of this chapter addresses three bands who reimagined Kansas and the Midwest through this framework: Short-Term Memory, a Buckthrusters spin-off whose minimal electronic sound further reimagines the region as a capitalist dystopia; LARD, whose enigmatic cassette releases reconstruct the Great Plains as audio sculpture; and Schloss Tegal, the most obvious disciples of SPK, whose disturbing soundscapes can be understood as an attempt to reproduce the ideology of the Off-the-Wall Hall performance. Through these bands, it’s clear that Kansas’ postpunk scene was an example of how industrial music and culture were localized throughout the United States in the 1980s.

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The Tragedy of Princess the Poodle: Short-Term Memory In Burch’s Last Attempt essay, Oblivion (Graeme Revell) recalled his time as a psychiatric nurse, discussing troubled patients who “had memory spans of no more than five minutes,” and thus had to be constantly retrained. This experience was central to Burch’s understanding of SPK’s philosophy: that individuals are “not really repressed by the state apparatus” but rather oppressed by themselves. Because “the mind is the center of revolutionary activity,” individuals must retrain their minds away from conventionality and toward this revolutionary, liberating impulse. The relationship of one’s short-term memory to societal oppression is further developed on the debut cassette from Kansas City band Short-Term Memory, Every Head Needs Cleaning (1983). They understand a capitalist apparatus as a legitimate oppressive force that subsumes the individual, whereas SPK could be more resigned to such forces; for example, they describe capitalism as “the most efficient system we’ve come up with so far to develop technology” (Vale and Juno, 100). The band’s song “Short-­ term Memory”  is structured around a memory test, told from the perspective of somebody (a doctor? researcher? boss?) testing a similarly undefined subject, telling the listener to repeat everything they hear. The test involves the recall of the unfortunate story of Sally, a good worker who experienced a horrible accident when she saw her poodle, Princess, “destroyed” by a bus. Poor Sally is defined by her job, a factory worker manufacturing consumer goods; poor Princess is a casualty of the traffic resulting from Sallys all over the city going to their jobs. The insert of Every Head features a drawing of Princess about to be destroyed and the band even named their label Silly Poodle Music; this accident looms large in the Short-Term Memory concept. But the test does not ask us to empathize with Sally or her poodle, or reflect on her situation at all, or why the rush hour is so bad. The subject is asked simply to recall it to test the “quality/Of short-term memory.” The lyrics are sung/spoken in vocalist/keyboardist Jon Paul’s “serious voice,” giving the words a stentorian, authoritative tone.5 The vocals are double tracked with a less authoritative, vaguely comic voice, providing a disorienting echo. The shock value of Princess’ fate, and any recall of her owner’s reaction, is lost in this strange exercise: who is administering the 5

 The singing credit is confirmed by Skeel (interview March 2021).

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test? Why do they need to test short-term memory? What are the stakes if the subject fails? The commanding voice does not leave an opportunity to ask questions; it demands obedience. Devoid of feeling, emotion, or empathy, “Short-term Memory” enacts how potentially traumatic events can be decontextualized and stripped of humanity in the service of some unnamed, unchallenged authority, the kind of Control Machines frequently evoked in Burroughs’ work (Reed, 28–9). The song “Short-term Memory” is representative of Short-Term Memory the band, whose work frequently focused on the problems raised by the mechanisms that increase efficiency within the system, often using minimalist music and lyrics to reimagine their Midwestern locale as a literal industrialized space, with humans reduced to capital. This, conceptually, recalls The Buckthrusters’ buckthruster device—not a surprise because the band was formed by ex-Buckthruster Jim Skeel, who continued his earlier band’s project of mutating popular music, but using an even more abstract, electronic, recognizably industrial musical approach. After the Buckthrusters broke up in 1981 Skeel—an employee of an insurance company, and thus quite familiar with the corporate lexicon that punctuates his bands’ lyrics—took a new position in Kansas City. After forming and disbanding a few short-lived bands, he began Short-Term Memory with two local musicians, Jonathan Paul and Kevin Dooley. Skeel’s projects always experimented with a wide array of genres, including rock, jazz, and ambient, but Short-Term Memory initially coalesced into a primarily electronic project that seems to have used “Wash Your Troubles Away” as a launching point, newly informed by the lush electronics of bands like Japan and Yellow Magic Orchestra. However, the group’s music was shaped more by their sense of experimentation than from any specific musical influences. Skeel had been interested in electronic instruments and over the next decade he honed his skills as a musician, producer, and soundman, recording at his home several local bands including the area’s most prominent postpunk outfit, The Embarrassment. By the time of their official formation on January 1, 1983, Skeel’s colleagues had acquired some equipment that would complement his recording arsenal. Dooley, particularly interested in producing a Kraftwerkian sound, had purchased a Jupiter 4 synthesizer and a TR-606 drum machine. Jon contributed a Mattel Synsonic Drum Machine—“which was essentially a toy” said Skeel, but one capable of some unique sounds. These machines were conceptually crucial to the band’s aesthetic, which Skeel describes as “explor[ing] the relationship between technology and the human condition.”

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Their recording process embodied this theme. As with The Buckthrusters, their early music and songs developed from improvisation, as well as a willingness to combine instruments, hooking different machines together to get weird sounds in efforts to reassert control over the machines—not always a successful effort. The band would connect their instruments through Skeel’s arpeggiator in unconventional ways, a refusal to remain bound by the instructions of machines—drum machines, for example, were played like an instrument, rather than simply using them to create programmed rhythms. Improvisation, rather than programming, provided the foundation for their songs. Toy instruments generated sounds next to professional-grade instruments, all recorded in Skeel’s dwelling, at the band’s pace. However, if the group’s process suggested a reclaiming of humanity from the sterilizing efficiencies of technology, the resulting songs painted a bleaker account of the industrialized human condition. Every Head Needs Cleaning was inspired by Rich’s Fresh Sounds cassette series and informed by the band’s own aggressively DIY approach. As such, the tape is very much in keeping with the aggressive independence of the tape trading cultures that were emerging as an underground force in the early 1980s (see Reed, 112–24). The bright red outer cover—the front decorated with what look like blurred red lights, of the sort you might see a computer console—distinguish it from, say, the bleak and grotesque images of physical and bodily decay common on cassettes like SPK’s The Last Attempt At Paradise. And indeed, musically Every Head is quite pleasant to listen to, its downcast minimal approach sometimes leavened by unexpectedly soulful moments or some proto-house music beats. The songs themselves, however, offer as bleak a perspective as anything found on Industrial Records. Despite the humanist, improvisational origins of the music and the physical tape’s DIY, cassette-culture independence, Every Head constantly reverts to the claim that technology increasingly chains us to, rather than liberates us from, late capitalism. This tension is very clear in the tape’s opening track, “The Corner,” based on a diner in Kansas City that the band frequented. On tape, this very real and human location is turned into uses the banality of a morning breakfast to offer an overture of its themes. Over a polite bed of midtempo electronic sounds, the lyrics offers a clinical, minimal account of a customer going through what sounds like an automated routine—“Morning/Coffee/Payment/Biscuits/Gravy/ cold sky”—in a predictable space: “Tables/Chairs/Our waitress/Menus/

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Napkins/The Wait.” The song serves as an introduction to the tape by presenting the social spaces of a corner diner and the pleasant routine of breakfast as a prelude to a modern worker’s day, human interactions re-imagined. Throughout the tape, human moments are transmutated into inhuman labor, a result of capitalist hegemony. “The Words” provided one of the tape’s oddly soulful moments, with Paul imitating a Prince-like seductive voice. He teases a subject by promising to share “two magic words” if they followed the speakers’ commands. After several minutes of robotic quiet storm anticipation and, apparently, compliance on the part of the subject, the words are revealed to be “portion control,” after which a voice explains the concept of supply and demand, and why rationing is necessary. The conventions of seductive soul music are used in the service of industry, to explain how limited access to goods is good for the subject. “Push Button Blues” is structurally similar to a blues song about a worker’s complaint that his fingers are so tired from pushing buttons that they no longer function. “Happy Industry III” featured a playful melody that made prominent use of Paul’s Mattel Synsonic and featuring Skeel’s “pretty voice” in the service of an agitprop soundtrack for the workers imagined throughout the tape: “This is a happy little song/ all about being free / this is a happy little song / In a capitalist society.” The singer is “happy to be working for free” because his “boss is nice to me / he’ll only cut wages at the first opportunity.” It is not clear how we are supposed to understand this track: is the singer demonstrating some resistance, sneaking complaints about his exploitation into a pleasant commercial jingle? Or has the singer simply accepted his position and is willing to attest in song to the happiness they feel working for such an efficient boss? The track closes the tape, leaving these interpretive possibilities unresolved, but considering the bleak portrayal of labor, technology, and capitalism throughout the record, it is difficult to be optimistic. Short-term Memory’s later records would revisit the themes (the title “Happy Industry” reoccurs throughout their oeuvre), while the band would shift to even more abstract approaches to genre, sometimes informed by The Buckthrusters’ early fusions of electronic and conventional instrumentation. Every Head Needs Cleaning is informed by the stylistic polyvocality of Wichita bands like The Buckthrusters rather than the Lawrence SPK show. However, more than these other bands Short-Term Memory foregrounds a version of industrial music rooted in the Midwest and reading some of the musical and ideological concerns of the genre into their music, where

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their counterparts start with industrial aesthetics and read them through regional concerns.

LARD: The Ambience of Everyday Life Nestled in a 1984 issue of the experimental music magazine Unsound is a minimal but striking half-page advertisement, of a blocky sans-serif black text on white space, advertising LARD.  Information was sparse: “C-60 Dolby” in the top center suggests a cassette; a Kansas City address to “R.R.” offers a place to send queries. Centered in the ad is the word “NO”—same font and size as the band’s name—and, in what look to be handwritten letters, a bracket contains the words “RHYTHMS” and “SYNTHS.” A later, slightly busier version of this ad makes this claim more explicit: “NO RHYTHM / NO SYNTHS.” The ads are intriguing and cryptic, resembling, to some extent, the generic packaging of off-­ brand items in a grocery store (think: the packaging of supermarket goods and beer in Repo Man), which is fitting visualization of the fatty baking ingredient that inspired the group’s name. But the insistence on the added detail about the lack of rhythms and synths, set off by handwritten text that emphasizes these claims, really offers no detail about what they might sound like, or if they are making music at all. The message perhaps parodies the “no synths” labels that had appeared on albums by Queen and Boston, emphasizing their refusal to use electronic instruments as evidence of the rockist authenticity of their music. The later ad spells out “R.R” as Religious Records, the band’s label. Together with the Kansas City address, we can put together a stereotypical midwestern coding here: baking pies at church, listening to homespun music. The fact that these ads appear in Unsound rather than, say, your weekly church bulletin suggests something different is underway. Unsound’s reviewer was perplexed by LARD’s music: “Not sure what to make of this one … has all the making of a generic industrial release but when it’s slapped on there’s a turgent [sic], swirling, banging sound that picks up into footsteps on gravel. This music is not like anything else” (DT, 53). The idea that it may be a “generic” release may come from the generic-looking ad, the completely white cassette casing, and perhaps the non-sequitur cover, a grayish drawing of a man playing bagpipes in a field captioned with LARD in white blocky san-serif text, the kind of vaguely noncommittal image that adorns a lot of cassette releases. But the sound itself is different—not a wall of noise, multi-media cut-ups, electronic

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sounds, or other conventional industrial moves, but ambient constructions  that often sound like field recordings punctuated with random banging. This willful confusion, engendered by a lack of explanation of the band’s creative philosophy and a refusal to contextualize the recordings themselves (after the first cassette, they do not even provide song titles) are key to LARD’s aesthetic. Regarding the ad, John Sandin explains that the band was “concerned about being mistaken for a typical experimental group. Almost all indie cassettes in the market we were looking at used rhythm machines and synths. We wanted to emphasize that our music was about sound without cultural (or countercultural) trappings.”6 DT’s review in Unsound included a statement by the band  explaining  that “LARD serves the same function as a light or a clock.” DT does not delve into this explanation, but it might offer a useful point of entry for understanding the band’s music: their tapes are ambient in the non-musical sense, drawing listeners into their world rather than alienating listeners by giving the sense that their sounds are surrounding them. As people tend to go about their day only noticing light sources and clocks when needed, LARD’s music fades into the ambience of the everyday, directing you to sounds that surround you even if you only pay attention to them fitfully. LARD were John Sandin and Steve Sweigart, Lawrence-based artists who began making recordings together in 1982. They listened to Burch’s and Schneider’s KJHK programs, which introduced them to groups like Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse, both of whom Sandin acknowledges as influences on their sound (though in the case of Whitehouse, he emphasizes that the influence is only “soundwise”; indeed, LARD entirely eschews the often graphic visual and auditory imagery associated with them and other contemporary industrial artists, particularly those associated with the cassette scene). Sandin attended the SPK show in Lawrence. Though Burch’s essay imagined and hoped that those who intended the show would collaborate in the exorcism of “normality,” Sandin expresses some reservations about the show, recalling that the slides of diseases and surgeries “made me nauseous when combined with the very loud pounding rhythms. Such images were seldom seen by the public then.”7 LARD’s music would be far from normal, but it would also indicate another way that industrial culture could inform Kansas’ indie scenes. They would 6 7

 Sandin, email interview, 20 February, 2020.  Ibid.

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separate the anti-musical approaches of industrial from the shock tactics endemic to the genre. Over the course of four cassettes—LARD (1983), Ball of LARD (1984), Dog of LARD (1983), and LARD Vol. 4 (1985)— the band would create what they call “difficult music” (no EBM dance beats or synthpop melodies either) that charted a middle course between extremity and banality. True to their ad’s claim, LARD primarily used turntable and tape manipulation to create their sounds, along with some conventional musical instruments (their equipment list for the 1983 LARD cassette includes a Gibson L6-S electric guitar, piano, washer and dryer, along with various microphones, amps, and tape decks). Where The Buckthrusters only imagined a device that would encapsulate their musical persona, LARD, drawing on both members’ art-school backgrounds, created them. They would make music with, in Sandin’s words, “crude experimental instruments of our own design,” that included a shop-vac taped to bamboo pan pipe whistles, home recordings found at thrift stores, and a balloon attached to a plastic horn and sounded underwater. But the key to their sound—what, according to Sandin, distinguished them from other contemporary experimental musicians—was their approach to tape editing. They used a TEAC 22–4 tape deck that allowed “very precise deletions,” with which they “used a subtractive process, ruthlessly removing bits of sound (both tiny and large) that didn’t contribute.”8 Thus treating sound literally as a sculptor approaching a block of stone, allowing no electronic rhythms and no vocals, LARD make music with noise in a manner that distinguishes themselves from the aural assault of Whitehouse and the electronic beats and pulses of SPK’s Auto-Da-Fé. LARD’s tapes contain no liner notes, essays, or much paratextual information beyond the title and the bizarre illustrations adorning the covers of each tape; it is very much left to the listener to decipher the world they have recorded. Their musical pieces share a similar pattern: long, simple drones, or repeated sounds that change key every ten minutes or so, overlaid with some sort of real or sampled percussion that accents the piece  without sustaining  any actual rhythm. Other noises—distorted voices, animal sounds, swooshing, wind-like effects, squeaks, electronic-­ sounding squiggles—pop in and out. Often the effect is hypnotic: the main portion of “Our New Home,” a named track on LARD, consists of 8  Ibid. An illustration and explanation of some of their instruments may be found in the June 1986 Experimental Musical Instruments, 16–17.

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a repeated five-second loop of a barking dog (that eventually drops out for a few measures, revealing a distorted human-sounding voice low in the mix), an electronic-sounding scratch effect, a cymbal (or some other metal object) hit, a looped snippet of melody, and some non-rhythmic bass plucking. In conjunction with the title, it is possible to build a visual image of the new home, a dog in the yard, distant voices in conversation, the clanging of kitchenware, soundtracked with the bass and melody floating like a pleasant breeze. This vaguely idyllic sonic structure ends, replaced by a noisier, repeated loop vaguely similar to early NON records, undermining any comforting ambience afforded by the loop. The track that follows, “Turtleneck,” cuts in with a loud burst of distortion—the closest LARD come to a Whitehouse-inspired noise wall—which sounds like the perspective of being trapped in a tornado or other wind event, an occasional metallic-sounding ping seemingly offering a beacon out of the storm. Similarly, percussive effects on the side-long “Church Of Daisies”—which are sometimes accompanied by a stray, unintelligible voice or dog bark— sound like somebody banging on a door trying to be heard over the loud, steady tones that dominate the track. In general, LARD’s music is not ambient of the relaxing sort, but ambient of the lived sort, the kind where—as on Side 1 of Ball of LARD—a pleasant flute flourish occasionally shares space with an out-of-tune guitar being smacked, all overlaying the kind of sounds you might hear when you open your front door early in the day. While quite often their music sounds like an ADR track to a missing film, occasionally their audio sculptures recall recognizable places. For example, Side 1 of 1985’s LARD Vol. 4 offers perhaps the most obvious domestic soundscape in the LARD canon, a 22-minute piece punctuated with obvious sounds of dishes being put in the sink and a television turning on, set to the occasional twang of a southern harp and dissonant piano notes, with what sounds like a metronome (or a ticking clock) in the background refusing to keep musical time. In all, the elements of a conventional home are heard in this piece but joined together with senses of dread and boredom. Taken as a whole, LARD may come across as a re-invention of industrial music, or perhaps a parody of new age music, reinterpreting the steady, clean synth tones that often characterized that genre with a more natural-sounding ambience, punctuated with unpredictable sounds. Apolitical, at least in contrast to the nuclear and economic anxiety of The Buckthrusters and Short-Term Memory, LARD reconceptualize their midwestern environments by stripping them  down to sound, giving

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listeners the opportunity to become sonic pioneers of the modern age, rebuilding upon the fragments that LARD leave behind.

Schloss Tegal: The Failed Exorcism If LARD pared the influences of SPK and Whitehouse down to their sonic approach, Schloss Tegal presented themselves as their heirs and successors. As early as 1979, Marc Burch and Richard Schneider emerged as the most active and vocal advocates for experimental/industrial music in the Lawrence indie scene. Both had featured these genres on their KJHK programs, they contributed articles and reviewed albums by groups such as Cabaret Voltaire, DAF, and Negativland for the local music zine Talk Talk, and, as discussed above, Burch wrote the liner notes for SPK’s  Fresh Sounds cassette. They began making music as well, first as members of the group Louis Lingg, whose SPK-inspired stage show sometimes featured a band member in a gas mask beating sheet metal with a chain; unsurprisingly they would open for like-minded groups like Hunting Lodge and Whitehouse. The duo would occasionally release cassettes through their Lawrence imprint Tegal Records, including a compilation Kollektiv (1982, featuring noise bands including LARD), a 1983 tape from experimental musician Maurizio Bianchi, and a posthumous cassette of music by Mark Wagner, supposedly a University of Kansas student who had committed suicide. They had also begun playing as Schloss Tegal, recording disturbing, noisy pieces indebted to early industrial music. Schloss Tegal’s activity was sporadic for much of the 1980s, releasing only one 7” EP on their own that decade, in 1989. By that time, the experimental energies of Kansas’ postpunk scene had substantially waned; The Buckthrusters were long gone; Short-Term Memory and LARD on hiatuses, Fresh Sounds Records, which had done so much to become the Great Plains’ nexus for industrial music, had gone mostly dormant by 1986, popping up to put their name on the occasional scene compilation. In Wichita, musicians such as John Eberly and Joel Sanderson produced an impressive catalogue of experimental music ranging from straightforward rock to Negativland-style cut-ups, but they could not garner much of a following at a time when, at least in America, industrial music had come to stand for aggressive, beat-driven electronic music—indeed by the late 1980s, Chicago’s Wax Trax! had become the Midwest’s industrial center, with Kansas an afterthought.

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In 1990 the Fresh Sounds name was revived for a compilation, Fresh Sounds from Middle America #5, a continuation of the series that began with the Fresh Sounds cassette compilations. Where those tapes emphasized the vitality of Kansan experimental music, by #5 only a long William S. Burroughs spoken-word piece and a Schloss Tegal track represent the genre. Otherwise, the anthology is a précis of the kinds of music college radio and commercial alternative radio were starting to favor: smart, catchy pop, rootsy AOR, and early grunge. Schloss Tegal uncomfortably stood out on this compilation, an echo of Kansas’ industrial heritage, literally surrounded (the 7th track on an 18-song comp) by a group of major-­ label-­ready bands. Even their track “Deviatus” is the most accessible song the group recorded, a beat-driven instrumental not far from the modes of industrial music that might find a place on college radio in 1990. Burch, in his Last Attempt At Paradise liner notes, hoped SPK’s Lawrence concert would be an exorcism that, through rituals involving noise and shock imagery, would cast off “the protective, often deceiving ring of normality” around those who attended. Fresh Sounds #5 demonstrated that this exorcism did not quite take. However, Schloss Tegal were ready to stand as the final bulwark against local normality. The band’s first proper LP, The Soul Extinguished (1991), may be understood as a response to this situation, its instrumental ambient noise, musically reminiscent of SPK’s earliest records, offering an aggressive counterpoint to Kansas’ contemporary alternative scene. (Visually reminiscent as well: the desiccated bodies decorating the covers of many of their releases strongly echo SPK.) From its opening track the record takes exorcism as a running theme, continuing the metaphor Burch expressed in his Last Attempt essay. Its title, “The Brides of Loudon,” refers to a seventeenth-century French witchcraft trial that involved the supposed demonic possession of a convent of nuns. A repeated sample from Ken Russell’s provocative film The Devils, based on this event, serves as a satanic mantra: “you will scream, you will blaspheme, you will no longer be responsible for your actions.” This sample is performative speech, expressed to possess a subject rather than exorcise a demon. Set to a bed of white noise punctuated by the occasional echo or scream, the track announced a kind of difficult music contrary to LARD’s spacious enigmas. Throughout the record, low, cacophonous echoes, ominous muffled voices, and evocative titles resist clear meaning, though a narrative of ritualized evil, and a human inability to entirely escape such evil, emerges. “Immunde Spiritus” takes its title from the Latin text of Catholic

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exorcism, a ritual apparently performed in the spoken text it samples, a response to the ritualized possession of “Brides of Loudon.” Accented with the occasional scream, presumably of the subject of the ritual. “Possession of the Dead” is centered around a recording of Jim Jones’ final speech urging the mass suicide at Jonestown, casting the cult leader as a demonic spirit possessing his followers, akin to the voice in “Brides of Loudon.” Other tracks on the record such as “The Visitation” (about alien visitation) and “Godvision” (about serial killer Joseph Kallinger) seem to employ Burch’s understanding of SPK’s strategy, using macabre and disturbing subject matter and imagery to shock listeners out of complacency. The album closes with “Maleficia,” a Latin term describing witchcraft done for the purpose of injury. The song is a relentless vortex of sound, high and low pitched with no identifiable voices escaping the mix, a slow two-beat measure suggesting some outline of a song that is swallowed up by the inchoate noise that envelops it. With this track the record concludes with the evil, the demons called forth on the opening track remaining viable. Taken on its own, Soul Extinguished may be understood as a sonic narrative of a failed exorcism. Ultimately the demons introduced on the record—evil seventeenth-century preachers, cult leaders, serial killers, antagonistic aliens—remain firmly in place, offering a final “Maleficia” before returning to the false security of normality. In general, this album, like many in the dark ambient and power electronic genres, might fairly be described as conveying what Simon Reynolds, in his account of Whitehouse, critiques as a “motivating idea that the extremes of existence are somehow more real or more valid than the middling areas” (Reynolds 240). But considering the record locally, as the product of two Kansas scenesters who had accrued subcultural capital as advocates for extreme music, and as a record recorded and self-released in Kansas, it could be understood as an attempt to re-enact SPK’s Off-the-Wall Hall show, offering another attempt at a shared exorcism, a communal purging of the normal in light of a musical scene that had, arguably, ceased to challenge the control machines of commercial music. If Kansas’ postpunk scenes are remembered at all today, it is for the proto-slacker indie rock of bands like The Embarrassment. But the state’s indie scenes worked in tandem with a small, eclectic industrial scene— indeed, two of the Embarrassment’s soundmen, Skeel and Jim Rossencutter,

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were also Buckthrusters.9 Similarly, SPK’s performance cannot be separated from these local scenes, having taken place in Lawrence’s most important indie venue, supported by an opening indie band from Lawrence, and the concert released on a local indie label. As the history of 1980s American indie music has over time become largely narrowed to a handful of guitar bands who paved the way for Nirvana, the Off-the-Wall show offers a necessary reminder that indie and industrial scenes frequently intertwined, and that the histories of these collaborations need to be recovered. This indie/industrial alliance is not unique to Lawrence or Wichita, but the industrial artists who emerged from these scenes reimagined these genres in ways informed by their particular circumstances. Though they never quite developed much of a national profile, all have continued to develop their aesthetics. Jim Skeel, still living in Kansas City, continues to  construct sonic heartland dystopias, most recently with his band Random Rex, a collection of experimental musicians spanning the Midwest. Both members of LARD left music to work full-time in the visual arts. Schloss Tegal developed a reputation as pioneers of Dark Ambient, particularly with their 1999 record Black Static Transmission; they remain an active band, though based in Prague rather than Lawrence. In his interview with Blur, Oblivion claims that the only way art can be an agent of change rather than “impotent” is “through infiltration, where you affect a few people, and they affect a few people … and so on.”10 Even if Marc Burch’s revolutionary hopes for the SPK show never came to fruition in Kansas, the event reveals the significant and lasting contributions of industrial culture to the local indie scenes, and their infiltration into American indie scenes in the 1980s.11

9  Rossencutter, along with his brother Britt, joined the band later in 1981. Skeel would also produce a number of songs for the Embarrassment that would be released on the first Fresh Sounds tape and their 1984 Retrospective cassette. 10  Blur 2, 13, 16. See also Burch’s Last Attempt essay, where he argues that SPK “are torn between the idea that art is impotent, and the idea that art can do something.” 11  Thanks to Tyler Arocha, Darren DeFrain, Mike Blur, Jim Rossencutter, John Sandin, Staci Stull, and Jim Skeel for their intellectual and material contributions to this essay. Many of the ideas here will be revisited in my forthcoming book, co-authored with DeFrain, No Choice But Action: A Critical History of Kansas Postpunk (University Press of Kansas, 2022).

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Works Cited Burroughs, William, ‘Interview’, Talk Talk 3.6 (1981), 18–23. Doug, Hitchcock. ‘Stretching the limit ...’, Lawrence Journal-World, 30 April 1982. Marc Burch, liner notes, The Last Attempt At Paradise. Fresh Sounds Records, Lawrence, KS 1983. Spinalli, Steve, Review: SPK The Last Attempt At Paradise cassette, MRR 2 (Sept/ Oct 1982). Qtd. http://maximumrocknroll.com/review/mrr-­2/the-­last-­ attempt-­at-­paradise/ (accessed 28 April 2021). Vale, V. and Juno, Andrea (eds.). RE/Search: Industrial Culture Handbook. San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 1983. WFMU. “S.P.K. in the USA Part Two/at the Russian Center, SF CA, April 17, 1982”, WFMU’s Beware of the Blog 2012, https://blog.wfmu.org/freefor m/2012/05/spk-­i n-­t he-­u sa-­p ar t-­t wo-­a t-­t he-­r ussian-­c enter-­s f-­ april-­17-­1982.html (Accessed 9 April 2021).

CHAPTER 8

Industrial Music and Inner Experience: Aural Abrasion as a Window to Post-Subjectivity Jay Fraser

Without doing violence to our inner selves, are we able to bear a negation that carries us to the farthest bounds of possibility? (Bataille, and Stoekl, Allan 1986, 24)

The fury of open sound, unrestrained by codified harmony or melodic direction, is unique and often unsettling. Humans are creatures largely of experience, who layer upon themselves like sediment and rock and, with time, meld together in much the same way to create a continuum of material which appears—at first glance—to be a concrete whole. As our lives are mediated by an enforced distance between perception and experience, these experiences are inevitably constructed out of some degree of presupposition: we are forever apart from that which we experience bodily. From this, there is always a yearning for something more than the physical, those experiences which seem to take place beyond the flesh, or, perhaps more accurately, despite the flesh.

J. Fraser (*) University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Whittaker, E. Potter (eds.), Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92462-1_8

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Going beyond the everyday experiences of life, Bataille opens important doors for us. Rather than accepting the distance between our physical and emotional lives, wherein the two may influence one another but are generally seen as being separated, Bataille dismisses the distinction and proposes a means for penetrating the chasm between the two through the introduction of transgressive activity—pain and suffering, yes, but also bound up within pleasure and excitement. More than simply the sum of parts, Bataille refers to the confluence of these two pathways as a variety of inner experience in the same manner as one might refer to a transcendent experience in a religious context. For Bataille, ‘man achieves his inner experience at the instant when bursting out of the chrysalis he feels that he is tearing himself’ in some manner, a process which allows the subject to go ‘beyond the objective awareness bounded by the walls of the chrysalis’ in some manner otherwise inaccessible to it (Bataille, and Stoekl, Allan 1986, p. 39). Through rupture—either as metaphor for social or communal shifts or, as discussed here, as literal damage—the quotidian restrictions of subjective experience may be cast aside for greater things. Putting Bataille’s formulation into action, this chapter will explore the affective results of aural pain on the body and the ability of this suffering to influence experience. When viewed in this manner, the pain that is induced by noise music—with its squealing static, abrasive white noise, and piercing shrieks—is not a negative experience. Rather, it is what Deleuze referred to as an unusual complication within desire itself (Deleuze 2013). Feeding one from the other, the delicate counterbalancing of the violence of sound with the experience of enjoyment is itself a transgression. However, the nature of this violation is not evident upon first approach, or at least the means by which this violation provides a sense of positivity is not. Could it be the case that Bataille’s chrysalis, from which one must escape to move beyond objective awareness, is also a conductor of sound which can therefore be deconstructed and eliminated via suitable vibrations? That, when stimulated by certain varieties of sound, the diaphanous membrane which holds the individual apart from the world can be pierced and there can be a form of unified experience in which all may partake as unique experiencers within the framework of a common bond? That, therefore, sound may be an avenue towards a unified version of the individual—one which overcomes the liberalism inherent in our modern understandings of the individual, passed down from Rousseau or Hobbes, and instead opens the doors of perception to an altogether more radical project.

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Pain, as felt physically, is a particularly bizarre sensation. This is not least because of its general rarity but also because of the self-disguising nature of pain. Most people are familiar with the experience of being cut or bruised and feeling absolutely nothing until noticing the injury visibly, whereas many other sensations—such as being kissed, for example—are evident the moment they occur, whether the body happened to be expecting this sensation or not. There appears to be, at least on some level, a direct connection between the physical experience of pain and the psychological phenomenon of the registration of an action upon the self in a way which many other sensations do not compare. Attempts have been made to explain this unique nature of pain throughout a number of fields, perhaps most notably evolutionary psychology and the biological sciences; however, many of these studies fail to access the function of pain on the underlying psychology of the sufferer. More useful here is Elaine Scarry’s concept of the body in pain which draws upon Bataille and others. Pain, when inflicted, has an erasing tendency, acting to ‘destroy the mental content and language of the person in pain’ (Scarry, 279). It is this method of erasure, the way in which pain seeks to ‘eliminate all that is not itself […] takes over all that is inside and outside, makes the two obscenely indistinguishable, […] displaces all else until it seems to become the single broad and omnipresent fact of existence’ (Scarry, 55) that allows it to become imperceptible until noticed; in order to replace all of perception, it must first be perceived. While Scarry’s work has been criticised for its omissions or peculiarities, the excessive nature of her argument is more suited to extreme conditions associated with noise. Physical suffering is a unique totality in this way, as what is being made total is non-existence: to be in pain is to undergo the abnegation of the self. There is an almost Brechtian quality to noise music, a sonic manifestation which does not seek to be presented as final, or as a polished product to be sold, but which instead is presented to the listener in the form of something incomplete, broken, and fractured. Far from the perfected production of modern pop music, or the honed edges of metal—or even the tired pastiche of today’s classic rock revival—noise music emerges from within the process of sound construction itself, the artefacts of production and sound amplified above the music itself to the point where the mechanics of sound are the aesthetic. There is a sense in which such an act removes the artificial wholeness from the recording itself; when one hears the clicking of the machines, the grinding of the wheels, the feedback of the recordings, one is reminded of the physical nature of the psychological

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experience. This is the case wherever these sounds are heard, but no approach to music makes this nature more prominent than noise.

The Abandonment of the Lyric And what he yearned for at that moment, vaguely but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, over-powering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words. Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word! (Milan Kundera, 90)

Scarry’s mention of the destroyed linguistic capacity of the person in pain is demonstrated aptly in the chosen sonic palette of noise music. While language is often present, the challenge of interpreting this language is vastly heightened. Heard through distorted screams, hidden beneath layers of faded and decaying sound, and coated in thick timbral sheets of textured sound, the spoken word—that is, the most obvious method of direct communication—is turned into a cryptic hunt for meaning situated among a shattered field of noises. If, as Calder Williams puts it, other forms of music such as black metal—a genre which shares noise music’s disdain for pure tonal vocal melodies—are war beyond all else (Calder Williams 2010), then noise music is unavoidably pestilential: there is a vast opening wherein what once lived has been infected; emotion, lyricism, language, overtaken by the furious underlying texture of the emotive drive itself. It is pure affect conveyed aurally. Undoubtedly, other genres—black metal, as previously mentioned, is one such example—which attempt to harness a similar libidinal drive. Despite the intense nature and weight of such styles, their insistence on generic trappings are themselves limitations which provide signification; the blast beats of black metal, the grinding guitar riffs, and the howling lyrics of classic black metal provide a framework for understanding and convey an astonishing variety of meaning. Noise music provides no such thing; all meaning is erased beneath the virus of sound, drowning out words but also common stylistic elements. Whatever melody or rhythm is introduced becomes quickly cannibalised by static and feedback screeches. Rather than becoming pointless and anaemic from this lack of stated motive, more value can be derived due to this ambiguity and undirected drive—in being unbothered by intent, there is a level of uniquely blissful chaos at work. It is in this that a listening may be able to ‘abandon [themselves] to peace, to the point of

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annihilation’ (Bataille 1996, 237). Far from the destruction of the linguistic capacity, the introduction of a zone of radical illegibility allows for fertile ground for the growth of the Other. The music of experimental outfit Prurient, one of the many outlets for the prolific artist Dominick Fernow, provides plenty of examples of the obscuring and obliviating nature of noise music, as with their 2015 album Frozen Niagara Falls, a lengthy ninety-minute epic of power electronics, drone, industrial sound, field recording, and acoustic balladry. This album contains plenty of tracks that demonstrate the affecting nature of noise. Opening with piercing squeals of electronic equipment—the artefacts of recording brought to the forefront—the album’s opening track, ‘Myth of Building Bridges’, contains melodic fragments. These synthesised electronic notes blossom as a support structure for the wanton distortions under a wash of crumbling, anchoring the listener to a familiar musical motif and tonality that is, nonetheless, disrupted by the never-ending lines of static which overpower the repetitive phrasing, so much so that at times the melodic content is lost beneath noise. This establishes the pattern of the track: the melody revitalises itself before being subjected again to the process of recording. By the time the track reaches three minutes into the ten-minute run time, the recurring melody has been strangled out no less than four times, and at no point has the screeching electronic overlay stopped. Rather, it morphs in pitch so as to become more or less noticeable at varying times, emerging through the rushing of the background music to invade the ear. There is no avoiding this continuous assault. Almost alive, the violent noise feeds from the melodic content that sits alongside and underneath it; the pain it inflicts upon the listener via aural assault subsides as it lowers in pitch only to return as it rises again. More than just noise, the effect requires a pattern that undulates like pain within the body itself. The sound feeds on healthy melodic content, with ‘each source of strength and delight’ is swallowed up by the glitching and failure of fidelity, becoming a means of recursive aural cannibalism, just as pain devours the very body which gives it sensation: ‘even the most small and benign of bodily acts becomes a form of agency’ (Scarry 1987, p.48) when in pain, and in the same way the ultimate settling of the track into a synthesised electronic quality, the pain fading as the electronic distortion coming to an end, which feels like an active catharsis. The sense of fulfilment given by predictable melodic resolutions and appealing aesthetic qualities is denied for the entirety of the track and in that sense so too is the sense of self, dissolved as it is within the warped experience of

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listening. Agency is only restored as the track fades, bringing with it a release from the experience of listening. Another example of the same phenomenon occurs within the album’s closing track, ‘Christ Among the Broken Glass’. Repetitive guitar motifs overlaid with harsh electronica and low, whispered speech that is so heavy with breath as to be near incomprehensible, the song delivers muttered messages bemoaning situations of pain, social misfortune; homelessness, rejection. At once the voice bemoans the suffering of those who have been left stranded within our society, yet the muffling of the prayer is consistently devoured and consumed by the overlaying electronic distortion. Following on from the writings of primitivists and anti-civilisationists such as John Zerzan, it is tempting to argue that the erasure of the lyrics—that is, the erasure of the language form itself—represents a movement away from representational forms of thought which alienate us from our own lived experience (Zerzan 2009). As early as Marx, the close connection between thought and language was underway, and by disconnecting the musical experience from spoken language one is also disconnected from conscious ideas (Marx 1972). This connection between language and comprehension is so well established in the cultural consciousness that the idea of inarticulation has become practically synonymous with mindlessness; the refusal to accept language paramount to the refusal to rise to consciousness (Culp 2016).The subject matter of the lyrics themselves would lend themselves easily towards this reading, as it is fundamentally impossible to assess issues of homelessness and social destitution as anything but failures of modern civilisation. The presence of an alienated sound—words denied the capacity for expressing meaning—playing the representative role of the alienated body, largely stripped of the ability to act in the same way that the muted lyrics are placed in nigh-inaudible mixes, a crude analogy for the elision of the body and mind into one. However, this would be to make a fundamental misreading of the effects of these sounds upon the body. Far from a rejection of the communicative principle, the harnessing of noise and electronic corruption to stray from comprehensible lyricism does not signify a rejection of communication but rather a rejection of purely humanoid, conscious representations. Directly working on the level of the libido, spurring on concepts and emotional drives rather than words or specific images, the creation of such sound-fields allows for the facsimile of pure communication—devoid of the ambiguity of language—which makes up for the lack of specificity by being incapable of untruth.

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While these tracks do contain lyrics, they are very nearly impossible to understand; delivered through thick layers of audio distortion and vocal fry, the low frequencies boosted intensely, the message that is being delivered is entirely incommunicable, drowned out by the medium through which they have been delivered. The purity of the signal is polluted by the interference of the medium itself, which creates an ironic interplay in which the efficacy of the libidinal drive’s transmission is dependent on a kind of autocannibalistic engagement between the message and the recipient. The sound eats the significance, the human is subsumed by the machinic, and any comprehensible message is put to work in the service of the machine itself; the body extends beyond the flesh of the artist and the listener fades into the object of the machine’s action. That is to say, the role of the transmitter and receiver both are erased in the conventional sense: no message is sent and no message is received—instead, both elements are made involved with the overall multi-personal body in which they are situated (Fisher 2018). To this extent, noise music shares traits with an altogether more atavistic form of musical tradition; that of the wordless scream. Unified by a collective instinct, it is difficult to imagine a sound more innately animal than the scream, and what is humanity if not simply the animal which orchestrates its screaming most thoroughly? The scream, the roar, the howl, or the wail all evoke similar raw but incommunicable feelings which reach beyond even our own understanding. Feelings which resist being placed into words precisely because words are related to ideas and these feelings do not exist within the realm of ideas to be comprehended, rather they are impacts upon our consciousness which appear from—where else—beyond the body. To be a body in pain, to be a sufferer, is to feel beyond language, and therefore also beyond formal consciousness. It is to scream, and, rather than the scream of the victim which is ‘made the property of the torturer’ (Scarry, 49), to incorporate the scream into music is to reach into a guttural and primal aspect of the self which goes beyond that consciousness which is experienced as the human and towards the underlying and communal animal tendency. Industrialism and noise simply extends this animal suffering into the realm of the electronic. To become part of the multi-personal body asserted by Fisher, to share in experience both with the programmer of the machine and the machine as one is to feel the feedback squeals and the static roars become one’s own, and the exhaustion and pain that one feels as these sounds dig into oneself become inseparable from exploring beyond the limitations of the mind. It

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is interesting that one of the most significant criticisms of Scarry’s work comes in readings which identify the ghost of a Cartesian division between mind and body (Dawney and Huzar 2019). Certainly, the discussion of affects upon the body as distinct from affects of the mind lends credence to this at times, but the core of Scarry’s work assumes a lossless interfacing between the two such that in her most powerful moments, this dualism is thrown aside in favour of a more immanent framework. There are those who would justifiably question the validity of exploring the human via technological means, echoing Zerzan’s contemplation that just as technological industrialism brought in mechanical interchangeability, it also introduced, or at least promoted, a significant popularisation of the interchangeability of people (Zerzan 2013). This reduction of the human to simply a component in the signal chain of a musical transmission appears to emphasise this concern; if the human is merely a singular piece in the mechanistic relationship between sound source and reception, there is a degree to which the function of the human is literally interchangeable—anyone could potentially step in and fulfil the same role as long as they are capable of hearing and feeling pain. Again, however, while this concern certainly holds some weight it does not go far enough. Noticing the reduction of human to the role of the tool in industrialism is valuable, however the applicability of such an analogy within the realm of music only goes so far; to return to Prurient’s Frozen Niagara Falls, unlike the death march of endless capital the music ends. Bataille’s ruptured chrysalis does not result in the entry into another chrysalis, or the death of the organism. Instead, this procession through the liminal moment of dissolved time and extended animalism allows the listener to exit rejuvenated, as having undergone a vital catharsis; the moment of the dying self and re-absorbance into animal incoherence is at once an overcoming and an undergoing; the sound lays the tracks for an emergence through pain into a greater connection to the emotional self because that splitting aural pain that grinds against the self emerges at once from the self and from the Other as shared suffering.

Arrhythmia Once again, what we’re dealing with is: a consubstantial relationship between power and rhythm. Before anything else, the first thing that power imposes is a rhythm (to everything: a rhythm of life, of time, of thought, of speech). (Barthes, 35)

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Routine and regularity are indispensable parts of the day-to-day functioning of power. Foucault¸ famously, analogised much of modern society to the prison system, drawing lines of reference between the scheduling and structure of various social structures, be that prisons and schools, or mental hospitals, or any number of other such things (Foucault 2012). In such systems, control is the desire of power being enacted upon the world, and is easiest to see when there is a structure to be followed. Of course, one consequence of rhythm is a sense of regularity to life, but also the necessary smothering of unpredictability and irregularity: certain structures must be imposed and that creates an inherent destruction of unstructured time and spontaneous action. Spontaneous action requires a degree of unbounded space, whether physical or conceptual, in which anything that could happen is free to do so; automatic writing, for example, acts as one such avenue in which the unguided subconscious can be allowed to engage in unmediated behaviour to produce a work. If it is the role of art to create exceptions from the norm, to ‘transcend its social determination’ (Marcuse, 6), and to allow for the emancipation of the ‘submerged masses’ (Bataille 1996, 100), then it is incumbent upon musicians to experiment with providing avenues for unmediated sound in the same way that the automatic writer provides an avenue for unmediated language. That is, to behave in such a way that music is created precisely by the rupturing of social expectation. Musicians have, of course, been experimenting with this for a long time and in contemporary electronic music the mainstream recognition of such techniques goes back at least as far as the 1960s; guitar amplification using fuzz and distortion allowed guitarists such as Hendrix and Page to allow the feedback signals of their rigs to overtake the musical quality of the notes themselves and create piercing saturation with over-sustained overtones which faded in and out of harmonic resonance with the underlying music. However, even such early adventures in non-melodic tones were exceptions from the norm and were not themselves the focus of the music for popular compositions. Nor, for that matter, were such tones allowed to continue uninterrupted for major periods of time. Even at this time, the tonal qualities of what would later become noise music were being explored but the demand for musical rhythm remained prominent. It was in the area of avant garde—for example Stockhausen’s Kontakte (1958–1960)—that electronic sound as noise was first explored, causing discomfort among those who expected tonality.

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While a great deal of industrial or noise music is made by focusing on the quality and timbre of sounds while otherwise obeying—or at least referencing—typical examples of musical rhythm, several sub-categories of the genre have strayed farther in the opposite direction. Referring to Barthes’ quote about the desire of power for a strict rhythmic structure, noise musicians have often lost some degree of focus on the harsh audiations of distortion and static and have instead wandered into the world of the arhythmic. Although it may seem unusual to identify some of this music—which can, at times, sound much less intimidating than traditional noise—with the genre discussed previously, there is nonetheless a connection. Often maintaining relatively sedate tone qualities in comparison with the more overtly abrasive nature of noise proper, musical approaches such as dark ambient have evolved from the underlying principles of noise to provide another approach to a similar concept. The focus here, rather than in defying norms of tone, lies in the deformation of time—most notably, rhythm. Death Cube K, the dark ambient moniker of prolific recording artist and guitarist Buckethead (real name Brian Carroll), is one such performer in this style. His 1997 album Disembodied—released under the Death Cube name so as to circumvent legal obligations as Buckethead—strays far from conventional song structures, and while the track listing presents five distinct songs it is entirely possible to listen to the entire project without ever truly registering a shift from one to the next. Track lengths vary between four and fifteen minutes, and while this is interesting to note it is almost immaterial with regard to the experience of listening to this music in practice; the lack of consistent rhythm—the album credits musicians on the guitar, organ, bass, ‘ambient nightmare machete’, and ‘stretching rake’, but no percussion of any kind—allows the meandering and irregular melodies and seething synthetic sounds to roll with an oceanic momentum. So powerful is this sensation that the divisions between tracks on albums such as Disembodied effectively fade into non-existence: the album ostensibly contains five different tunes and yet, aside from dips in volume, there is no focus on dividing these tracks in any meaningful way. They do not reach typical peaks nor do they settle anywhere low; one almost feels the sense that they do not end at all—or even truly begin. Instead, they emerge for a time and then fade away again afterwards at their own leisure with seemingly no motivation. Rejecting the call for musical purpose, dark ambient genres often embrace the will of the music itself which pulls the listener, as part of that multiple body constructed so commonly in noise,

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along with it. There is a sense of ego death here, as some ceases to be subject and becomes instead both object and mechanism; it is by the body being acted upon that this experience can be transmitted into consciousness, and the mind can be shifted from the realm of ordinary subjectivity into occupying the position of the heterogenous individual. Unconscious but still active, a positive rejection of homogeneity (Bataille 1996) thus allows a listener to experience being both acted upon and also becoming an actor insomuch as they constitute their own experience and construct it amongst a milieu of simultaneously detached consciousnesses. This is not the underlying but inaccessible subconscious posited by psychoanalysis, rather, it allows for the active fostering of connections between those who experience this state. It is by no means a coincidence that Bataille describes this heterogeneity as being not formless, but diffuse, split-off (Bataille 1996, 140) in the same way that Deleuze describes the schizoanalytic subconscious: multiple, changing, and constantly experimenting with its form—this unconscious is constructed (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 14). Perhaps the most obvious and powerful demonstration of this effect lies between the tracks ‘Embalmed’ and ‘Terror Tram’, the second and third of the album. A deep, thrumming synthesiser fades into nothing before a crackling, wheezing electronic signal rises from those same depths. Sharp and metallic, sharing aural space with the sound of settling ships and whirring servers, there is a clattering and a plodding which fade in and out of the background. A blizzard of distortion and white noise settles over these irregular and arhythmic sounds, with the tell-tale roar for harmonic dissonance pulling on what sounds like rushing winds. Contextualised within music, rhythm is often simply power as applied to the temporal realm, the desire for some order and control imposed from without. Noise, however, is one of the few genres which are free to abandon time in such strictly delineated fashion. This kind of undistinguished pattern might be called a pure music—perhaps best described as sculpted time—the unbroken material wholly contiguous and yet forming abstract shapes as sounds and structures tumble over one another. Music which refuses to differentiate itself in conventional rhythmic fashion such as this manages to do for the aural realm what the movement of the modernists did to the literary, evoking through the listening experience the all-encompassing halo effect that Woolf described as truly embodying life (Woolf 2008). Disembodied is an example which leans heavily upon the disorientating affectations that the avoidance of strict and standard rhythm

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can have, and as a result provides a clear example; however, it is far from the only album to use these techniques. Musicians such as King Crimson, Erik Satie, and a range of indigenous musicians have made great use of this asynchronous approach to greater and lesser extents. Approaching music from such a framework always places a musician in conflict with the body, which—being subject to the compulsive power of life—is embroiled within ongoing sequences of rhythms. The peristalsis of the digestive system, the beating of the heart, the inflation and deflation of the lungs—all of these avenues of existence are ones in which regularity and timing is key. Leaning away from what might be called the intrinsic pattern of life—a rhythmic pattern, beyond all else—music is free to stray from the lines in a manner not dissimilar to surrealist or Dadaist art works which preceded the noise movement in the twentieth century, blurring the lines between comprehensible experience and nonsense. Nonsense, however, has a sense of its own: it is only by refusing the accept the innate limitations offered to us by human understanding that one can be free to move beyond it, and the sense of disorientation or confusion rendered upon a listener by abandoning classically accepted time is one such way of embracing an experience far outside of what regular life demands.

The Advent of the Aural Posthuman In so far as art stretches the boundaries of representation to the utmost, it reaches the limits of life itself and thus confronts the horizon of death. To this effect, art is linked to death as the experience of limits […]. (Braidotti, 107)

Ultimately, the power of these choices which are made frequently within the world of music—but nowhere more frequently than in industrial music and the numerous sub-genres which have evolved from the same core; sprung from the same chrysalis—is to eliminate the experience of subjectivity. As the anchoring points of human experience are erased from the canvas that people raised in the Western musical tradition expect (and as the twenty-first century continues to march forward, this is an increasingly large portion of those on the planet) are erased, so too are the common reference points for language and communication. The music continues to play but the elements we recognise, whether melodic or rhythmic, timbral or temporal, continue to fade into an obscurity which leaves us beyond words and beyond comprehension. This loosening of understanding falls

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upon us as a weight, and we move closer and closer towards the incomprehensibility that death itself brings. Irony abounds here. As the signification with which we are all expected to be familiar is stripped away to be replaced by an oceanic mass of purely libidinal sound and purely abrasive tone, we find ourselves not unmoored from a sense of understanding but rather, more connected. Undeniably, this relates to Fisher’s discussions of the de-coupling of the self which have been mentioned previously. More than this, however, noise music does not solely introduce us to some Tetsuo: The Iron Man situation, wherein the listener is interred within the metallic agitation of the sonic assemblage with the sound-sources themselves; rather, it inculcates us in an all-­ encompassing experience of fading consciousness. It introduces us to the strange mirror of absolute silence. Noise music, therefore, is that absolute sonic death which lays beyond comprehensible melody. This sound is not the empty, solemn death of silence but rather the self-annihilating uproar of life in that moment before it fades; it is the realisation of death in which activity does not fade but rather picks up, the activation of life at the peak as it greets death upon the threshold. It becomes clear, therefore, that the experience of the self being subsumed into the parade of static and noise is not merely the uncomfortable experience of sound but rather the eruption of the self into a shared universal experience which is unavoidable. Moments such as this do not diminish the process of listening to this music, nor do they elevate it. They do, however, offer it a possibility that many other forms of music are not able to access. As Todd May writes, part of being human is being that creature which knows—without doubt or reservation—that it will die, that ‘know it throughout [their] lives, even when [they] are not in imminent danger’ (May 2009). Embracing the unique presentations of industrial and noise music is to embrace this knowledge, and in the process of erasing the many structures of expected sound we are able to return to life—and to music—in acknowledgement of the innate emptiness in that human experience, not so as to suffer in nihilistic despair but such that we may cast off these inessential trappings and, as Marx would have it, ‘gather the living flower’ (Marx, 132).

Works Cited Bataille, Georges, trans. Dalwood, Mary (1986). Erotism: Death and Sensuality. (San Francisco: City Lights Books.

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Bataille, Georges, trans. Dalwood, Mary. trans. Stoekl, Allan, et al. (1996). Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Culp, Andrew. Dark Deleuze. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Dawney, Leila, and Huzar, Timothy J. ‘Introduction: The Legacies and Limits of The Body in Pain’, Body & Society, 25.3 (2019), pp. 3–21. https://doi.org/1 0.1177/1357034X19857133. Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. B. Massumi. London: The Athlone Press, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles. Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty. Trans. McNeil, Jean. New York: Zone Books, 2013. Fisher, Mark. Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-­ Fiction. New York: Exmilitary Press, 2018. Foucault, Michel, trans. Sheridan, Alan. Discipline and Punish. New  York: Vintage, 2012. Marx, Karl, trans. McLellan, David. The Grundrisse. New  York: Harper & Row, 1972. May, Todd. Death. Stocksfield: Acumen, 2009. Scarry, Elaine. The Body In Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York City: Oxford University Press, 1987. Williams, Evan Calder. Combined and Uneven Apocalypse. Winchester, Zero Books, 2010. Woolf, Virginia, ed. Bradshaw, David. Selected Essays. USA: Oxford University Press, 2008. Zerzan, John. ‘Industrialism and its discontents’. Fifth Estate. #389. Summer, 2013. pp. 19–24. Zerzan, John. “Language: Origin and Meaning.” The Anarchist Library, 11 Feb. 2009, http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/john-­zerzan-­language-­origin-­ and-­meaning.

CHAPTER 9

The Occultural Side of Industrial: From Its Origins to Industrial Black Metal M. Cecilia Marchetto Santorun

The occult has been present in industrial music since COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle  (TG). P-Orridge regarded Edwardian artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare as a predecessor, and Chaos magic, an esoteric system derived from Spare, as a source of inspiration for his occult order Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (Partridge 2014: 195–197). Genres like ritual industrial can be understood as standing in opposition to commodification, searching for a dark re-enchantment. Some forms of industrial are intended to break the spell of the ‘simulacrum’ (Attali,  24) of capitalist fantasy, its bad enchantment. If music is priestcraft, industrial is (very consciously) an iconoclastic chaos magic. For Attali, the ritual function of music was to channel violence, murder being its ultimate form. As such, the practice of human sacrifice is substituted by a Carnival, a festival of noise (24). Remnants of this function seem to be explicit in industrial both in acoustic harshness and in lyrical aggression. In extreme metal, which, as we will see, received influence

M. C. Marchetto Santorun (*) Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Whittaker, E. Potter (eds.), Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92462-1_9

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from industrial, suicide and murder became literal in many tragic cases such as the suicide of Per ‘Dead’ Ohlin, first vocalist of Mayhem, while the first vocalist for Laibach, Tomaž Hostnik, committed ritual suicide by hanging himself from a hayrack—a structure replete with nationalist meanings for Slovenians—in 1982. Turning to the occult or the esoteric for the purposes of this chapter, I will use Christopher Partridge’s notions of occulture, esoterrorism (both terms originally coined by Genesis P-Orridge) and industrial Paganism. Partridge’s concept of occulture is based on the characteristics of mystical religions (2004: 62), which are defined as having ‘no desire for organized fellowship’, their focus being rather ‘freedom for interchange of ideas, a pure fellowship of thought’ (Troeltsch, 1931, cited in Partridge, 2004: 62). They are usually ‘self-oriented, eclectic and epistemologically individualistic—religious authority is internalized’ (62). Due to this rejection of institutionalisation, they appeared only as ‘a foreshadowing of coming developments’ (62). What Attali considers a prophetic nature of music finds a correlate in the prophetic nature of mystical religions, and therefore, as we will see, of occulture. Although some occultural groups eventually become organised, the general tendency for these is to remain loose (Partridge, 2004: 67). Unlike ‘new age’, the term ‘occulture’ includes spiritual beliefs and practices that are concealed, countercultural and sometimes even marginal, beyond the bourgeois ideology that often underlies new age ideas (68, 78). The occult often refers to practices usually encompassed by the umbrella term ‘Western Mystery/Esoteric Tradition’ (69): Gnosticism, Stoicism, Hermeticism, neo-Pythagoreanism and the ideas derived from the Corpus Hermeticum, Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia (1533), Giordano Bruno, nineteenth-century secret societies promoting ‘arcane, salvific knowledge’ under the names of gnosis and theosophia, occult interpretations of the Kabbalah, initiatory ritualism and the study of John Dee’s Enochian system (69). Gnosis is often concealed behind a code or symbolism that the adept needs to master. In occulture, these more traditional aspects are combined with ‘Eastern spirituality, Paganism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, alternative science and medicine, popular psychology (usually Jungian), and … the paranormal’ (70). Many ideas and practices of occulture have today become accepted and integrated in mainstream contexts (70). More than a single worldview, occulture is ‘a reservoir of ideas, beliefs, practices, and symbols’ (84). Modern Pagans often reject their identification with new age (78), among other reasons because

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new age is sometimes associated with a naïve vision of the world where there is only good. From the point of view of the political economy of music, the occult can be dissonance. The two most important characteristics of occulture can be boiled down to eclecticism and the sacralisation of the self. In occulture, these take forms heavily influenced by Romanticism: the idea that reality can be understood merely through reason alone is questioned, and intuition and imagination are defended. Only imagination can reconcile the apparent contradictions inherent in accessing ‘the infinite through the finite, (…) the metaphysical within the physical, (…) the spiritual flowing through the material’ (72). As with Romanticism, there is a conception of the universe as living and creative, and there is confidence in the individual as capable of experiencing it without the mediation of religious authorities (72). This allows the possibility to create one’s own formulas according to background, practical needs or emotional connection (70–71). This chapter will show how these characteristics of occulture are present in the lyrics and aesthetics of industrial and related genres and musicians. A history of industrial occulture would begin with COUM Transmissions, Genesis P-Orridge, TG and the influence of William S.  Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Simon Reynolds situates the origin of COUM Transmissions and TG in the last throes of psychedelic rock (2669–2677). P-Orridge’s diverse endeavours are also inspired on Burroughs’s work, in particular the technique of cut-up, a literary or sound collage which Burroughs in turn borrowed from Brion Gysin. Burroughs’s theme of control, the ‘all-pervasive power reaching inside the fibers of our consciousness’ (Reynolds, 2685) determined the development of this technique as a means to escape control (Vecchio, 3) through a process of ‘downward metamorphosis’: the material (linguistic or musical), used in ways it was not intended to be used, loses its controlling power (Skerl, 1985, cited in Vecchio, 10–11). Downward metamorphosis is also a trope in the content. In ‘The Mayan Caper’, a chapter from The Soft Machine, a Mayan priest transforms into a crab-like creature during sexual intercourse; in the books, the transformation of human beings via control into flesh or gelatinous mass, ‘undifferentiated tissue’ (Vecchio, 35–36), is a frequent image. A good lyrical example of such transformation is P-Orridge’s 2017 song, ‘Six Six Sixties’ in which injured flesh and wasted limbs blur and dissolve. Part of the song further echoes Burroughsian themes of control through images (being consumed, rather

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than consuming them) and verbal downward metamorphosis in the shrinking of text from more complex structures to a monosyllable. Industrial was based on a musical paradigm Attali called ‘composition’. In composition, musicians do not need to study, but rather transmit their ideas orally, and create music predominantly through improvisation (Attali, 140). Although Attali was principally concerned with jazz, many of his ideas are particularly suitable for industrial music, in which the performer often does not even use conventional instruments; as Attali argued, conventional instruments are designed to play music obeying existing codes and make it difficult to find anything beyond (141). Through musical training, bodily expression is controlled, and the composer is empowered or stripped of the very status of musician according to their capacity to adhere to the discipline. P-Orridge in a similar vein declared that ‘the future of music lies in nonmusicians’ (P-Orridge, no date, cited in Reynolds, 2693) and ‘You can’t have anarchy and have music’ (1977, cited in Reynolds, 2755), perhaps realising, like Attali, that music reproduces existent hierarchies of power. Only non-music—noise—could provide the dissonance that challenges power. P-Orridge’s recordings contain symbolic ritual murder in COUM’s bloodletting and violent actions, but also in the themes of TG’s songs and artwork. TG’s next album, Heathen Earth (1980), explored a shamanistic and magical view of music (Reynolds 2871). The elements that evoke it are the droning guitars combined with repetitive, hypnotic rhythm samples (see Partridge’s comments on dub in 2004: 176–177). ‘Painless Childbirth’ suggests the album is a journey from control to wakefulness with the sample of a narrator guiding the listener out of hypnosis. This new direction of the band would culminate in the creation of an esoteric order and a new band to represent this new, more occultural and technopagan approach. In 1981, P-Orridge created Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, or TOPY. It was designed as a ‘worldwide network to help encourage and support the development of multi-dimensional individuals’ (Neal, 1991, cited in Partridge 2004, 150). Together with P-Orridge, David Tibet and Jhonn Balance were its founding members (Partridge 2014: 202). P-Orridge created the band Psychic TV as a mouthpiece for TOPY, which practised a form of ‘technopaganism’, a neo-gnostic spirituality that focuses on the mind and its possibilities of freedom in cyberspace (see Partridge 2005: 155–159). Unlike the nostalgic hippie neopaganism from where it sprang, it does not look back to a pastoral nature religion; instead, industrial Paganism reacts to urban social oppression by subverting its

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hierarchies (Partridge 2014: 204–205). TOPY expected the members to develop their own answers to existential questions, and if they used any established teachings, they were advised to modify them and make them their own, thus generating a ‘functional system of realizing their desires’ (160). Psychic TV was a ‘modern alchemical weapon’ (P-Orridge, 1988, cited in Partridge, 2014: 203) to reappropriate the power of religion to encode initiatory knowledge behind a simpler messianism, and that of television to ‘empower and entrance thee [sic.] viewer’ (203). Psychic TV’s shows contained occult symbols designed for specific purposes called sigils, originally developed by Spare. Another magico-religious aspect was the use of instruments such as the kangling, a Tibetan thighbone trumpet (203) that David Tibet played. Tibet found it interesting because it was used, according to him, in graveyard ceremonies to cleanse the soul from evil and vanquish the fear of death (see Tibet, 1987, cited in Partridge, 2014: 203–204). The song ‘Message from the Temple’ contains TOPY’s occultural principles: ‘Thee Temple strives to end personal laziness and to engender discipline. To focus thee Will on one’s true desires’ (P-Orridge, 1982). The idea of the Will derives from Crowley’s concept of Will, individual purpose in accordance with a universal will, often going beyond worldly institutions and conventions. Individuals must release themselves from outer control and seek to exert their own control. This reflection on one’s desires leads to transformation. To achieve it, the message tells us that the listener must get closer to and integrate with their real Self so that the external aspects of ‘L-if-E’ will fall into place. Psychic TV was always more overtly occultural than TG, and its anti-control project starts to de-­ emphasise the violent and disturbing imagery in favour of more utopian ideas about desire and liberation. While TOPY and Psychic TV pursued these notions and practices of technopaganism, the Canadian industrial band Skinny Puppy had made close friendships with the members of TG. They could be considered heirs of P-Orridge’s esoterrorism. Some of Skinny Puppy’s songs contain lyrical references to The Process, a 1960s and 1970s cult originated in Britain. The influence of the Process in industrial begins with P-Orridge’s encounter with a Processian during a trip to London. He was impressed by everything they represented: ‘Anyone able to shatter society’s complacency on such a deep level resonated with my own compulsive urge to strip away imposed behavioral patterns’ (P-Orridge, 2009: 195). An ex-Processian, Timothy Wyllie, explains that the leaders and inner circle repurposed

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Scientology methods to tease out from people the defence mechanisms with which they unconsciously sabotaged the realisation of their deepest desires (27–28). Processians focused on the idea of the ‘unification of opposites’ (52), expressed as the unity of Christ and Satan (64). Jesus’s teaching ‘Love your enemy’ was interpreted as an injunction to love Satan (52). The Process promoted apocalyptic messages of death and disaster (50), believing that the corruption of the world should end. This was the spirit of proclamations such as Humanity is the Devil (Robert de Grimston, 1968, cited in Wyllie, 54), referenced in Skinny Puppy’s video to ‘Candle’. Skinny Puppy’s references to the Process appear after the death of ex-­ band member Dwayne Goettel (Reed, 289–291), when Cevin Key and Dave “Rave” Ogilvie started recording The Process (1995). P-Orridge helped with the production and contributed with many concepts, such as the title and the online community dedicated to the album (Reed, 291). The track ‘Process’ develops the topic of freedom and escape from control, exploring this as a means to individual freedom and healing the ‘wound of separation’, as well as subverting mass control and information wars. Reed thinks that Skinny Puppy’s adoption of these tropes might remain just a tribute to the already established concepts of industrial rather than an authentic source of ‘revelatory freedom’ (292). ‘Candle’, apart from featuring the symbol of the Process Church in its video, also includes interesting cut-up lyrics that are clearly intended to demonstrate the Process in practice. The track describes a journey away from the beliefs of a ‘disturbed society’ to a questioning attitude that tries and discards beliefs. The personal search for spiritual power is unfinished, defined by struggle with the almost unassailable idea of God: despite his ‘Thelemic gestures’ (in reference to Thelema, Crowley’s religion of Desire), the individual stays alienated, falling into conformity and silence. ‘Curcible’ [sic] takes from the Process Church the criticism of conventional religious morality and integration of the diabolic. Ogre sings ‘Good and evil does not exist’, and ‘All is not so black and white’, rejecting ‘weak bland righteousness’ and the ‘slaves reward’ (Skinny Puppy, 1996) of conformity. The song plays upon the distortions of language practised in cutup and juxtaposes elements that seem unrelated, prompting new ­ associations. In ‘Confessions alter bugger faith / Moisten gland insert and taste’, the first line can be read both as a full sentence, either with ‘alter’ or with ‘bugger’ as a verb, thus generating two different meanings, and as two noun phrases (‘Confessions altar’ and ‘bugger faith’), thus

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generating a third. Following the first possibility, confession appears as redemption because it alters a false faith; in the second, the moralism of confession perverts or ruins (‘bugger[s]’) faith, and in the third, confession is proclaimed a false belief. The juxtaposition with ‘Moisten gland insert and taste’ takes us back to Burroughs, suggesting conventional religion degrades the subject through downward metamorphosis, but the track brings this technique back upon religious ideology. The line also emphasises the organicism of the human body as machine-like, anatomisation and the bizarre sexual imagery employed by Burroughs. Skinny Puppy’s use of Processian themes reflects a critical, but pessimistic and nihilistic attitude, more akin to TG’s cut-up disturbing spoken word than to the ironic but occasionally utopian and (consciously) innocent tone of Psychic TV. While Skinny Puppy continued the harder, more abrasive edge of the industrial music of TG, other projects that span out in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Industrial Records label were often more tangential to the extreme forms pioneered by TG. Current 93 (C93), formed by P-Orridge and David Tibet in 1982, owes its early inspiration to Crowley and Thelema, the name being taken from the number of the ‘current’, or atemporal spiritual influx Crowley believed he was channelling. Tibet was also involved with another order that claimed to follow Crowley’s current, the ‘Typhonian’ Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), led by Kenneth Grant (Keenan, 36). Tibet entered both orders around 1982, but soon disliked the hierarchy (42). He was a member of Psychic TV, and a follower of the utopian project of TOPY to dismantle conventional morality to help individuals find their true desires (43). Together with Balance and P-Orridge, they examined cult dynamics and techniques to reutilise them for emancipatory goals, but hierarchies and blind following started to emerge in their own group (43). Despite having been a Thelemite and member of the OTO (Crowley’s Thelemic order), Tibet eventually came to identify as a Christian. The first recording of C93 was an invocation of Malkunofath (45), the tunnel between two of the Qlipphoth or spheres at the reverse of the Tree of Life of the Kabbalistic Sephirot (45). Current 93’s first 12″ release, LAShTAL (1982), was named after a term Crowley coined to designate various symbolic meanings, including actions delivered ‘without lust of result’ (Fra. Faustus, On Love and Love), and therefore, more magically potent than those made difficult by the very anxiety to achieve a purpose. The self-titled track is an improvised dark ambient piece with samples and Eastern-sounding drums that evoke a trance mood, announcing the

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development of the ritual genre. After abandoning the OTO and TOPY, Tibet turned his interest towards apocryphal and apocalyptic writings, folk magic, horror literature and various eccentric and forgotten British artists. Tibet reflected on his ambivalence towards Christianity, concluding that the truth of it lies in the hidden narratives, never in its overt, exoteric manifestations. He concluded that Crowley had been a man that wanted to overthrow Christian institutions but could never really shake them off from himself; Tibet felt like he had gone through an analogous process (Keenan, 147). The 1994 song ‘Lucifer Over London’ starts with the riff from Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’. Through this track, Tibet exorcised his past obsession with the occult. The song finishes with a coda in which Tibet declares himself to be sick of 666, referring to the negativity and the ‘demons’ that had recently caused him a mental and physical breakdown (Keenan, 244). Another Crowley reference in All The Pretty Little Horses (1996) can be found in the song ‘Calling for Vanished Faces II’, where Tibet imagines Crowley receiving a lonely, quiet and belated epiphany, suggestive of a realisation of the foolishness of his past occult pomposity. This reference points even more forcefully at Tibet’s rejection of pretentious approaches to the occult, and his capacity to find a deeper spiritual meaning in places as varied as pop culture and Christian heresy (see Keenan, 255). Keenan compares the original ‘Lucifer Over London’ with the cover by Greek black metal band Rotting Christ, which skips the coda (255), as it is clearly imbued of a more blasphemous spirit. Although they distort the original message of the song, this connection between C93 and extreme metal is key to understand how metal musicians became open to new forms of understanding occulture. Other artists, unlike Tibet, continued to be fascinated by the occult throughout their career, as was the case of Jhonn Balance, from Coil. John (or Jhonn) Balance was another influential performer who came to be involved in P-Orridge’s spin offs and, as seen in the earlier chapter on Coil, retained the influence of industrial music more thoroughly through his partnership with Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson. From an early age he was openly gay and Pagan (Keenan, 28), and soon started experimental musical projects through which he met Tibet and P-Orridge (37). Balance and Tibet became close friends, until Tibet decided to leave both OTO and TOPY (46–47). Balance found in his first recording with Tibet an opportunity to express themselves through what Attali calls composition: ‘We would be going into these big studios and it was all new shiny objects, and it was like—oh,

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what does this one do? You didn’t realise what you could do or more importantly what you couldn’t do so you just did what you wanted completely’ (Balance, cited in Keenan 2003, 46). Before starting Coil, Balance began developing the concept in a manifesto entitled The Price of Existence is Eternal Warfare (1983), where he wrote ‘COIL is … Kabbalah and KHAOS.  Thanatos and Thelema. Archangels and Antichrists’ (cited in Keenan, 101). At the time, Balance admired Spare and spent time at the legendary Atlantis bookshop in Bloomsbury (Keenan, 102) which the band Ulver would visit later. Balance believed he was a disciple of Spare (104), and called his music ‘sidereal sound’ similar to Spare’s ‘sidereal’ portraits, since he tried to convey in sound the same anamorphosis Spare practised in his pictures (104): Spare ‘would tilt his portraits slightly sideways as if to reveal aspects of the person that you wouldn’t normally see’ (Balance, cited in Keenan 2003, 233); their idea was to ‘skew it [sound] to the side so as you can see the things that you wouldn’t normally perceive’ (233). He also engaged in sex magic, and in his experience, it worked only too well—giving way to sex obsessions (Keenan, 104–105). To the effect of rituals, drugs and emotional intensity he attributed the loss of control that caused the breakup of Psychic TV (105). The first Coil record was planned as the first in a series of albums dedicated to each planet. How to Destroy Angels (1984) was dedicated to Mars and its Kabbalistic attributes and recorded on a date ascribed to the planet and the god, thus described by Balance: ‘Mars is the Roman god of spring and warfare. His qualities are dynamic energy combined with a vital stabilising discipline; when self-control is missing, the unbalanced force results in cruelty and wanton destruction’ (Balance, 1984, cited in Keenan, 119). This is easily understood as a personal concern for Balance, who felt he was losing control, and constitutes an example of the industrial tension between pure Burroughsian escape from control and a fascination with discipline as a way to master oneself, and at the same time, escape from both external control and the internal control of unconscious impulses. C93 and Coil are a threshold between the riotous anti-control explosion of TG and a new ritual variant that attempts to inspire a self-control and a discipline that spring organically from within. Their occultism was not dogmatic, however, as Balance stated: I see the music in ritualistic terms … I’ll go and look up Crowley’s 777 … just to find musical parameters. It’s not much different to John Cage

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t­hrowing stones onto a grid and extracting music from that. It’s a way of kickstarting you. (Balance, cited in Keenan 2003, 121)

The most relevant release in these terms was Astral Disaster, containing ‘The Sea Priestess’, a track where Balance recites a text adapted from Crowley’s descriptions of the murals he painted at the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù (Keenan, 180). Crowley wrote that ‘the purpose of these pictures is to enable people, by contemplation, to purify their minds … contemplating every possible phantom which can assail the soul’ (Crowley, 1921, cited in  Fra. Orpheus, 2018). In fact, Crowley painted an ‘Undergraduate bathing’ on the wall, about which he wrote ‘The first task of a young man is to “cleanse his way”’ (cited in Fra. Orpheus 2018). In Coil’s song, vision is indeed purified from conventions, and therefore, in it ‘Nature is naked’ (Balance 2018). ‘There’s a beast of prey on the threshold of pleasure’ alludes to Crowley’s self-identification as the Beast of Revelations, but also any individual in the liminality of sexual-magical states. In the lyrics, a great natural other is also manifested in the figure of the monstrous ‘giantess’, the Sea Priestess. The sea in Crowley’s text is also the sea of death, thus the Priestess’s injunction ‘Do not lose sight of the sea’ (Balance, 2018) referring to a sustained consciousness of death as the ultimate liberation. As with Skinny Puppy and C93, in Coil the topic of control starts to shift from a force that the individual tries to escape through magical means, to a power that they try to cultivate in themselves both against unwanted internal or external pressures. At the same time it is acknowledged as a simple device or system to create new inspiring associations and facilitate changes in the perception of reality. The influence of similar occultural ideas can be found in groups and individuals that went beyond P-Orridge and his immediate circle in the early 1980s, although the relatively small size of the industrial scene in those years almost inevitably meant there were crossovers. Thus, for example, the Austrian act Zero Kama (1983–1986) released a single LP, The Secret Eye of L.A.Y.L.A.H., through their own label Nekrophile Rekords in 1984. The artist responsible for Zero Kama, Zoe DeWitt, known before as Michael DeWitt, worked with some members of Psychic TV and Coil, using abundant Crowley and Spare references (DeWitt, 2:15–2:24; 31:24–37:48), and the philosophy of the label consisted in the adoption of noise and subversive music as rebellion against oppressive ideologies. DeWitt’s manifesto ‘Black Noize Magick’ proposes ways in which listening to music can be active subversion (see 21:03–21:56). The label slogan

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‘Homekilling is taping music’ reveals the true nature of illegitimate music (noise) as a private ritual murder behind the original music industry slogan against piracy ‘Hometaping is killing music’ (22:20; see also Reed, 134 for other parodic slogan versions). DeWitt understood the use of magic in industrial as a modern interpretation of Tantra, and specifically the Left-­ Hand Path or Vama Marga, a tradition within Tantra where unorthodox and taboo practices are employed, including sexuality, death and sorcery (29:20–29:45). She became a member of TOPY for a short period, until she also felt it was becoming authoritarian (30:07–30:39). Nonetheless, it was during this time that she was inspired to create Zero Kama and also maintained correspondence with Balance following her departure from TOPY (30:39–31:23). DeWitt received the name Eden 77, and from the number she drew out numerological associations to the Arabic word ‘Laylah’, meaning ‘night’, and the Hebrew word ‘Oz’ (‫)עז‬, related to ‘goat’ (54:46–56:06), which in occultism symbolises the ‘unrestrained creative force of nature’ and connotes the Christian associations with the devil (56:07–56:15). The initial design for the Zero Kama logo was a sword and an eye inside a triangle, ‘sword’ and ‘eye’ being the meanings of the names of the Hebrew letters in ‫עז‬, Zayin and Ayin (56:15–56:35). The symbolism plays on the union of the two basic opposite forces within nature: death and dissolution versus the unrestrained sexual forces of natural creation (56:36–57:05). DeWitt was impressed by Psychic TV’s ‘23 Tibetan Human Thighbones’ and the idea of using human bones to make instruments and music (42:52–44:02). DeWitt used bones from an abandoned charnel house (44:03–44:29) and while the bones were stored in her room, she experienced the feeling that a part of their souls were still living in the remains (44:30–45:19). She made thighbone trumpets after the Tibetan kangling, but also drums out of the skulls, a flute out of a shank bone, and attached an oboe mouthpiece to a thighbone; in addition, she made rattles with finger bones, and a xylophone with the rest of thighbones (45:20–46:41). Some instruments were decorated with snakeskin and metal or painted (46:42–46:53). After this process, DeWitt states, the ‘spooky’ atmosphere disappeared (46:57–47:16). The album is loosely based on Tibetan ritual music and Arabic Bedouin music as appearing in The Pipes of Pan at Joujouka, produced by Brian Jones in 1968 (48:09–48:30). The track ‘Death Posture’ (in reference to Spare’s meditative practice) is made out of low-pitched ghostly chants; ‘Atavism Dream’ creates a primitivistic sound with chaotic Pan pipes on

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repetitive drumming; ‘Night of Matter’ features the bone trumpets accompanied with faster drum rhythms, and ‘Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome’ (in reference to Kenneth Anger’s Crowleyan films) consists in long, sustained ominous notes of hissing flutes and trumpets. The Secret Eye can be read as a euphemism for the vaginal opening of the dark goddess, visually represented by the vertical eye embedded in a feminine inverted triangle as it appears on the 1988 re-release cover. If the yoni of the diurnal goddess is the source of life, the yoni of the nightside goddess is the passage to the other world, the door of death. DeWitt underlines the alchemical process of transforming death into music, even if to conventional taste the results might appear disturbing (57:06–57:22). She presented Zero Kama tracks in her final musical degree exam, but the examiner thought it was ‘nauseating’ (57:22–58:05), which confirms Zero Kama as an example of practically all of Attali’s ideas about the subversive potential of composition: DeWitt only exposed and made explicit use of the most primal power of music as a channelisation of violence, in a deliberate attempt to restore individual power before institutional and ideological control, and in return, at least on one occasion, she was denied the very status of musician. The document accompanying the album includes the affirmations that ‘Death is a Function of Life’; ‘There is a huge and splendid dream waiting to be dreamed’ and ‘There is essence in the Vagina of Non. There is a fountain of white blood revolting in a convulsivic [sic.] Universe, the body of a wish’ (53:15). The latter part formulates the theme of the potentialities of desire repressed by control in sexual magical terms, including the yonic symbolism that can be found in the re-released album artwork. ‘White blood’ is simultaneously suggestive of menstruation and of sperm, conjoining female and male aspects and reinforcing this sexual union as key to cosmic movement and manifestation. Esoteric schools that include sexual magic (such as OTO) emphasise the magical power of the ritual mixture of male and female sexual secretions as a physical correlate of the mystical conjunction. Zero Kama inverts the ontological status of dream and reality, claiming for dreams the preponderance over reality: ‘This is the militant fight for the liberation of dream as the determinedness [sic.] after which reality has to fall into existence’ (53:25). The document defends the hidden relationship between love and death, concluding that a liberation of death is also a liberation of love, of sexuality, the aforementioned fulfilment of Being through the union of opposites and consequent manifestation of a new reality (53:47):

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The ultimate aim of our revolution is the establishment of the Solarphallic Eye, which doesn’t receive anymore in a passive way by perception, but procreates and generates through projection of the Individual Will to outside the whole world and reality under the endless embrace of the Woman of the Universe, the totality of infinite possibility. (54:24)

Zero Kama also influenced musicians in other genres, among them the black metal band Rotting Christ, who used a sample from a Zero Kama track at the end of their 1991 song ‘Forest of N’Gai’ (1:34:07–1:35:02). What this chapter has demonstrated so far is that in the immediate aftermath a wide range of performers and groups took up certain trends prevalent in the work of TG to develop occultural and essoterrorist practices in their own work. The links between occult music and industrial culture also continue in a more diffuse form following the influence of the early proponents of ritual noise on other genres. Black metal bands like Samael, Aborym and The Kovenant show an industrial influence that often exacerbates and mutates in interesting ways the already heavily occultural character of extreme metal. Industrial influence in metal correlates and even in some cases stimulated a turn from black metal Paganism and diabolism towards different forms of occulture and music. Popularly, black metal is associated with anti-Christian Satanism. However, the second wave is ‘more correctly defined as heathen’; they were anti-Christian, but focusing on nostalgia for a lost Old Norse Paganism (Granholm, 5921). The second wave’s occulture was completely unorganised and vague, and rejected institutions such as The Church of Satan (5940). This changed when many musicians became members of Dragon Rouge, a Swedish magical order with a runological, but also eclectic, mystical, cabalistic and demonological approach. Mika ‘Belfagor’ Hakola, from Ofermod, has described his band as ‘dedicated to the darkest of forces which ultimately involves the Luciferian illumination’ (Belfagor, 2012, cited in Granholm, 5959). JK, leader of Head of the Demon, defines their songs as some sort of chaos-magical rituals (Granholm, 6010), in fact their album was recorded in the DR Temple in Stockholm (5970). Granholm and Tuomas Karhunen attribute the cultural and personal intensification of interest in the occult to the synergy between the cultural atmosphere and artists possessing subcultural capital (6085). Karhunen explains this structure of feeling in magical terms as a current that is being evoked collectively, giving way to new musical expressions (6085).

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A fascinating case is that of the Norwegian band Ulver, which started in 1993 as part of the black metal scene, but now produce synthpop through the label House of Mythology, which in fact also released a C93 album, The Light is Leaving Us All (2018) and have subsequently re-­ released several C93 works. In 1997, Ulver changed their musical style completely. They had begun to de-emphasise black metal elements with Kveldssanger (1996), but Themes from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1998) went beyond, exploring electronica and industrial sounds. Kristoffer ‘Garm’ Rygg, one of the main members and vocalist, explained the role of Blake, occulture and Coil in this change: Our perspectives on religion and society had started to become more difficult as well. That’s why Blake was hugely interesting to us, because it was just so much more of a meticulous vision than the dissentient perspective we were part of at the time … I was hugely into Coil and I found their music to be immensely fascinating. I checked out all their references—chaos magick, Alfred Jarry, Austin Spare and Blake and so forth. I was in London in ‘96 on a trip together with Ihsahn of Emperor and we went to this place, Atlantis Bookshop, a quite legendary bookstore for occult literature and stuff like that. I picked up a beautiful copy of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and it just blew me away. (Rygg 2007: ‘Tragic Serenades’)

Ulver were starting to enter the musical paradigm of Attali’s composition. Ulver seemed to realise this and explore this aspect in Silence Teaches you How to Sing (2001) and similar titles. On the most inaccessible side of the experimental/industrial spectrum, most of its content is noise with some harmonic sounds, rather than music as we conventionally define it. However, it works as an experiment in the economy of composition, allowing and inviting the listener to anticipate singing (or even sing) before the absence of any recognisably musical sounds. From the noise of the self-titled track, disjointed notes emerge, almost forming a bleak but harmonious sequence, over which electric crunches and noises are superimposed, until a piano finally emerges. In this regard, while emerging from metal forms, some of the experimentalism of Ulver had more in common with the work of TG and its various spin-offs such as Coil and Psychic TV in the 1980s and early 1990s. Other contemporary bands also created industrial influenced projects with occultural lyrical content, but employed a more accessible musical

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approach. Septicflesh are a Greek metal band from Athens appearing around the same time as Rotting Christ. Septicflesh, however, are very relevant in occultural terms, as not only they increasingly adopted industrial aesthetics, but also occult themes, apparent in album titles and stage names, such as bassist, vocalist and artist Spyridon Antoniou (aka Seth Siro Anton) and Sotiris ‘Anunnaki’ Vayenas. Sotiris V, guitarist and lyricist, focuses his writing on ancient civilisations and an antinomian view of evil. One of the band’s most industrial-influenced albums is Revolution DNA (1999), containing the song ‘Nephilim Sons’. The lyrics allude to the entities in Genesis 6: 1–5 in ways that conflate them with space aliens: Spheres of light fell down, a rain of mystic fire from the skies. Thirsty angels smelled the warmth of life into this earth. Bathed with stardust, in greatness They descended. (Vayenas, C. Antoniou and S. Antoniou, 1999 [2016])

The theme of the fallen angels having intercourse with human women, teaching humanity magic and technology and engendering a race of giants (Partridge 2005: 211–212), is given a sci-fi turn inspired by alien mythology as explained by Partridge. Aliens have often been reinterpreted in recent times as technological incubi (in this case, Nephilim), whose main role is the seduction and sexual union with humans (2005: 260–261), thus following a modern sacralising explanation for the enigmas of human nature and evolution: Soon They felt an urge to taste forbidden pleasures. Their flowers were erected for the daughters of Their beasts. With awe and lust these young mutations drunk Their potions. As bees they took Their seed in places, far and wide. (Vayenas, C. Antoniou and S. Antoniou, 1999 [2016])

Their next industrial orientated album was Sumerian Daemons (2003), revolving around ancient civilisations and demonology through a futuristic approach, including ‘The Watchers’ from 1 Enoch 15, thus continuing the Nephilim theme. ‘Magic Loves Infinity’ centres around desire, will and ‘spiritual eroticism’ (Vayenas, C. Antoniou and S. Antoniou, 2003), like Spare, Crowley, TOPY and many others that conceived magic not as an ascetic, but also a sensual endeavour in which Eros and sexuality are spiritual powers rather than degrading instincts. The metaphor ‘Magic is a

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goblet that seems hollow / A fountain strives to fill It to the brim’ (Vayenas, C. Antoniou and S. Antoniou, 2003) draws upon the meaning of the chalice, a macrocosmic feminine principle, in a way that resonates with DeWitt’s texts, where this sexual archetype is compared to a brimming fountain of magical power where opposing forces become creative. However, in ‘Magic Loves Infinity’, it seems hollow, and the fountain might be a human will trying to fill it with imagination and desire. The idea fits with DeWitt’s magical sexual imagery of human perception as a phallic (i.e. active) element that interacts with ‘The Woman of the Universe’. The strange alien women and creatures on the original cover of early albums like Esoptron (1995) or Ophidian Wheel (1997) are reminiscent of alien succubi and perhaps as well of Grant’s admixture of Spare and Crowley’s systems with Lovecraftian extraterrestrial entities, although in those albums industrial musical elements were practically absent. In ‘Faceless Queen’ (from Codex Omega, 2017), the lyrics focus on a lunar feminine principle (the Sumerian goddess Tiamat, according to the prefatory words) associated with death through the image of a skull suggested by the chorus repetition of ‘A mask your only skin’ and ‘Can you remove / Your mask of skin?’ (Vayenas, C. Antoniou and S. Antoniou, 2017). She is found in the ‘spaceless void’, all of the tropes evoking a similar figure to Laylah or even Balance’s Sea Priestess: She is enigma, A canvas without frame. Worshiped as Goddess. By the toys she made from clay. Behold the Faceless Queen! (Vayenas, C. Antoniou and S. Antoniou, 2017)

As with their early albums, the industrial aesthetics are hardly present in the music itself. It is more visible as one of the many elements in the artwork by Seth Siro Anton, while the music is more characterised by the epic, symphonic and Middle Eastern arrangements. However, the lyrics of the song continue to be inspired by similar occultural concepts viewed in a neo-­Romantic way: the utopian prophecy of a union between mind and nature or universe, the reappraisal of death and darkness, and their association to female archetypes of the goddess, nature, the sea or similar others. What this chapter has sought to show is the various ways in which industrial music and other derived genres have been throughout the last decades vehicles of occulture. We can see this impulse from its inception in

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TG towards a recovery of music as ritual, a means to escape control, to channel violence, to symbolise death and as a practice deeply associated to a prophetic liberation of perceptions. Industrial has explored music as Carnival, through what Ogre has termed the ‘psychedelic’ side of industrial (Ogre, 20), the violent performance aspect, the language of the grotesque and Burroughsian downward metamorphosis; but it has also explored music as Lent, when the search went full circle and returned towards control, discipline and the ‘military’ side of industrial (20). Tibet typifies the paradigmatic journey from an initial carnivalesque Paganism to a heterodox but more sober Christianity. The appropriation of cultural and social taboos, like death and sexuality, as sacralised elements confirms Attali’s views on the functions of music. In certain cases, the musical expression, the concept of the band and the esoteric ideas are more integrated than in others. While in Coil the composition process itself obeys magical parameters and goals, and the music is completely conceptualised as ritual, Skinny Puppy or Septicflesh clearly have more commercial orientated projects; their tracks are not meant to be used by listeners as ritual necessarily, in fact they are enjoyable as more conventional music. While Skinny Puppy’s lyrics are inspired by cut-up, Sotiris from Septicflesh writes more usual lyrics, albeit its esoteric subject matter (as well as its symphonic and compositional elaboration) diverges from commonplace black metal Paganism or Satanism by engaging with modern demonologies and cyberspirituality. A tendency in ritual that can be worth further study is the neo-Romantic point of view around the theme of perception and the gender associations derived from occulture on the relationship between subject (mind) and object (‘universe’). Not many industrial artists were successful in their goal of escaping control. However, they insist on the search for a discipline or control that bestows form and structure organically from within (like in a work of art), echoing Romantic solutions to the dilemma of freedom and order. At least agency is gained through the consciousness of how far control goes inside the individual.

Works Cited Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Minneapolis / London: U of Minnesotta Press (original 1977) 2009.

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Balance, Jhonn, (2018) ‘The Sea Priestess’ (lyrics) In Astral Disaster. Available at https://brainwashed.com/common/htdocs/discog/drug8.php?site=coil08 (accessed: 12/05/21) (first published: 1999). Coil. How to Destroy Angels. L.A.Y.L.A.H. 1984. Crowley, Aleister (No Date), Liber AL vel Legis, Available at ‘O.T.O. U.S.A. Library’ United States Grand Lodge Ordo Templi Orientis website (1996–2020) https:// lib.oto-usa.org/libri/liber0220.html (first published: 1904) (accessed: 05/05/21). Current 93, LAShTAL, [Vinyl 12”] Belgium: LAYLAH Antirecords .1984. DeWitt, Zoe, (2017) Zero Kama, Nekrophile Rekords and the Occult Underground of the Postindustrial Era, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, 30/04/15, [Vimeo] Available at https://vimeo.com/220269585, uploaded by zoedewitt (accessed: 05/05/21). Frater Faustus, (2002) ‘On Love and Love’ Available at The Faustus Files http:// www.baymoon.com/~btoak/faustus/love.html (accessed: 05/05/21). Frater Orpheus, (2018) ‘Images of Cefalù’, Zero = Two Blog, Posted: 05/02/18, Available at http://zeroequalstwo.net/images-of-cefalu-by-frater-orpheus/, (accessed: 06/05/21). Granholm, Kennet, (2017) ‘Popular Music and the Occult’, In Partridge, Christopher, and Marcus Moberg, (eds.) The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Popular Music, Kindle edition, Bloomsbury. Hine, Phil, (1995) Condensed Chaos: An Introduction to Chaos Magic. Tempe (AZ): New Falcon. Keenan, David, (2003) England’s Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground. Strange Attractor. lashtal, (2007), ‘The meaning of the word Lashtal?’ Available at LAShTAL Forums, Thelemic Culture and Crowley in the Media, 08/02/07. LAShTAL, https:// w w w. l a s h t a l . c o m / f o r u m s / r e q u e s t s / t h e - m e a n i n g - o f - t h e - w o r d lashtal/#post-19299 (accessed: 05/05/21).Ogre, Nivek, (2013) ‘Skinny Puppy’ interviewed by Hangedman. Auxiliary Magazine. 06/06/13. Pp. Partridge, Christopher. The Re-Enchantment of the West Volume I: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture, and Occulture. London / NY: T & T Clark / Continuum, 2004. Partridge, Christopher. The Re-Enchantment of the West Volume II: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture and Occulture. London / New York: T & T Clark International 2005. Partridge, Christopher. ‘Esoterrorism and the Wrecking of Civilization: Genesis P-Orridge and the Rise of Industrial Paganism’, In Weston, Donna, and Andy Bennett (eds.), Pop Pagans: Paganism and Popular Music. Oxon / NY: Routledge (first published: 2013). Pp. 189–212. (2014).

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P-Orridge, Genesis. ‘Message from the Temple’ In Force the Hand of Chance (1982). Available at https://genius.com/Psychic-tv-message-from-the-­ temple-lyrics (accessed: 12/05/21). P-Orridge, Genesis Breyer. “Music: Best of ‘THE PROCESS IS THE PRODUCT: The Processean Influence in Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth’, In Wyllie, Timothy, and Adam Parfrey (2009), pp. 194–209 (E-book). P-Orridge, Genesis. (2017) ‘Six Six Sixties’ In 20 Jazz Funk Greats Available at https://genius.com/Throbbing-gristle-six-six-sixties-lyrics (accessed: 12/05/21) (first published: 1979). Reed, Alexander S. Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music. Oxford / NY: OUP. (E-book) 2013. Reynolds, Simon. Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984, Kindle edition, London: Penguin (first published: 2005) 2006. Rygg, Kristoffer, ‘Tragic Serenades’, interviewed by Rob Hughes, Unrestrained! Magazine September, 2007, Available at http://www.jester-­records.com/ ulver/ulver_shadows_unrestrained.html (accessed: 05/05/21). Skinny Puppy ‘Curcible’ In The Process (1996). Available at https://genius.com/ Skinny-­puppy-­curcible-­lyrics (accessed: 12/05/21). Skinny Puppy, (1996a) ‘Candle’ In The Process, Available at https://genius.com/ Skinny-puppy-candle-lyrics (accessed: 12/05/21). Skinny Puppy (1996c) ‘Process’ In The Process, Available at https://genius.com/ Skinny-puppy-process-lyrics (accessed: 12/05/21). Skinny Puppy (1996d) The Process, [CD] US: American Recordings (first published: 1995). Tibet, David. ‘Lucifer Over London’ In SixSixSix: SickSickSick, Available at https://genius.com/albums/Current-93/Lucifer-over-london (accessed 12/05/21) (first published: 1994) 2005. Tibet, David. ‘Calling for Vanished Faces II’ In The Inmost Light, Available at: https://genius.com/Current-93-calling-for-vanished-faces-ii-lyrics (accessed: 12/05/21) (first published: 1996) 2007. Ulver. ‘Silence Teaches You How to Sing’, In Teachings in Silence, [CD] US: Black Apple 2002. Vayenas, Sotiris, Christos Antoniou and Spyridon Antoniou (2016) ‘Nephilim Sons’, by Septicflesh (Spyridon Antoniou, Sotiris Vayenas, Christos Antoniou, and Akis K.). In Revolution DNA [Album liner notes] Europe: Season of Mist (first published: 1999). Vayenas, Sotiris, Christos Antoniou and Spyridon Antoniou, ‘Magic Loves Infinity’, (2003) by Septicflesh (Sotiris Vayenas, Christos Antoniou, Spyridon Antoniou, Akis K. and George Z.). In Sumerian Daemons [Album liner notes] (Season of Mist). Vayenas, Sotiris, Christos Antoniou and Spyridon Antoniou, and Anthony Christos Antoniou, (2017) ‘Faceless Queen’, by Septicflesh (Sotiris ‘Anunnaki’ Vayenas,

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Christos Antoniou, Seth Siro Anton [Spyridon Antoniou] and Kerim ‘Krimh’ Lechner). In Codex Omega Available at: https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/septicflesh/facelessqueen.html (accessed 12/05/21). Vecchio, Joseph, (2014) “I Was in a Position to Dismantle It”: Industrial Music Appropriations of William S. Burroughs, Masters Diss., Texas State U. Wyllie, Timothy, and Adam Parfrey (eds.) (2009) Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgement. Port Townsend (WA): Feral House. (E-book). Wyllie, Timothy, and Adam Parfrey (Father Micah), (2009) ‘My Life Inside the Process Church’ In Wyllie, Timothy, and Adam Parfrey (eds.) (2009), pp. 22–141. Zero Kama, (1988) The Secret Eye of LAYLAH, [Vinyl] France: Permis De Construire.

CHAPTER 10

“Happiness in Slavery,” or Industrial Erotic Elizabeth Potter

In 1988, Trent Reznor began Nine Inch Nails, a solo music project in the style of industrial metal. A subgenre of industrial, the genre utilizes metal-­ style guitar riffs, distorted vocals, angst-filled lyricism, and aggressive energy. While Ministry was perhaps the first industrial metal band to bring the genre to the masses, Nine Inch Nails was the solidifying force for the genre’s popularity and acclaim. To date, Nine Inch Nails has sold over 20 million records and have been nominated for 13 Grammy Awards, winning with “Wish” in 1992 and “Happiness in Slavery” in 1996. Additionally, Nine Inch Nails was nominated for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014 (their first year of eligibility), again in 2015 and 2020, with the latest nomination resulting in an official induction. These are just a few of Reznor’s achievements, others including a Primetime Emmy Award for his musical score of the television series Watchmen (2019) and a Golden Globe and Oscar for Best Original Score for the Walt Disney film, Soul (2020). These critical accomplishments and powerful collaborations with mega-corporations can obscure the impact of Nine Inch Nails’ earlier forays into transgressive and rebellious discourse,

E. Potter (*) University of York, York, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Whittaker, E. Potter (eds.), Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92462-1_10

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however, the Internet always remembers. As one Twitter user amusingly wrote, “I love that the guy who made a music video where a man gets his penis ripped off by a machine might win an Oscar for scoring a Disney movie about jazz” (@6demonbagg).1 The music video this user is referencing is, of course, “Happiness in Slavery,” the subject of this chapter. After the successful release of Pretty Hate Machine in 1989, Reznor began recording the EP Broken in secret. The secrecy was due to a major disagreement between Reznor and his record label, TVT Records. Accompanying the vinyl promotion, he included a stream-of-­consciousness prose explanation of the inspiration and production for the album: Broken was a hard recording to make Broken is an ugly record made during an ugly time in my life Broken marks phase three of nine inch nails: the becoming I am starting to realize what this is all about and I don’t like it…maybe I am what everybody seems to think I am nine inch nails is still not a real band with real people playing real instruments there will be no touring for Broken[.] (Reznor Press Sheet)

With substantially harsher sounds and caustic lyrics, the EP aligned with this dissatisfaction expressed in the promotional material. Reznor explained that Broken should be an abrasive, hard-to-listen-to thing … I wanted to make a record that the first time you hear it you don’t like it, but you might want to hear it again, but by the third time it’s pretty cool. By the fifth time, you really like it and possibly by the tenth time you’re not sick of it and now it all makes sense. (Wawzenek 2017)

Perhaps to further emphasize the “hard-to-listen-to” element of the album, a year later, the Broken movie was released. Around 20 minutes in total running time, Broken is stylized as a snuff film of a young man who is kidnapped and forced to watch Nine Inch Nails music videos during his torture and eventual murder. Reznor recruited Peter Christopherson, one of the original members of Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and Coil, to direct the film. Christopherson reported that he designed Broken 1  @6demonbagg. “I love that the guy who made a music video where a man gets his penis ripped off by a machine might win an Oscar for scoring a Disney movie about jazz” Twitter, 25 April 2021, 10:57  PM, https://twitter.com/6demonbagg/ status/1386439148287012864.

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“without regard for MTV and what was showable and not showable,” because that is what Reznor explicitly requested (Barnes 2009). Reznor explained that stopping at reasonable boundaries was never the plan and that “if we were going to do it, we figured we might as well cross the line into potentially bad taste … I don’t want to cater to MTV standards” (Barnes). Because the record label was uninterested in promoting such potentially harmful and non-lucrative materials, Reznor bootlegged and sold the VHS tapes himself at live concerts. Nine Inch Nails fans began to duplicate their copies and distributed them farther, as Christopherson explained, “because the net wasn’t really working for video then” (Barnes). Home reproduction of bootleg movies renders the images and audio to be increasingly unclear, fuzzy, and glitchy. Christopherson lamented, a lot of people, especially kids, started to believe that it was a real snuff movie. By the time, a VHS has been copied ten times you are hard pressed to make out any detail at all. You can just about see that there is a guy with a rubber mask and a chainsaw appearing to cut someone’s legs off, but you can’t really see anything else: you can’t see all of those clues that would actually tell you it was no more real than Saw 2 or Hostel. (Barnes)

This difficulty to discriminate the truth from fiction was precisely in accordance to Reznor’s plan. He suggestively asked, “what if we built a framework around these songs, what if we took an approach where it really was scary, instead of a cop-out horror movie nod to the camera? What if it felt real?” (Grierson 2017). Despite Reznor’s zealous approach to Broken, Christopherson later expressed regret about the way the movie filtered out to the masses as he feared that it may have potentially harmed people that believed they were watching someone being tortured and murdered. While Hollywood films glamorize torture and murder in blockbuster horror films, this more authentic feeling of demise can complicate our already uneasy comprehension towards death and suffering. Christopherson commented that death as depicted in mainstream media is “shown in a plastic way,” meaning that viewers “have no clue about the reality of death” (Barnes). Susan Sontag argues that “photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. And photographs are a species of alchemy, for all that they are prized as a transparent account of reality” (Regarding the Pain of Others 70). Unlike older forms of media, like painting or sculpture, the readily available iterations of a photograph or film can be owned by the spectator. Further, the accessibility to the

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work and the nature of the medium makes it feel much more authentic than something crafted out of plastic materials. She continues by contemplating the desired function of the camera, which she calls “beautifying,” a flattering angle to the reality of what is shown, to eliminate a “moral response” (70). This “plastic way” of depicting death and torture in Hollywood, as alluded to by Christopherson, is aligned with Sontag’s notion of the beautifying “classical operation of the camera” (70). In opposition with this effect is “uglifying” or “showing something at its worst” (70). This “modern function,” Sontag reasons, is “didactic” and “it invites an active response” from the viewer (70). Christopherson’s anxiety that he may have harmed viewers of the Broken movie by creating an unnervingly authentic-seeming snuff film is precisely due to the “uglifying” effect. The lighting is uneven, the camera seems balanced on a table, depth bounces between in and out of focus inconsistently in the non-­ music video scenes of Broken. For the viewer who believed they were really watching the kidnap, torture, and murder of a young man, the grim reality of death became realized. Indeed, it did promote an active response, as Sontag supposed, as demonstrated in an Atlanta, Georgia news investigation in 1994. A Nine Inch Nails’ fan recounts her acquisition of the Broken movie and her shocked mother, remonstrating the content said: “it’s almost satanic to me. They’re mutilating people, they’re having sex with what I have seen, to be a corpse” (Prime Time I-Team Investigation: Nine Inch Nails’ “Happiness in Slavery”). Throughout the news segment, Reznor is criticized for the repulsive and harmful content in the Broken film. The video is not widely available still to this date due to the nudity, subject matter, and mature content. For a viewer to encounter the video, they must be proactive in their search online, similar to how it was in 1992. This clandestine and insider knowledge accelerates the viewer’s openness to the content of the movie. Tim Grierson considered the impact of a movie like Broken then as opposed to the current media climate: when something goes viral in 2017, there’s an immediacy to the sensation that makes the experience a little less special. In the 1990s, discovering Broken was personal and individual. It was your own dark, little secret, which made it all the more powerful.

Knowing it is far too explicit for YouTube means the video will inevitably cross the boundaries drawn in the sand by polite society. Those who accept and endeavour to find and view these taboo subjects are perhaps best

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primed for these discussions. Fans of industrial music are well-inclined to question these themes because of the genre’s history of considering the notions of the limits of the individual, body, and machine. At face value, evisceration is painful to an excruciating degree. However, the power of the mind and the desires that accompany it may be able to transform the one-dimensional theatre and pain of torture into something else entirely. Rob Sheridan, an art director, closely affiliated to Reznor considered the time period the impact of Broken now: Kids today can’t possibly appreciate the feeling of tracking down a rare video artifact, because everything now is a mere Google search away … [Broken] was never meant for searchable, on-demand access, never meant for the soft-­ hearted masses who put no effort into seeking it out. (Grierson)

The act of searching for this film can also enhance the “creative enterprise” that Foucault celebrated. The depictions are in a cutting-edge approach to a sensation that seems so unequivocally singular means that the power of the individual can transcend the pangs of bodily mutilation and discover the dimensions of sensation. But it also means that the spectator must be diligent to discover the video and work towards this same understanding without the personal experience of the pain pictured. It is important to recognize that the Broken movie is structured to simulate a snuff film with a steady interjection of Nine Inch Nails music videos. The overarching imagery of the movie is a raw, vulgar, and deliberately authentic depiction of torture (see Fig. 10.1). Like the controversial Ruggero Deodato film, Cannibal Holocaust (1980), it is very difficult to ascertain the authenticity of the acts portrayed because of the lower quality recording equipment and lighting. On the other hand, the “Happiness in Slavery” video is stylized with high contrast, angular lighting, filmed in black and white with cutaway shots, zooming, and other classically recognized cinematography techniques. The juxtaposition of the snuff film coarseness with fuzzy focus and tilted perspective against the avant-garde and transgressive artistry of the music videos elicits a discourse on the voyeurism of torture. The high contrast, black and white of “Happiness in Slavery” is reminiscent of art films or even film noir styles of the 1940s and 1950s. Does the snuff torture feel worse to watch for the spectator? Yes, because it appears non-­ consensual and fully real. “Happiness in Slavery” is vastly more explicit and gruesome, but the consent of the man and the decidedly artistic

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Fig. 10.1  Scene of a tooth being forcibly removed; Broken

depiction safely removes the viewer from being involved. In Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, she interpreted what she called the “structure of torture.” The foundation is that pain must be inflicted in “ever-intensifying ways;” secondly, the pain is forged into an object and carried out to be made visible to those outside of the person’s body; and finally, the objectified pain is denied as pain and interpreted, instead, as power (Scarry 28). Pain, an intensely internal experience and made difficult to express linguistically, is disparate from torture because torture should have a spectatorship element. Pain, when internally and personally experienced, is a sensation and not its own object. Torture, the art of inflicting pain on another, is a goal and even, a “fantastic illusion of power” (Scarry 28). This power structure of pain is essential to understanding the structure of torture because it is the “unmaking” she refers to in the title. By undoing the creation powers of pleasure and life and instead venturing into pain and death, the world built on social understandings can in turn be unmade. I argue that the difference between the two modes of narrative and exposition is separated by the eroticism and self-contained power found in “Happiness in Slavery.” While it may not lend itself to more typical flavours of sexual intrigue, it is, nonetheless, represented as erotic for the man in the video. The actor in the music video, Bob Flanagan, described himself as a “supermasochist.” As a child, Flanagan was diagnosed with

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cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder characterized by increased difficulty of breathing, incessant coughing, and frequent lung infections. The condition has no known cure and can cause miserable conditions of life. Perhaps due to this involuntary suffering, Flanagan began exploring the world of sadomasochism (SM and sometimes stylized as S&M), the world of voluntary inflictions of suffering. Jon Reiss, the director of the music video for “Happiness in Slavery,” confirmed that Flanagan thoroughly enjoyed himself during the filming, even in going so far as to confirming that he felt sexual pleasure.2 Eventually, Flanagan would become a recognized practitioner of sadomasochism and torture performance artist. Flanagan recounted, “with all my heart and soul, all I ever wanted was to be strung up, spanked, splayed, saddled, stuck, strangled, split open,” and continued with a litany of agonizing sensations, before arriving at his point: People don’t think of the masochist as being a strong person. The stereotype that the masochist is snivelling and weak is actually not true. The masochist has to know his or her own body perfectly well and be in full control of their body, in order to give control to somebody else or to give control to pain. So, the masochist is actually a very strong person. (Sick 1997)

Michel Foucault suggested that the exploration beyond pleasure could “create a new way of life,” and Flanagan’s performance and life, Reiss’ video, and Reznor’s music combined insist that “to make one’s being an object of art, that’s what is worth the effort” (Foucault 1996, 317). Flanagan, in particular, did seem to make his suffering into a pleasurable and remarkable way of exploring the intensities of life, pain, and eventually, death. When he states that the masochist must be aware and authoritative in their bodily autonomy to release the role of control to pain, this hearkens back to Scarry’s structure of torture. The pain is made into an object, not merely a sensation, that can be understood as power itself. Flanagan’s description of giving control to pain means that pain has manifested in a new phenomenon and form. In psychological circles, many fetishes are considered to be paraphilias (sadomasochism being one of the main areas of research interest) stemming from early childhood trauma, relating to discomfort around genitalia. In 1927, Freud explained “the purpose of the fetish precisely is to preserve it [the discomfort, anxiety, dysphoria, etc.] from being lost” (Freud 203). This disruptive sensation 2

 Reiss, Jon. Personal interview. 30 May 2020.

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becomes essential to the individual’s identity and thus, the fetish is an expression of their innate, innermost desires. However, in his discussions on sadomasochism, Foucault remarked that fetishes, and specifically, sadomasochism, should not be dismissed to the mere exploration and fulfilment of unconscious, repressed fascinations. Instead, It’s the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure … the idea that S&M is related to deep violence … is stupid. We know very well what all those people are doing is not aggressive; they are inventing new possibilities of pleasure … it’s a kind of a creation, a creative enterprise. (Foucault 1997, 165)

Industrial music lends itself to this type of exploration well because of the merger of natural and machine. The harsh and abrasive nature of the genre’s blending of these two elements is a type of experimentation with the sensations of pleasure and pain. How is it that caustic sounds and grim lyrical imagery can be enjoyed? This similar question is explored in sadomasochism. The listener to industrial music assents to this by playing the track, and the viewer of “Happiness in Slavery” agrees to watching the discovery process of the limits of pleasure and pain for another individual. By engaging in both, simultaneously, the viewer safely transgresses against socially accepted experiences, identities, and expressions. Georges Bataille explained that “underlying eroticism is the feeling of something bursting, of the violence accompanying an explosion” (Bataille 1986, 93). The blast of an explosion, something destructive, powerful, and curiosity provoking, shakes up the everyday reality. This everyday sense of torture, seen in the Broken movie as the snuff elements, is not erotic but rather gratuitous and nauseating. The “Happiness in Slavery” video is strangely alluring because of the bizarre lustiness and ultimately, horrific death scene, where sex and death finally merge. The congruent discourse of the blurred boundary of sex and death naturally intrigues humans as they are areas of the unknown, a view of intimate suffering that eventually ends in the death of another. Directly after a grainy and glitchy scene of the victim’s front tooth being extracted by the torturer with a wrench, the movie transitions to the “Happiness in Slavery” music video. A black and white, slow, and disorienting shot of lush leaves cuts to industrial cogs rotating and shifting in operation. Trent Reznor performs parts of the song while contained inside of a small metal cell, screaming and staring down the camera lens like the

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dreadful Stanley Kubrick stare. An overhead shot introduces the viewer to the room in which the subject, played by Flanagan, enters finding a type of dental or otherwise medical chair with straps and an altar in the corner. He places a rose upon the altar and lights a prayer candle, surrounded by a skull and thorns. Dizzying shots of the room provide context to the unusual environment, while the subject undresses and folds his suit neatly on the table and proceeds to wash himself. As he gazes into the mirror, he begins to disassociate, his image falling away from him. He climbs onto the chair, and it automatically lifts and embraces him, plunging metal cords like an IV into his hands. A terrifying clamp with three prongs raises and pulls the skin on his chest while a curved metal mechanic grips onto his testicles and yanks them down forcefully. The subject throws his head backwards with an expression of sexual pleasure. The tri-pronged claw continues to pluck and stretch his skin on his stomach and on the head of his penis, before moving back to his torso again where it begins to gouge the flesh (see Fig. 10.2). Additional mechanical arms emerge from the chair and drills plunge into his torso, burrowing deeper into his body as blood begins to trail down his sides, onto the chair, and below it. The camera pans down and reveals that the blood is falling onto a garden below. The subject is fully

Fig. 10.2  Scene of victim, played by Bob Flanagan, feeling pleasure while being eviscerated by the machine; Broken

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awake and alert, and in the next shot, it is revealed that he is now eviscerated while a blunt mechanical arm with a saw attached continues to grind into his entrails. He screams, inaudible because of the music, and tosses his head from side to side, sometimes sitting up to witness what the machine is perpetuating onto his body. The suit he arrived in and folded is now on fire in the corner of the room, the last static and stabilized shot of the music video. A flat iron panel smashes his genitals upwards onto his groin, and he screams before a spray of blood lands on his face. The next shot is an overhead view of his mutilated body, where he is clearly deceased. A machine spews out a wet, glutinous substance, resembling a meat processor, suggesting that the subject’s body has been mashed down into compost for the vicious garden. The final scene of the music video is Reznor entering the room, wearing a suit, and closing the door behind him and approaching the altar, in the same manner as the deceased man’s entry. In his analysis of links between ancient sacrifice and sexual intercourse, Bataille wrote: The act of violence that deprives the creature of its limited particularity and bestows on it the limitless, infinite nature of sacred things is with its profound logic an intentional one. It is intentional like the act of the man who lays bare, desires and wants to penetrate his victim. The lover strips the beloved of her identity no less than the blood-stained priest his human or animal victim. The woman in the hands of her assailant is despoiled of her being. With her modesty she loses the firm barrier that once separated her from others and made her impenetrable. She is brusquely laid open to the violence of the sexual urges set loose in the organs of reproduction; she is laid open to the impersonal violence that overwhelms her from doubt. (1986, 90)

In the music video, the tortuous act is portrayed like a ritualized sacrifice: the offerings on the altar, the lighting of a candle, the disrobing of previous social identity, and the washing of the body. When I spoke with Jon Reiss, I pointed out that religious rituals typically would not involve a machine. He explained, I always imagined the machine, in this, to be kind of alive. And being part of this, that the machine has a symbiotic relationship between man and machine. That the machine is getting something and the people that enter it are getting something. It’s almost like a biologic strategy of offering, it

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wants to cultivate its garden, gain pleasure from its garden. So, it’s offering this experience to this other species in order to do that. (Reiss)

In a sense, the machine is then like the “blood-stained priest” in Bataille’s analysis. Instead of an object that performs a function, the machine has transcended into not only a subject with sentience but also one that offers an experience that cannot be gained through any other method. As previously mentioned, Scarry’s structure of torture indicates that pain must be made into an object and have the ability to be understood as power. The machine’s cruel gift of this experience gives, all parties involved, a unique power with varying dynamics. For the machine, it gains sustenance from the subject’s blood and flesh; the subject gains a perspective that could not be experienced alone; and the pain becomes complicated and oversteps previously held aversions, changing its identity and function. Jean Baudrillard’s account of the abstractness of power in relation to objects can assist with understanding the importance of pain becoming an object, delivered via machine. He writes, “in the face of the functional object the human being becomes dysfunctional, irrational and subjective: an empty form,” bared open “to the mythology of the functional, to projected phantasies stemming from the stupefying efficiency of the outside world” (The System of Objects 57). This vulnerability of the subject in the music video is bewildering to the viewer because they have not accepted this mythological system offered by the machine that feeds the blood garden below. Continuing with Bataille’s consideration of the similarities shared between religious sacrifice and sexual intercourse, the flesh is essential to consider, as “both reveal the flesh” (92). Sacrifice replaces the ordered life of the animal with a blind convulsion of its organs. So also, with the erotic convulsion; it gives free rein to extravagant organs whose blind activity goes on beyond the considered will of the lovers. Their considered will is followed by the animal activity of these swollen organs. They are animated by a violence outside the control of reason, swollen to bursting point and suddenly the heart rejoices to yield to the breaking of the storm. The urges of the flesh pass all bounds in the absence of controlling will. Flesh is the extravagance within us set up against the law of decency. Flesh is the born enemy of people haunted by Christian taboos, but if, as I believe, an indefinite and general taboo does exist, opposed to sexual liberty in ways depending on the time and the place, the flesh signifies a return to this threatening freedom. (92)

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Bataille’s exploration of the violence of sexual intercourse and the animalistic freedom that accompanies it can be paralleled with the video for “Happiness in Slavery.” The music video is about a sacrifice in which the subject freely gives himself to and also gives up his rational, sensible control in exchange for immense pleasure and pain. The “urges of the flesh” exceeded past the rational and into a new form of thinking, feeling, and experiencing. Like sex and religious ecstasy, pain is also beyond words—a transcendent experience into a different existence. “Physical pain,” Scarry wrote, “is language-destroying. Torture inflicts bodily pain that is itself language-destroying,” but also destroys the “prisoner’s voice” leaving very real political consequences (19–20). Language, the tool of the human voice that uses symbols to communicate needs, desires, ideas, and so on, is annihilated but so too is the tortured individual’s power and identity. This release from language, power, and identity is precisely the “threatening freedom” that Bataille alluded towards. Although Reznor repeats the lyrics, “don’t open your eyes,” the existence of the video begs the viewer to continue watching these scenes. In an invitation, spoken from experienced authority, he continues, “take it from me, you can find happiness in slavery” (Reznor). As the artist, the one who has facilitated this journey, Reznor has shared the creative enterprise that is venturing beyond the typical expressions of pleasure. By embracing the state of bondage and reorienting the reception of pain, one can potentially find pleasure, security, and fulfilment. This extraordinary exploration of the body, subjected to curious and harmful power, can be agreeable, if the viewer can open their eyes and allow the variant delight to be understood. “It was super important to me that the subject was a man and not a woman,” explained Reiss, “because even though you could make a case that it was consensual, and women’s sexuality” is complex, “it would still represent so much of what happens to women in society … and it doesn’t need to be represented on screen.” Concerned with the focus of a woman’s body and the potential pornographic potential, due in part to the male gaze and the camera, Reiss knew that “everything else [important] about the video would be lost.” In the same fashion that Einstürzende Neubauten commanded their fans to “listen with pain,” Reznor guided them to listen, watch, and consider pain and pleasure in new ways. Approaching the Broken movie and EP with an openness to transgression can be challenging and perhaps, why he commented that the music should prove difficult to withstand, let alone enjoy. However, he does expect the listener to undertake the EP and movie several times over. It will be

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shocking or galling to experience but with repeated effort and exposure, the resistance towards noise and pain can be withstood, questioned, and perhaps, even accepted.

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Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS #MeToo, 47 20 Jazz Funk Greats, 2 23 Skidoo, 97 2001, 66 A Acker, Kathy, 8 Actionism, 8 Adorno, Theodor W., 11–14 Afrika Bambaataa, 48 Agrippa, Cornelius, 144 AIDS, 17, 71–85 Alldridge, Peter, 72 All The Pretty Little Horses, 150 Almond, Marc, 84 Althusser, Louis, 76 Anger, Kenneth, 154 Antoniou, Christos, 157, 158

Antoniou, Spyridon, 157 Apple Music, 40 Artaud, Antonin, 13, 14, 93 Astral Disaster, 152 Atlantic slave trade, the, 60 Atrocity Exhibition, 56, 77 Attali, Jacques, 12, 13, 143, 144, 146, 150, 154, 156, 159 Atton, Chris, 91, 95, 100–102 Auto De Fe, 110 B Balance, John (Jhonn), 80–85, 146, 149–153, 158 Ballard, J. G., 8, 77, 88 Bargeld, Blixa, 10–12, 15, 16 Barthes, Roland, 136, 138 Basu, Helene, 93, 94

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Whittaker, E. Potter (eds.), Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92462-1

195

196 

INDEX

Bataille, Georges, 129–131, 133, 136, 137, 139, 170, 172–174 Battaglia, Andy, 96 Baudrillard, Jean, 173 Benjamin, Walter, 11 Bentham, Jeremy, 73 Berlant, Lauren, 68 Bianchi, Maurizio, 123 Bibbings, Lois, 72 Biopolitics, 17, 19–34, 73, 85 Black bodies, 55–69 Black Lives Matter, 47 Blake, William, 19, 75, 80, 85, 156 Blood, Women, Roses, 24 Blur, Mike, 110, 126n11 Body modding, 74, 77–79 Body to Body, Job to Job, 21 Body without organs, 14, 72, 74, 79 Braidotti, Rosi, 140 Breton, André, 90, 91, 100, 103 Breyer, Jacqueline, 79 Broken, 18, 164–167, 170, 174 Brown, Danny, 56 Bruno, Giordano, 144 Buckthrusters, The, 112–114, 112n2, 116–118, 121–123, 126 Buñuel, Luis, 99 Burch, Marc, 111, 112, 114, 115, 120, 123–126, 126n10 Burning World, The, 24, 25, 28 Burroughs, William, 8, 10, 42, 73, 77, 88, 89, 96, 98, 110, 111, 116, 124, 145, 149 Busta Rhymes, 48, 51 C Cabaret Voltaire, 7–9, 17, 41, 43, 87–103, 113, 123 Candyman, 56 Cannibal Holocaust, 167 Care, Peter, 96

Carpenter, John, 56, 60 Carroll, Brian, 138 Carter, Chris, 2, 75 Cave, Nick, 11 Cazazza, Monte, 7, 77 Chaos magic, 143 Children of God, 24, 25, 27, 28 Chion, Michel, 90, 92, 94 Christopherson, Peter, 2, 75, 80–85, 110, 150, 164–166 Clark, Msia Kibona, 45 Clifford, Dave, 24 Clipping, 17, 55–69, 82 CLPPNG, 56 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 56–60, 63, 66, 67 Coil, 15, 17, 80–85, 150–152, 156, 159, 164 Collins, Karen, 49 Columbine School Massacre, 5 Concerto for Magnetophone, Gramophone, Radiophone and Megaphone, 77 Condon, Paul, 92, 93 Confusion is Sex, 21 COUM Transmissions, 1, 2, 10, 12, 13, 41, 75, 79, 143, 145 and prostitution exhibition, 1 Courage Riot, 38 Cowper, Greg, 112, 112n2, 113 Crimp, Douglas, 81 Crowley, Aleister, 81, 147–152, 157, 158 Culp, Andrew, 134 Current 93, 149, 151, 156 Curry, Denzel, 57 D D.o.A: The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle, 83 Dadaism, 8, 17, 89

 INDEX 

DAF, 123 Daniels, Brandy, 79 Danticat, Edwidge, 69 Darlington, Andy, 92, 95 Death Cube K, 17, 138 Death Grips, 6, 7, 56 Dee, John, 144 Deezer, 40 Deleuze, Gilles, 72, 130, 139 Deodato, Ruggero, 167 Depeche Mode, 28 Derrida, Jacques, 76 DeWitt, Zoe, 152 Disembodied, 138, 139 Doublevision, 96–99 Dra ̨g, Wojciech, 92, 100 Dragon Rouge, 155 DT, 119, 120 Duchamp, Marcel, 4, 11, 99, 103 Dworkin, Andrea, 31, 32 Dwyer, Sean, 73 Dymock, Alex, 74 E Eberly, John, 123 Einstürzende Neubauten, 8, 11, 12, 14, 83, 174 Electronic Body Music (EBM), 7–9, 11, 41 Eraserhead, 96 Esoterrorism, 144, 147 Every Head Needs Cleaning, 115, 117, 118 F Fama, 51 Fellini, Federico, 99 Fernow, Dominick, 133 Fiasco, Lupe, 48 Fish, Mick, 8, 99

197

Fisher, Mark, 135, 141 Flanagan, Bob, 18, 168, 169, 171 Fluxus, 1, 8 Ford, Simon, 2, 8, 75 Fothergill, John, 103 Foucault, Michel, 20, 21, 31, 76, 137, 167, 169, 170 Freud, Sigmund, 169 Friday the 13th, 60 Front 242, 41 Frozen Niagara Falls, 133, 136 Futurism, 4, 8, 10 G Geffen, Sasha, 29, 33 Gerard, David, 98 Gill, John, 8 Gira, Michael, 19–34 Glitsos, Laura, 13 Glowing Man, 21, 26, 32 Gnosticism, 144 Goddard, Michael, 41, 95 Gold is the Metal (with the Broadest Shoulders), 81 Goldstein, Dan, 93, 101 Golpushnezhad, Elham, 50 Gopalan, Nisha, 11 Gourley, Bob, 98 Graham, Elizabeth, 38, 39, 41, 43, 46, 51 Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, 44 Grant, Kenneth, 149, 158 Great Annihilator, The, 25, 28 Greed, 21, 22, 25 Grierson, Tim, 165–167 Grimm, Larkin, 28–31, 33 Gunn, Joshua, 7, 20 Gysin, Brion, 88, 89, 145

198 

INDEX

H Halloween, 60 Halnon, Karen, 75 Han Han, 40, 41, 46, 50 Hanley, Jason J., 42, 43 Haraway, Donna, 13 Harris, Eric, 5 Heaven 17, 88 Helman, Peter, 28–30 Holy Money, 21, 22, 25 Homotopy to Marie, 101 Horkheimer, Max, 11 Horse Rotorvator, 81, 83 Hostnik, Tomaž, 76, 144 How to Destroy Angels, 80, 83, 151 Hulme, T. E, 80 Human League, 96 I Ice Cube, 48 Industrial Culture Handbook (RE/ SEARCH), 7, 73, 77 Industrial hip-hop, 11, 37–51, 56–58 Industrial Records, 9, 110, 117, 149 INfest8, 38, 38n1 Islam, 46–49 Isoke, Zenzele, 44, 45 J Japan (band), 46, 48, 116 Jarboe, 31 Jarry, Alfred, 82, 156 Jones, Brian, 76, 84, 153 Jorgenson, Darren, 89, 90, 93, 100, 103 Jourgensen, Al, 6, 43, 110 Juno, Andrea, 7, 9, 41, 42, 74, 75, 77–79, 111, 115

K Kabbalah, the, 144, 151 Keenan, David, 80, 82, 92, 102, 103, 149–152 Key, kEvin, 2 Khabeer, Su’ad Abdul, 47, 48 Khan, Katy, 50 Khanjani, Mehrnaz, 44, 45 Kid Vishis, 39 Kieller, Daphne, 103 King Crimson, 140 Kirk, Richard, 88, 89, 95, 98–100, 103 Klebold, Dylan, 5 KMFDM, 5 Kollektiv, 123 Konqistador, 37–41, 43, 46, 51 Kontakte, 137 Koster, Mickie Mwanzia, 45 Kraftwerk, 4, 9, 10 Kramer, Larry, 81, 85 Kubrick, Stanley, 66, 171 Kundera, Milan, 132 Kuźnicki, Slawomir, 19, 26 L Lady Jaye, see Breyer, Jacqueline Laibach, 8, 76, 77, 144 La Mala Ordina, 61 Lamar, Kendrick, 59 Land of Rape and Honey, The, 6 LARD, 114, 119–124, 126 Lashtal, 149 Last Attempt At Paradise, The, 111, 117, 124 Leichenschrei, 109 Levermore, Gary, 100 Lewis, Scott, 84, 85 Lindemann, Till, 15 Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, 76 Lockwood, Annea, 65

 INDEX 

Lockwood, Dean, 20, 26–28, 32 Lodder, Matt, 74 Love of Life, 25, 28 Lyford, Amy, 89, 90, 92, 96 Lynch, David, 96 M MacCormack, Patricia, 79 McLuhan, Marshall, 90 McMurray, Anaya, 48 Mallinder, Stephen, 43, 88, 89, 92, 93, 98, 99, 101 Man Ray, 99 Manson, Charles, 83 Manson, Marilyn, 5 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 24 Marcuse, Herbert, 137 Mariani, Mike, 60 Marlan, Stanton, 83 Marx, Karl, 134, 141 May, Todd, 141 Mayhem, 144 Mbembé, Achille, 63 Medusa TN, 39, 46, 50 Miller, Michael T., 19, 28, 101 Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse, 2 Ministry, 6, 7, 41, 43, 163 Miss Undastood, see Shannon, Tavasha Mitchell, Tony, 44 Money Store, The, 56 Monroe, Alexei, 8, 76 Morgan, Frances, 21, 22, 31–33 Mos Def, 48, 51 Mr Sebastian, 73 MTV, 33, 165 Musafar, Fakir, 13, 78 Muslim cool, 48 Mute Records, 2, 20, 24, 27, 28, 32 M’uzan, Michael, 72

199

My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, 26, 31 Mystic Stylez, 57 N Nafada, 17, 37–51 Nag, Nag, Nag, 96, 97 Nathanson, Donald, 83 National Arab Orchestra, 39 Neal, Charles, 23, 91, 97, 100, 146 Nealon, Jeffrey T., 11 Necropolitics, 56, 63 Needle Drop, The, 56 Neoism, 8 Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), 76 Nevitt, Barrington, 90 New Mother, 25 New Order, 96 Neyland, Nick, 88, 89 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 19 Nine Inch Nails, 5, 18, 163–167 Nirvana, 126 No Love Deep Web, 6 Nomadic Massive, 51 NON, 122 Nothing Here Now but the Recordings, 110 No Wave, 27 Nurse With Wound, 17, 87–103 N.W.A., 44 Nyawalo, Mich Yonah, 48 O O’Brien, Geoffrey, 88, 90, 91, 94, 100 Occultism, 151, 153 Occulture, 18, 144, 145, 150, 155, 156, 158, 159 Ogre, Nivek, 2, 3, 15, 16, 148, 159 Ohlin, Per, 144 Oksanen, Atte, 42

200 

INDEX

Olsen, Marty, 110 Open Eye, 8 Operation Spanner, 72, 73, 75 Orchard, The, 40 Ordo Templi Orientis, 149 Osumare, Halifu, 45 Overell, Rosemary, 12, 15 Oversby, Alan, see Mr Sebastian Ovid, 87, 88 P Parplar, 28, 29 Partridge, Christopher, 143, 144, 146, 147, 157 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 81 Pauline, Mark, 77, 112 Payne, Chris, 30 Pediconi, Beatrice, 26 P-Orridge, Genesis (Breyer), 1, 2, 9, 13, 18, 42, 73, 75, 79, 80, 110, 143, 145–150, 152 Post-Punk Monk, 89, 90, 93, 95, 96 Pretty Hate Machine, 164 Price of Existence is Eternal Warfare, The, 151 Process, The, 148 Prurient, 17, 133, 136 Psychic TV, 73, 80, 81, 111, 146, 147, 149, 151–153, 156, 164 Psycho, 60 Public Enemy, 48, 51 R Rammstein, 5, 15 Rand, T. A., 81 Rant, James, 72 Rasmussen, Anne, 39 Ratliff, Ben, 23 Reed, Alexander S., 4, 7, 8, 10, 15, 42, 43, 77, 80–82, 116, 117, 148, 153

Reiss, Jon, 169, 172–174 RE/SEARCH, 7, 8, 77 Reynolds, Simon, 76, 94, 101, 102, 125, 145, 146 Reznor, Trent, 163–167, 169, 170, 172, 174 Rich, Bill, 110, 111 Riefenstahl, Leni, 97 Ritual Industrial, 143 Roberts, David, 33 Rose, Tricia, 44 Rossencutter, Jim, 125, 126n9, 126n11 Rothenberg, David, 91, 92 Rotting Christ, 150, 155, 157 Roxy Music, 88 Rushton, Geoffrey, see Balance, John (Jhonn) Rygg, Kristoffer, 156 S Saci, Meryem, 39, 46, 50, 51 Sacrifice, 12, 29, 143, 172–174 Sadomasochism, 81, 169, 170 Saeed, Amir, 48 Safi, Michael, 40 Saiber, Arielle, 15 Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, 82 Salome MC, 40, 45, 46, 50 Sanderson, Joel, 123 Sandin, John, 120, 121, 126n11 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 21 Satie, Erik, 140 Savage, Jon, 2, 9, 10, 41, 111 Scarry, Elaine, 16, 131–133, 135, 136, 168, 169, 173, 174 Scatology, 80–85 Schloss Tegal, 114, 123–126 Schneider, Rick, 111, 120, 123 Schoenberg, Arnold, 10, 82 Scientology, 148 Scott, Travis, 57, 84

 INDEX 

Second Annual Report, 2 Secret Eye of L.A.Y.L.A.H., The, 152 Septicflesh, 157, 159 Shame, Humility, Revenge, 24 Shannon, Tavasha, 40, 47, 50 Sharpe, Christina, 56, 57, 66, 69 Shields, David, 103 Short-term Memory, 114–119, 122, 123 Shryane, Jennifer, 8, 14 Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, 18 Simpson, Dave, 23 Skeel, Jim, 112, 112n2, 113, 113n3, 115n5, 116–118, 125, 126, 126n9, 126n11 Skinny Puppy, 2, 3, 7–8, 15, 16, 42, 147–149, 152, 159 Slouka, Mark, 91 Snowpiercer, 68, 69 Soft Cell, 84 Sonic Youth, 21 Sontag, Susan, 165, 166 Sony, 40 Soul, 163 Soulsby, Nick, 22–25, 27, 28 Soundtracks for the Blind, 28 Spare, Austin Osman, 81, 143, 147, 151–153, 156–158 Spinalli, Steve, 110 SPK, 7, 17, 41, 77, 109–111, 113–115, 117, 118, 120, 121, 123–126, 126n10 Splendor & Misery, 55–57, 66–69 Spotify, 40 Stapleton, Steve, 17, 100–102 Steele, Clinton, 23 Stelarc, 13 Stockhausen, Karl, 8, 10, 137 Stubbs, David, 92, 94, 95, 103 Stull, Staci, 112, 113, 126n11 Suada, 38, 39

201

Sumerian Daemons, 157 Survival Research Laboratories, 77, 112 Swans, 17, 19–34 Sweigart, Steve, 120 T Tangerine Dream, 113 Tantra, 153 Tarlow, Sarah, 23 Tattooing, 74, 77, 79 Technopaganism, 146, 147 Test Dept., 83 Tetsuo: The Iron Man, 4, 141 Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, 143, 146, 147, 149, 150, 153, 157 Thelema, 148, 149, 151, 152 Themes from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 156 There Existed an Addiction to Blood, 55–59, 69 Thomas, Deryk, 25, 30 Thornburg, Harvey, 101 Three 6 Mafia, 57 Throbbing Gristle, 2, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 41, 42, 73, 75, 76, 79–82, 97, 110, 111, 113, 120, 143, 145, 147, 155, 164 Tibet, David, 146, 147, 149, 150, 159 Tiessen, Reginald, 38–40, 46, 51 Toop, David, 91–95, 102 To Pimp a Butterfly, 59 TOPY, see Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth Torture, 2, 4, 16, 55, 62, 63, 96, 164–170, 173, 174 Trump, Donald, 47 Tutti, Cosey Fanni, 1, 2, 9, 75, 80 Tzara, Tristan, 89, 103

202 

INDEX

U Ulver, 151, 156 V Vale, V., 7, 9, 41, 42, 74, 75, 77–79, 111, 115 Van de Kree, Charles, 102 Vayenas, Sotiris, 157, 158 Vecchio, Ruth, 42, 145 Velasco-Pufleau, Luis, 62 Vile, Sarah-Alice, 39, 43 Visions of Bodies Being Burned, 56, 59, 65 W Wagner, Mark, 123 Wallis, Jennifer, 8 Walvin, James, 67 Warthog Records, 38 Watchmen, 163 Watson, Chris, 89, 91, 98, 100 Wawzenek, Bryan, 164 Wax Trax!, 9, 123 Wealt, Matthew, 71

Wengrofsky, Jeffrey, 21 Went, Johanna, 73 We Rose From Your Bed With The Sun In Our Head, 26 West, Kanye, 56, 57, 91 Whitehouse, 120–123, 125 White Light from the Mouth of Infinity, 23, 25, 28 Williams, Evan Calder, 45, 132 Woods, Bret D., 41, 42 Woolf, Virginia, 139 Wyllie, Timothy, 147, 148 Y Yardley, Heidi, 26 Yeezus, 56 Yellow Magic Orchestra, 116 Young God Records, 27–29, 32, 33 YouTube, 56, 57, 166 Z Zero Kama, 152–155 Zerzan, John, 134, 136 Žižek, Slavoj, 8, 76, 77