a work aesthetic / the machineries of joy
Timothy Gabriele points me to some recent pieces of his that address the legacy of industrial / Cold Wave / Electronic Body Wave / Minimal Synth and its reactivation in the last few years
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/column/143901-technos-labor-force-rocks-betrayal/
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/column/124399-things-we-were-due-to-forget-the-cold-undertow-of-minimal-waves/
The first of those, "Techno’s Labor Force, Rock’s Betrayal, and the Birth of the Fascist Groove Thing" is instalment #1 of a trilogy, he says: Part 2 will be posted on Pop Matters in a few days and traces "the industrial sonic (concrete/atonal strand) through 90s scenes like gabber, idm, drill n bass, and techstep at a time when 'industrial' itself became more heavy guitar rock" while Part 3 will follow the trajectory "into the present with post-millenial acts/scenes like glitch and Mille Plateaux illbient, House of God/Downwards/Surgeon/Sandwell District, Vex'd style dubstep, Ekoplekz, CLR techno."
(Now Tim, don't be forgetting Mordant Music, who have that connection to 2nd-wave
Avant-F/WORK-ers Portion Control. And Moon Wiring Club are hugely influenced by Laibach's Kapital - got to be vinyl version, mind!).
If I were to redo Energy Flash now, this is one of the threads that could do with pulling out more... just how many 90s electronic bods, from Jeff Mills to Achim Szepanski to Oliver Chesler, have the industrial connection. In America, for many it was the gateway drug into techno. But then in the U.K. you have Greater Than One turning into a menagerie of bleep/rave/gabber alter-egos.. And weren't Black Dog coming originally from a Coil-y sigil-ly esoterrorist type place? Mixmaster Morris started out in this zone too I think, transitioning through sample-heavy DJ-cutup type tracks into chillbient...
Talking of A Work Aesthetic: now this is a track the Monitor crew used to love. Can't remember if it was Stubbs or Oldfield who had the record, but it got played a lot at DJ sets.
Arbeit meaning Work of course.
Tune got remade for this Krupps remix project that came out in the late Eighties if i recall right (Oldfield got to interview them for MM)
Don't recall hearing this other early Krupps project at the time, but "Steelworks Symphony" seems to very slightly predate Test Dept, if not quite Neubauten. For some reason though Bohn-heads in those days regarded Die Krupps as chancers and 'jumpers,or so I seem to recall
Nitzer Ebb! I saw them at the Fridge in Brixton. They could certainly put on a good show, but I (and probably most people who'd have any atrraction to this kind of music) could never get past the DAF-tribute-band thing. Dan Miller really believed in them and stuck with them though.
(Now I think about it I reviewed the third album, on which Ebb tried to break with that pattern and explore bluesier/rock-ier modes (as did, er, Mode, round about the same time))
DAF! If anything is the industrial/acidhaus shared DNA alpha-origin point it's them (and Liaisons Dangereuses).
Look for old DAFtunes on YouTube and you find countless live-footages of their 2011 reunion tour! But also:
Later they tried to go mersh/Mode with things like "Absolute Bodycontrol" and "Brothers"
DAFt things I've done in my time: bought the Gabi Del Dago debut solo album the month it came out. I think it was one of those heavy-discount/"chart hype" jobs that record companies used to do back then, but still...
Sold it a few weeks later.
Probably would have done better with the Robert Gorl solo stuff.