Spluttering rapid-fire drum machines. Screeching feedback. The world's coolest Elvis impersonator crooning and yelping on the mic and the inimitable Martin Rev on keys and rhinestones. This is everything a rock n roll show should be, without a Les Paul in sight.
Old live clips like these give the impression that a Suicide gig back in the day would hit just as hard and feel every bit as thrillingly, viscerally intense to a jaded 21st century noise and/or industrial fan burned out on volume and distortion, should we choose to bunk off our "kill baby Hitler" mission and travel back to 1980s New York instead.
If it wasn't apparent from previous posts, here at n0teeth we are suckers for a bit of live electronic action - the glorious Ballardian car crash between meat and machine, the sound of the human condition bearing its hideous guts through the medium of dangerously overcooked cables and wires. Here are some blistering performances we would've loved to have been in the room for:
Throbbing Gristle - Discipline (San Francisco, 1981)
This 9-minute or so clip captures the TG live experience at its most violent and unpredictable. While their bandmates keep time with nailgun rhythms and bandsaw riffs, Genesis prowls the stage emitting tortured screams and barks, pausing only to bang their head against the speaker stacks, "play" the bass and snog a front row audience member. It's a performance that is as cathartic for the viewer as it must have been for the band; I certainly feel less inclined to bang my own head against anything after rewatching it a couple of times.
Although the above upload is the canonical place to view this clip - coming up to 18 years on Youtube with the brief but perfectly accurate description of "real industrial, yo." - n0teeth first saw it on an old Cleopatra Records DVD which runs the gamut from undisputed old industrial legends such as TG, Neubauten and Clock DVA to 90s crunch like Chemlab and Front Line Assembly, plus a load of Los Angeles goth dreck that presumably no other label would touch with a ten foot barge pole and a hazmat suit. Seeing this clip was a formative experience for n0teeth, showing just how "heavy" industrial music could be before the influx of guitars or danceable rhythms.
Motor - Junker (Yokohama, 2007)
This is exactly the kind of unhinged chaos you want from a live techno performance; if you're just gonna stand there twiddling knobs it might as well just be a DJ set (not there's nothing wrong with that, just don't call it a live set!). We want sweat and fear and thrills. We want some guy (neither Bryan nor Mr. No, as far as I can tell) marching around the stage venting his spleen like a psychotic sergeant-major while a digital drum pad gets whipped like a particularly demanding submissive. The crowd sounds bang up for it and the low quality of the video (2007 being smack in the middle of the golden era of low quality phone videos at gigs) can't mask the sheer frenzied energy of Motor doing their thing.
The closest I've found to a current artist that can rock it like Motor could back in the day is Container aka Ren Schofield, whose shows - as covered on here before - will make you feel like you've been chewed up and digested by some large, hideous scaly thing that lives in a murky cave on a polluted beach.
Headcleaner (London, 2010)
With a cocktail of analogue-sounding synth-pulse-beats and Ceephax-esque ringtone bleeps, Dave Headcleaner gets the room jumping. Or at least shuffling and nodding its head - perhaps, in 2010, Headcleaner was a little ahead of his time, even for the Plex crowd. Maybe the concepts of 'avin it in the rave and and chin-stroking appreciation of experimental modular synth tinkering were still too distant from each other in the punters' consciousness at that point, but within two or three years that very same venue (Corsica Studios, n0teeth's second home) would host acts like Perc and Karenn employing similarly complex tools to generate similarly unabashed dance floor delight. And during that time, of course, there was a certain other act going the other way, bringing the rave to the chin-strokers...
Factory Floor (London, 2012)
It's impossible to overstate the excitement this band stirred at the start of the 2010s. The sheer genius of their simple, minimalist electronics and metronomic live drums felt absolutely massive in a live setting, temporarily transforming every room they played (including venerable artsy instutions like London's ICA, where Neubauten once had a crack at amateur tunnelling work) into a cavernous warehouse. The Factory Floor was staffed by musicians with experience in "organic", wood & steel based instrumentation as well as monstrous acid apocalypse raves, and the above clip does a good job of showing how the resulting sound was at once a warm psychedelic trip and a coldly precise electronic workout. Few if any bands have ever managed to get sullen indie kids popping pills and shaking their bums with as much taste and class as this.