Mit a bang, mit a boom, mit a bing-bang-bing-bang boom (and many other noises besides)

"Eh, I never really cared much for Ministry/Nine Inch Nails/some bizarrely irrelevant strawman I've just fashioned out of a half-remembered Tool video from MTV in 1998."

American industrial is often snootily dismissed out of hand by people who in all likelihood might have heard the odd Wax Trax! release, decided they didn't like the disco beat or the heavy metal riffs or some other undeniably present but far from defining element, and concluded that the 4th largest country in the world's contributions to industrial music can be judged on one's feelings towards a dozen or so bands from late 80s/early 90s Chicago.



Today we are going to undertake a thorough, rubber-gloved probe of the gloriously noisy pre- and para- Jourgensen world of American industrial music, so as to arm the reader with a solid retort to such dismissals, and hopefuly burst a few tympanic membranes in the process. If you've ever grumbled that a certain kind of industrial fan only likes industrial "made by some guy bashing an oil drum with a metal pipe" then I am sorry to report that I am most definitely that kind of industrial fan. It's already broken, why fix it?

First stop: the Midwest

n0teeth's introduction to the dented steel underbelly of American industrial was via a December 1985 letter from that highly respected periodical, The San Bernardino County Sun, which has been circulating online for a while now, reproduced below in all its prim, censorious glory:

"Dear Ann Landers: I was interested in that column about rock music and how parents were upset by the dirty lyrics. According to the Wall Street Journal, noise levels might produce the most damage. It is my belief that the younger generation has gone bananas. Diane Petzke reports that junk rock (also known as industrial music) is produced by scrap metal, car parts and air-conditioning ducts rather than by guitars and drums. Any object that can be made to emit a sound when coaxed with an aluminum pipe, a lead mallet or a power drill qualifies. And if the sound is reminiscent of a garbage truck at 5 a.m., this is intentional. One group uses a pneumatic drill that screeches like several thousand long fingernails dragged across a chalkboard. Then one hears the slamming of a drum pedal against a 500-gallon storage tank. A skinny young man screams in German amid a collection of dented car doors, a cement mixer and a refrigerator scavenged for the occasion, ready to be banged, drilled and scraped. A Milwaukee group called Boy Dirt Car uses junkyard items or special sound effects in a record album called "Catalyst." It was recorded beneath an underpass in an old Schlitz brewery. "Machine Age Voodoo" uses airplane wings, crushed glass in mosquito netting and a shotgun. If all this doesn't add up to a mass nervous breakdown and the desecration of everything sacred in the world of music, I miss my guess. No signature Just Disgusted (A Father In Rhode Island)"

To which the quietly and prematurely self-assured reply:

"Dear Rhode Island: Cool it, Dad. This, too, shall pass. Let us hope it doesn't produce a few million deaf kids in the process. Aside from the hearing loss I see no danger of mistaking this trash for music long enough to make an impact on anyone."

There is much that is unintentionally amusing to unpack in the above exchange (not least Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells' Rhode Island's apparent confusion of SPK with the album title Machine Age Voodoo) but apart from that the previously unfamiliar name Boy Dirt Car leapt off the page at us. We felt a giddy thrill like we were discovering industrial music for the first time. Industrial music that lives up to its name in the most gratifyingly literal way possible.

You can't produce an album where a musician is credited simply with "metal" and expect n0teeth not to immediately fall in love with it.

BDC were formed by Darren Brown and Eric Lunde in '81 ... Gathering a few friends together for ungodly jams of entirely incompetent "industrial" racket, they knew they were onto something and proceeded to play with a revolving-door line-up that usually consisted of Brown, Lunde and any drunken and/or drug-addled buddy they could string along. Finally settling on a semi-stable line-up that consisted of the duo and Keith Brammer and Dan Kubinski of Die Kreuzen on various metal percussive instruments and noise-making devices, BDC found their feet and were soon hailed as America's answer to Einsterzunde [sic] Neubauten. - furious.com

Our travels through the Midwestern junkscape soon revealed a rich seam of rusty goodness hitherto obscured by the swaying cornfields.

BDC side project Impact Test sticks out on some wretched pair of Christian Death riddled comps called "Gothic Underground" and "Merry Maladies" like a solitary diamond glistening amongst the leavings of the dog that swallowed your jewellery box. (I am of course being grotesquely unfair to Rozz's far superior, cat-eating side project, Premature Ejaculation, but that'll be a whole other post in its own right one day.)

Minnesota's premier "found object" band Savage Aural Hotbed certainly scratch an itch (with a rusty nail) as well. The influence of Japanese taiko drumming wasn't something n0teeth had ever considered before, but with SAH it governs their every stroke of the drumstick. Er, so to speak.



The Deep South


Texan wrecking crew Miracle Room - seen above going hard at it on tour in a soon-to-be-Velvet-Divorced Czechoslovakia - bring a satisfying swing to proceedings, not a million miles from Cop Shoot Cop's jazzier moments. I was turned onto this lot by a long time internet chum whose father was in the band and who assumed that a group with saucepans for percussion and a stringed door for bass would be right up my street. Regular readers of this blog will be shocked to know that he was absolutely 100% correct in this assumption.

The East Coast

A decade after Z'EV began making a name for himself on the local, national & international experimental music circuit, junk rock came to New York City and immediately established itself as a raging megaphone for sociopolitical discontent, furiously fighting back against gentrification, the cops and just about anything else to cross paths with the squatter/artist scene.

A few years earlier and across the waters Test Dept and Officine Schwartz got political on the picket lines supporting the industrial working class. Missing Foundation would fight for the even further marginalised - squatters, the homeless, those internally displaced by the relentless march of gentrification across downtown - with the same fervour and similar instrumentation. As the below clip of fellow NYC noisemongers Black Rain (long before their forays into ambient techno, in a phase depicted by the Metal Rain compilation) demonstrates, the use of conventional instruments and the influence of punk and NYHC differentiate this strand of junk rock from the more purely industrial work of Z'ev and co. Which is a very dull, dry and academic way of saying these cats knew how to fucking rock.


Missing Foundation took this symbiosis of punkish controntation and industrial sensory assault to another level, even prompting CBS to produce the 1988 special news report "Cult of Rage". Cosey and GPO's milk, blood & piss enemas, Neubauten drilling through the stage at the ICA, Hanatarash's bulldozer stunt and even GG Allin's scatological stage antics pale in comparison to MF's gleefully violent exchange of projectiles with the audience culminating in - spoiler alert - a cheeky bit of self-immolation.


What you're listening to is not music. It's something new. Something called "combat art" [...] This enraged, delirious celebration of violence goes beyond anything envisioned by the slam dancers of the 70s. - Mike Taibbi, CBS

Missing Foundation's story is barely believable at times - one source even claims that a cannibalistic murderer walked amongst their fanbase - but beyond the urban legends there is a solid bed (a foundation, you might say) of gloriously cacophonous metal-on-metal clanging junk rock to satisfy even the most jaded industrial palette.

"Kill Missing Foundation; Don't Masturbate"?

The Pacific Northwest

The PNW is where n0teeth's scavenger hunt for the true sound of American junk rock struck paydirt. Taking Missing Foundation style percussive activism to the Republican Party convention and WTO events across the globe, the Infernal Noise Brigade formed in Seattle, Washington - the home of Starbucks and, some might say, the spiritual home of sickly, faux-hip Gen-X capitalism:

IFB in action over the years: "We are a tactical rhythmic unit"

Equally heavy on the agit-prop but more prolific on the musical side, we have the delightfully onomatopoeically-named ¡TchKung!, described by a fellow blog-shunter as "the most dangerous band in Seattle":


And last but not least, coming from Portland, Oregan with an accessibility that could well have been a bridge between industrial music and that other rainy northwestern American city's more radio-friendly grunge sounds, Hitting Birth are seen here hitting all the right notes (and some carefully selected wrong ones for good measure):


The West Coast

At one end of California's history with junk rock you have riot-provoking progenitors Crash Worship and at the other, the inimitable and much-missed Babyland. Somewhere along the line, a mad scientist by the name of Mark Pauline ditched the musical aspect in favour of pure mechanised spectacle, with his proto-Robot Wars industrial performance art project Survival Research Laboratories:


In sharp contrast to the stripped-down, DIY approach of the previously discussed bands, SRL's shows are a massive engineering feat which Mark Pauline has admirably managed to just about keep safely under control for over forty years, save for a 1982 incident in which he horribly fucked up his hand (WARNING: graphic photos). The painstaking partial reconstruction of said hand by nerve specialists lends Pauline a faint aura of cyberpunk mythology - of a man who, after coming a cropper through careless interaction with a machine, almost ends up becoming one himself.

The influence of SRL is apparent not just in the aesthetics but entire approach of industrial doom metaller Author & Punisher. Among the many sinister ideas the softly-spoken Mark Pauline shares with the interviewer is the concept of furthering man-machine interaction until the lines are blurred, especially in the context of military weapons technology. Just how tactile A&P's array of MIDI triggers really is can be debated til the robo-cows come home, but I'll take any excuse to repost this meme:

Junk rock worldwide

After discovering these gems in the rust it was difficult to know where to cut the golden thread short. Are Slipknot, with their custom percussion, part of the junk rock continuum? What about Blue Man Group? Even without stretching the concept that far, we still haven't even mentioned Illusion of Safety or Compactor. But it's time to move on from the US and take a look at junk rock around the world.

Mutoid Waste Company - the UK's answer to SRL. Tangentially related: the destructivist day out Scrapclub is well worth a visit if it ever comes to your town or you happen to be passing through.

Bästard / Le Syndicat - the former, undeniably junk rock; the latter, more of what we'd call "literal industrial", but with enough conventional rhythmic elements (especially in later works) to set them apart from those engaged in the noble pursuit of pure mechanistic noise worship. And then there's La Nomenklatur. You'll want to be wearing a sturdy pair of boots and a kevlar helmet for La Nomenklatur.

Aside from Rifiuti Solidi Urbani (light on the junk, heavy on the rock) and Capone & Bungt-Bangt (industrial junk rock without the industrial), Hardcore Tamburo are the most noteworthy Italian band flying the flag for metal-on-metal sounds. Of course, Officine Schwartz were patient zero for the whole lot.

We've surely mentioned Norillag before, but there's no harm in mentioning them again: this is white-hot steel-plated industrial fury, in which you can almost hear the rivets popping off the iron carapace of the boiler as it is pushed beyond its limits.

Imagine the iconic image of Marx, Engels and Lenin but instead it's the three great figureheads of Slovenian industrial: Laibach, Borgheisa, and the motherfucking Stroj.

Der Eisenrost / Zeitlich Vergelter / Chu Ishikawa: man-machine music just doesn't get much more abrasive yet compulsively enjoyable than this.

Sektor 304 / Waste Disposal Machine: the dark lords and bright sparks of Portuguese industrial, respectively.

Militia is pleasingly described by their Dutch-language Wiki page as an "industrial-percussieband". Their eco-anarchist agenda makes them a notably left-leaning exception in the martial indutrial scene.

De Fabriek: when you call your band "the factory" you'd better have the appropriate sounds to back it up. Clearly not an issue for this Dutch group at all.

The Skeptics offered a noisy, raw and extremely welcome corrective to the rather fey impression one might have of New Zealand's independent music scene - the Dunedin Sound, this ain't.

Beinhaus define their music as "Neue Deutsche Industrie", a fitting description for a furious molotov cocktail of sound that combines the piercing, feral screams of early, speed-guzzling Blixa with a clattering percussive din. Objects made of plastic, metal, glass, brick and god knows what else all make an appearance here.

Connecting all of the above is the idea of "industrial music" being taken so literally that the words readily spring to mind even to the unfamiliar observer. Perhaps some of these artists would be reluctant to stand up and be counted in the genre, considering it far too restrictive a label for their art. But here at n0teeth we like industrial music, and we know it when we hear it, see it and smell it. And this is it. This is what it's all about.

"Is this industrial?" No. This is industrial.

And on that note, we're off to see the O.G.s do their thing, for the first time in a decade.