It is this blog's view that the emergence of Youth Code just over a decade ago was a watershed moment in industrial music, whether their hardcore punk approach to EBM does it for you or not. Their self-titled debut album was a breath of fresh air in a genre getting increasingly stale and self-referential; an electric shock to the system by outsiders who'd grown up in an entirely separate scene, absorbing completely different influences and bringing a whole new sonic and aesthetic vocabulary to this thing of ours.
There's an album that came out the following year still holds up as one of the most startlingly original and compellingly listenable contributions to the mid-2010s wave of "outsider industrial", an album that I happened to stick on while getting dressed earlier and got so engrossed in I'm now writing about it with one sock and no shirt on.
Unlike Ryan George and Sara Taylor, Philadelphia noise musician Noah Anthony wasn't an outsider to electronic music, but his (seemingly untinentional) forays into industrial techno under the name Profligate explored new territory completely uncharted by any established "scene" names in the world of rhythmic electronics or power noise.
Finding The Floor is melancholy, crunchy, danceable, oddly catchy in parts - by turns sweetly melodic and fizzing with distortion. The beats are all just the right side of lo-fi; there's none of that sickly, digitised, post-witch house compression going on. This album is a testament to how much human soul and heart can go into machine music and still come out warm and beating.
The opening trio of Girl Full Of Joy, We're Desperate and Can't Stop Shaking are decidedly on the harsher end of the spectrum, but you can hear Anthony applying admirable restraint to his noisy tendencies, allowing the beats to dominate.
The mood gets more introspective after that, but we're soon back on the dancefloor with the melancholic yet fast-paced Laughing Song. Beautiful melodies weave in and around whispered vocals, tape hiss and slamming beats; this sets us up nicely for the more mid-paced eight-minute title track, which feels like the prog-house response to the straight-on techno of Laughing Song.
The album ends on the utterly gorgeous We Can Have It All, a slower tune with a melody that could melt steel. You've been in Finding The Floor's company for just under an hour but have heard Profligate flaunt more ideas than some producers have managed to pack into a decade of work.
Dark grey clouds are gathering overheard, threatening to spoil my afternoon walk, but if there exists such a thing as techno for listening to on rainy Saturday afternoons, it's the sound of Profligate.
P.S. Happy EBM Day to all who celebrate!