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Industrial History The term "Industrial" was coined by the band Throbbing Gristle for their music forming Industry Records in the late 70's. They were also joined by several freinds such as Boyd Rice (NON) and Monte Cazzaza. Their music was based largly upon expeimental and noise music. It also was not based soley on music but something more like performace art. Joining them in a non-musical way was Mark Pauline of Survival Research Labs who built large robots and destructive machines. All of this is documented on the web and especially in the book "Industrial Culture Handbook" printed by Re/Search magazine which came out around 1983. With the 80's and the rise of synthpop (New Wave), various bands also taking advantage of these new tools were slowly being grouped together. First and formost would be Einstruzende Nuebauten, a German band who uses power tools as instruments as well as making instruments out of scrap metal, the bands forming after the disentigration of Throbbing Gristle from its members, Coil, Psychic TV, and Chris & Cosey. We must also mention Skinny Puppy and Ministry, although their place (as well as the other bands) were by no means known definatly as most bands of this time period were switched between goth, punk, new wave, cyber-punk, industrial, and probably a few others depending upon who you talked to, their personal preferences and what they thought of the band in question. These bands would be seperated from other genres such as New Wave (Devo), Punk and Hardcore (Sex Pistols and Black Flag), goth (Christian Death) and synthpop (Depeche Mode) due to various common factors usally including a facination on the dark side of life (war, crime, fascism, etc.), technology, body modification, S&M, shock tactics, and the use of samples as well as synthetic and found sounds. One record company that handled much of this music, Wax Trax, took the lead for the genre and became the defacto leaders in the late 80's. this was the hey day of industrial music, much like the early 80's were for punk rock. Well, nothing lasts forever and the musical genre and sound became a little more defined and started being mixed with other musical styles as they always are. Bands started using real guitars and drums, heavy metal elements found their way into industrial, various metal bands started having indsutrial sounds to them. This was also when some bands that were considered industrial at first (NIN) began to get soem recognition in the mainstream market. Thus, they were quickly labeled as "non-industrial". There was also an explotion of soundalike bands copying the sounds of previous bands. Some were pretty good, but where earlier bands all had their own sound and were at times sounded radically different, these all tended to have one of a handful of sounds that solidified the "Industrial sound" meaning that bands that didn't sound like them were instantly labeled as "not industrial". The early and mid 90's were the doldrums of indsutrial music. Many bands kept going. They branched out. Formed their own musical styles which spawned more soundalike bands. Eventually names and labels were given to these bands and trends such as synthpop, Electronic Dance Music (EBM), Industrial (or Intelligent) Dance Music (IDM), Cold Wave, Dark Wave, powernoise, futurepop, and Lord knows what else. I can't keep up with them all. All the time, people argued on what was "Industrial" and what was not (once again, based mostly upon what the speaker liked, surprise). So here we are, in the early 00's and with dozens of styles of music and a term "Industrial" upon which people are divided upon as to what it actually means and who should be grouped with who. Looking back to the origins of the term industrial gives us no real help because nobody has been doing what the creators of the term meant it to be for a long, long time. Even later usage of the term is not too much help because at the time it was fairly easy to group all "industrial" bands together because there simply wasn't enough of them to get too confused over. Now, we have tons of bands that need to be described somehow, otherwise people won't get any useful information out of record reviews and bad DJs won't know which albums to buy or play. |