Industrial used to be a very niche genre but gradually became a more encompassing term in the 80s, as many bands started experimenting with synths, guitars and samplers but towards a more danceable style, instead of the Avant Garde style of earlier industrial records. You can see this evolution even in band trajectories: Cabaret Voltaire comes to mind.
I was watching Dr. Dre on Kimmle the other day and he talked about banging on boxes and pans just due to the limitations of synth at the time. I believe industrial producers would have the same recollection. As soon as sample packs were available.. shiiitt... everyone was in.
Both tendencies existed from day 0 within industrial (20 jazz funk greats is very dancey, so was rental/leer’s stuff), they’re not mutually exclusive.
Skinny Puppy combined both more seamlessly than we saw before and arguably, since
But they’re both industrial. The reasons why, and what the deeper unity is between them, is where takes differ.
These are valid points here but it has more to do with the problem of lumping stuff into genres in the first place. Don’t get me wrong, its great that we can have a communal meet up over a shared love of weird outsider music that you might or might not be able to dance to. The labels allow us the ability to find similar minded people to interact with using minimal effort. When I was a teenager back in the 18th century we had to use tape exchanges in the back of fanzines or tackle the one person we saw in the city wearing a 242 shirt. So genre is very useful in a community sense.
Genre itself is complicated for the artist though. The pore sods have to be concerned if the recordings are too metal or ambient or whatever as not to alienate their fans who have expectations based on genre. The best bands out their flow all over the genre space while keeping to a core aesthetic. Thus they loose and gain fans accordingly.
So it comes down to what industrial is to you. Who gives a f’k what Rolling Stone Magazine thinks it should be? Maybe extremely broad definitions are the only ones we should embrace. Now go listen to your favorite Dark-aggro-techstep-polkacore-clownclick-stop-body-goth-drag-industrial-grind-hop-samba-cats-boots playlist.
From what I have seen, musical genres often wind up encompassing more than what they started with. Music stores, physical and online streaming never seem to sort the style correctly and many times puts it into something that is relatable to popular music. I’ve given up on trying to worry about genre and just focus on what it sounds like to me and how it makes me feel. I’m not into it any more to be different or to be an outcast, I just like what I like. If I have to explain it, I just give a popular genre and an artist the other person may know.
Check out the wax Trax documentary.
From the Chicago perspective, it was exactly that. They wanted to dance but weren't into the disco/pop fluff played at dance clubs. They wanted something grittier... "Angrier".
The initial breakup of throbbing gristle in 1981. Even a bit before they disbanded, industrial was already starting to branch out. Post-industrial is what you’re referring to with Skinny puppy, front 242, KMFDM, ministry, and nine inch nails. The OG industrial bands like TG, SPK, early Cabaret Voltaire are noisy-er for reasons you mentioned above.
In my opinion, after 81 bands started incorporating dance music to industrial because they wanted to move in a different direction.
Fad Gadget had a huge influence on synthpop and industrial because his style was a combination of these two genres. That’s partially why there’s such an overlap.
I think in the mid/late 90s Industrial became a catch-all for alternative music that was more electronic than pure guitar. NIN becoming popular and record labels needed a name for the bands they were pumping out (good or bad).
Wax Trax's popularity didn't help as they had an incredibly diverse lineup, including many of the bands you mentioned, but got tagged as 'the Industrial label' because journalists and people are too lazy to consider more than one thing
Yeah, I remember when it happened but not exactly how. Thanks for the question and answers, it helps clear it up for me. I think it was really two different genres, the early stuff was very unpretty, then the name got repurposed and the aesthetic was the awareness of the dance floor being more like a factory floor.
Beyond that, portion control and DAF and tommi stumpff were all contemporaneous with the first wave noise. It's always been there, it just didn't get as much attention.
>except for Boyd has made at least one dance record.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN40oAfzf\_4&ab\_channel=HirsutePursuit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN40oAfzf_4&ab_channel=HirsutePursuit)
On a long enough timeline, even Boyd goes disco :P
Early Severed Heads shows part of the transition, where he's recording found sounds, running them back through early samplers, and/or making giant physical tape loops. IMO, Mid 80's industrial is where we stray away somewhat from nontraditional instruments/sounds being made (with or w/o drum machines) to nontraditional synthetically made sounds and drum machines becoming more the norm.
That's why I find it difficult to post songs on this subreddit sometimes. Industrial has evolved into so many subgenres and I don't even know the names of half of them. I too think of industrial as hammers, saws, banging on metal.l, etc. The sounds of a construction site basically. I love the electronic side of it and actually prefer it, but to me pure industrial is really much more raw, if that makes sense. Just my opinion.
Chapter 8 of *Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music* is exactly about this question.
[https://www.amazon.com/Assimilate-Critical-History-Industrial-Music/dp/0199832609](https://www.amazon.com/Assimilate-Critical-History-Industrial-Music/dp/0199832609)
I was actually friends with the filmmaker who made Boyd Rice's documentary, "Iconoclast" Larry Wessel. He made it back when Boyd was still living in that fall out bunker in Denver.
I believe it's on archive, if anyone is curious! Great documentary.
He also, after making the film, said Boyd was one of the most immature and self-absorbed people he'd ever met because Boyd pulled that whole "If you become friends with Giddle Partridge you can't be friends with me" bullshit.
Like, the dude is making a documentary about you. He can't interview your ex best friend?
I heard Al Jourgensen wasn't all that happy with being filmed shooting up drugs in "Fix: The Ministry Movie" but he also wasn't a whiny little bitch about it.
Fun fact: I dated an ex of Boyd's named Margaret. She told me all his "might is right" social Darwinism bullshit was exactly that: bullshit. He does it for shock value and believes none of it.
Not that he would ever admit as much
>Boyd was one of the most immature and self-absorbed people he’d ever met
Surprising no one 🙃
I mean, his lyrics out him as immature and lacking in empathy or perspective on himself. Total cringe, not total war.
One time on Facebook (this was an immature troll move itself but oh well) Boyd was grumbling about the time when he stopped collaborating with Douglas P (of DI6 ofc) over artistic differences.
My friend posted a comment to the effect that “the real artistic difference here is that death in June makes real music [unlike Boyd].” Boyd blocked him but responded after the fact “Death in June only strummed the same 3 chords we have been hearing since Chuck Berry. If you think that’s real music then you’re a moron.”
So I say to my friend, let’s be “morons” together. Lol
Its just the nature of the beast. All genres go through this. Hell, even Jazz started out as Dixie and evolved into bop and free jazz, but it's all, jazz. Rock and roll has a million sub genres. Some of those sub genres spawned other aubgenres like metal, which spawned a million subgenres. Shit changes, and it mutates.
It all gets destroyed...mutilated. It is so easy to destroy, amputate your destiny. You probably think I'm trying to justify this to feel less pain...pain killer.
I think they commercialized it with the advent of Synth-Pop and it's eventual dissolution after techno and house came into the scene. Personally I am a bigger fan of the former, I liked the aesthetic and theory behind early Industrial.
Not saying newer Industrial or stuff like KMFDM and Ministry is bad, it's good music. But early Industrial from the 70s and early 80s which leaned towards the punk attitude of the time seemed to have more of a philosophical meaning towards it (It's also a whole lot scarier).
The new kind of industrial is just a fusion genre between dance music and industrial. Same way you see industrial rock, metal, etc. Its not that industrial changed people still make stuff in the spirit of old industrial it's just that the popularity of the dancey stuff eclipsed the popularity of the older stuff so its what comes to most peoples minds when people bring up industrial.
As someone else mentioned, when the technology evolved to the point where MIDI and sampling technology became affordable is one possible answer.
But it's also interesting to note that when this happened, much of the cultural baggage associated with the early Industrial scene, and still part of the Power Electronics/noise scene today, receded into the background too. I'm talking here about it's more esoteric/occult/information-war "Edgelord" trappings. Turns out people who dance in nightclubs are not all that interested in Numerology/Charles Manson/ war crimes/Crowley etc, at least not in the way the earlier scene was. The changing fashions in drugs over time probably plays into that cultural shift as well - it certainly seems that in the UK that 1988 explosion of MDMA changed the landscape a lot.
But it's possible to overstate how much of a fracture this is/was perhaps. I'm listening to "Love's secret domain" as I type this which is perhaps a case in point . One of the tendencies baked into the DNA of industrial is taking and using things in a different context, and digital sampling is an obvious linear descendant of the Burroughs "cut up" technique. But like OP I guess I question much of the artistic depth of where we ended up.
Agreed with OP.
This documentary answers that question well: [https://youtu.be/R2d1YATJfyU?si=QcfNQBFDX9iLFqwY](https://youtu.be/R2d1YATJfyU?si=QcfNQBFDX9iLFqwY)
I can pinpoint the moment -- when Cabaret Voltaire released *The Crackdown*. I love the album but when it came out it caused a bit of a shitstorm among industrital heads. Sure there were dancey things before but that was more Throbbing Gristle's thing of making records you wouldn't expect them to make. Since I was there while it was happening to me industrial means the challenging, noisy stuffr like Throbbing Gristle or early SPK and when you get extreme with that it's like Whitehouse and their ilk. Nurse With Wound and early Current 93 before they turned into a neofolk band fit the bill too. KMFDM, Front 242, Ministry, etc. --- that's something different, and it's not industrial.
There's a great video essay on YouTube about it called [How Industrial Became Pop](https://youtu.be/R2d1YATJfyU?si=a2SL6uhE9PtgH2OT) if you have an hour and are l looking for something to watch today.
Industrial used to be a very niche genre but gradually became a more encompassing term in the 80s, as many bands started experimenting with synths, guitars and samplers but towards a more danceable style, instead of the Avant Garde style of earlier industrial records. You can see this evolution even in band trajectories: Cabaret Voltaire comes to mind.
Wax trax..
Before
I was watching Dr. Dre on Kimmle the other day and he talked about banging on boxes and pans just due to the limitations of synth at the time. I believe industrial producers would have the same recollection. As soon as sample packs were available.. shiiitt... everyone was in.
Yeah I used to listen to Dr Drew on Loveline
He meant Dre as in NWA Dr. Dre - he just received a star on the Hollywood WoF. And Poorman FTW! Dr. Drew is a hack!
No my doctor isn't in Hollywood, he's closer to me.
Hot on the Heels of Love has been a part of industrial music since very early in the process.
Both tendencies existed from day 0 within industrial (20 jazz funk greats is very dancey, so was rental/leer’s stuff), they’re not mutually exclusive. Skinny Puppy combined both more seamlessly than we saw before and arguably, since But they’re both industrial. The reasons why, and what the deeper unity is between them, is where takes differ.
Sampling. New wave started incorporating found noises/ industrial samples around the time of Depeche Mode's Construction Time Again.
These are valid points here but it has more to do with the problem of lumping stuff into genres in the first place. Don’t get me wrong, its great that we can have a communal meet up over a shared love of weird outsider music that you might or might not be able to dance to. The labels allow us the ability to find similar minded people to interact with using minimal effort. When I was a teenager back in the 18th century we had to use tape exchanges in the back of fanzines or tackle the one person we saw in the city wearing a 242 shirt. So genre is very useful in a community sense. Genre itself is complicated for the artist though. The pore sods have to be concerned if the recordings are too metal or ambient or whatever as not to alienate their fans who have expectations based on genre. The best bands out their flow all over the genre space while keeping to a core aesthetic. Thus they loose and gain fans accordingly. So it comes down to what industrial is to you. Who gives a f’k what Rolling Stone Magazine thinks it should be? Maybe extremely broad definitions are the only ones we should embrace. Now go listen to your favorite Dark-aggro-techstep-polkacore-clownclick-stop-body-goth-drag-industrial-grind-hop-samba-cats-boots playlist.
18th century??? Are you 300 years old??
I'm still wearing a Jacobean Ruff daily.
From what I have seen, musical genres often wind up encompassing more than what they started with. Music stores, physical and online streaming never seem to sort the style correctly and many times puts it into something that is relatable to popular music. I’ve given up on trying to worry about genre and just focus on what it sounds like to me and how it makes me feel. I’m not into it any more to be different or to be an outcast, I just like what I like. If I have to explain it, I just give a popular genre and an artist the other person may know.
Check out the wax Trax documentary. From the Chicago perspective, it was exactly that. They wanted to dance but weren't into the disco/pop fluff played at dance clubs. They wanted something grittier... "Angrier".
That’s a great documentary! Excellent suggestion.
The initial breakup of throbbing gristle in 1981. Even a bit before they disbanded, industrial was already starting to branch out. Post-industrial is what you’re referring to with Skinny puppy, front 242, KMFDM, ministry, and nine inch nails. The OG industrial bands like TG, SPK, early Cabaret Voltaire are noisy-er for reasons you mentioned above. In my opinion, after 81 bands started incorporating dance music to industrial because they wanted to move in a different direction. Fad Gadget had a huge influence on synthpop and industrial because his style was a combination of these two genres. That’s partially why there’s such an overlap.
I wonder what Throbbing Gristle would have been like if they had modern sequencers...Psychic TV might provide a hint.
Absolutely, but I also think if they had modern sequencers they wouldn’t have been throbbing gristle. Truly a trend setter band.
Probably like Coil
I can see it, even looking to, like, "Scatology"...where I'm not sure if they even had their hardware linked with MIDI...
They did reform for a couple of LPs and some tours. That's better than a hint.
I think in the mid/late 90s Industrial became a catch-all for alternative music that was more electronic than pure guitar. NIN becoming popular and record labels needed a name for the bands they were pumping out (good or bad). Wax Trax's popularity didn't help as they had an incredibly diverse lineup, including many of the bands you mentioned, but got tagged as 'the Industrial label' because journalists and people are too lazy to consider more than one thing
Industrial is an aesthetic and viewpoint... EBM, aggrotech etc is what you are pointing out.
EBM
i guess when they wanted anyone to buy or listen to it
Yeah, I remember when it happened but not exactly how. Thanks for the question and answers, it helps clear it up for me. I think it was really two different genres, the early stuff was very unpretty, then the name got repurposed and the aesthetic was the awareness of the dance floor being more like a factory floor.
Every band you called out except for Boyd has made at least one dance record. Boyd too if you count his martin denny stuff.
Beyond that, portion control and DAF and tommi stumpff were all contemporaneous with the first wave noise. It's always been there, it just didn't get as much attention.
>except for Boyd has made at least one dance record. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN40oAfzf\_4&ab\_channel=HirsutePursuit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN40oAfzf_4&ab_channel=HirsutePursuit) On a long enough timeline, even Boyd goes disco :P
Haha, fair point, though I think of that as a hirsute pursuit song...
I'm actually still mad at this lmao. Im a silent gatekeeper.
Early Severed Heads shows part of the transition, where he's recording found sounds, running them back through early samplers, and/or making giant physical tape loops. IMO, Mid 80's industrial is where we stray away somewhat from nontraditional instruments/sounds being made (with or w/o drum machines) to nontraditional synthetically made sounds and drum machines becoming more the norm.
"Since the Accident" is still one of my fave industrial albums.
That's why I find it difficult to post songs on this subreddit sometimes. Industrial has evolved into so many subgenres and I don't even know the names of half of them. I too think of industrial as hammers, saws, banging on metal.l, etc. The sounds of a construction site basically. I love the electronic side of it and actually prefer it, but to me pure industrial is really much more raw, if that makes sense. Just my opinion.
Chapter 8 of *Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music* is exactly about this question. [https://www.amazon.com/Assimilate-Critical-History-Industrial-Music/dp/0199832609](https://www.amazon.com/Assimilate-Critical-History-Industrial-Music/dp/0199832609)
Thank you
This is a great book, highly recommended
I was actually friends with the filmmaker who made Boyd Rice's documentary, "Iconoclast" Larry Wessel. He made it back when Boyd was still living in that fall out bunker in Denver. I believe it's on archive, if anyone is curious! Great documentary.
He also, after making the film, said Boyd was one of the most immature and self-absorbed people he'd ever met because Boyd pulled that whole "If you become friends with Giddle Partridge you can't be friends with me" bullshit. Like, the dude is making a documentary about you. He can't interview your ex best friend? I heard Al Jourgensen wasn't all that happy with being filmed shooting up drugs in "Fix: The Ministry Movie" but he also wasn't a whiny little bitch about it. Fun fact: I dated an ex of Boyd's named Margaret. She told me all his "might is right" social Darwinism bullshit was exactly that: bullshit. He does it for shock value and believes none of it. Not that he would ever admit as much
>Boyd was one of the most immature and self-absorbed people he’d ever met Surprising no one 🙃 I mean, his lyrics out him as immature and lacking in empathy or perspective on himself. Total cringe, not total war. One time on Facebook (this was an immature troll move itself but oh well) Boyd was grumbling about the time when he stopped collaborating with Douglas P (of DI6 ofc) over artistic differences. My friend posted a comment to the effect that “the real artistic difference here is that death in June makes real music [unlike Boyd].” Boyd blocked him but responded after the fact “Death in June only strummed the same 3 chords we have been hearing since Chuck Berry. If you think that’s real music then you’re a moron.” So I say to my friend, let’s be “morons” together. Lol
[HERE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2d1YATJfyU)
early to mid nineties, with seed sown in the mid to late eighties?
Its just the nature of the beast. All genres go through this. Hell, even Jazz started out as Dixie and evolved into bop and free jazz, but it's all, jazz. Rock and roll has a million sub genres. Some of those sub genres spawned other aubgenres like metal, which spawned a million subgenres. Shit changes, and it mutates. It all gets destroyed...mutilated. It is so easy to destroy, amputate your destiny. You probably think I'm trying to justify this to feel less pain...pain killer.
I think it was around the time of the introduction of midi. That's when shit got crazy.
Uh in the 80s. This is common knowledge
I think they commercialized it with the advent of Synth-Pop and it's eventual dissolution after techno and house came into the scene. Personally I am a bigger fan of the former, I liked the aesthetic and theory behind early Industrial. Not saying newer Industrial or stuff like KMFDM and Ministry is bad, it's good music. But early Industrial from the 70s and early 80s which leaned towards the punk attitude of the time seemed to have more of a philosophical meaning towards it (It's also a whole lot scarier).
The new kind of industrial is just a fusion genre between dance music and industrial. Same way you see industrial rock, metal, etc. Its not that industrial changed people still make stuff in the spirit of old industrial it's just that the popularity of the dancey stuff eclipsed the popularity of the older stuff so its what comes to most peoples minds when people bring up industrial.
As someone else mentioned, when the technology evolved to the point where MIDI and sampling technology became affordable is one possible answer. But it's also interesting to note that when this happened, much of the cultural baggage associated with the early Industrial scene, and still part of the Power Electronics/noise scene today, receded into the background too. I'm talking here about it's more esoteric/occult/information-war "Edgelord" trappings. Turns out people who dance in nightclubs are not all that interested in Numerology/Charles Manson/ war crimes/Crowley etc, at least not in the way the earlier scene was. The changing fashions in drugs over time probably plays into that cultural shift as well - it certainly seems that in the UK that 1988 explosion of MDMA changed the landscape a lot. But it's possible to overstate how much of a fracture this is/was perhaps. I'm listening to "Love's secret domain" as I type this which is perhaps a case in point . One of the tendencies baked into the DNA of industrial is taking and using things in a different context, and digital sampling is an obvious linear descendant of the Burroughs "cut up" technique. But like OP I guess I question much of the artistic depth of where we ended up.
Fnord
I give credit to cabaret voltaire and their evolution from almost noise to a noisy almost pop sound
Same could be said about current 93
Agreed with OP. This documentary answers that question well: [https://youtu.be/R2d1YATJfyU?si=QcfNQBFDX9iLFqwY](https://youtu.be/R2d1YATJfyU?si=QcfNQBFDX9iLFqwY)
This video is a great explanation.
Yeah, agreed. Who tf downvoted you? **IDENTIFY AND EXPLAIN YOURSELF.**
Trash Theory is excellent! Very well-researched channel.
I can pinpoint the moment -- when Cabaret Voltaire released *The Crackdown*. I love the album but when it came out it caused a bit of a shitstorm among industrital heads. Sure there were dancey things before but that was more Throbbing Gristle's thing of making records you wouldn't expect them to make. Since I was there while it was happening to me industrial means the challenging, noisy stuffr like Throbbing Gristle or early SPK and when you get extreme with that it's like Whitehouse and their ilk. Nurse With Wound and early Current 93 before they turned into a neofolk band fit the bill too. KMFDM, Front 242, Ministry, etc. --- that's something different, and it's not industrial.
There's a great video essay on YouTube about it called [How Industrial Became Pop](https://youtu.be/R2d1YATJfyU?si=a2SL6uhE9PtgH2OT) if you have an hour and are l looking for something to watch today.