![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() And the menacing drone suspending Levi’s minimal compositions hearkens back to Nurse With Wound’s calmer offerings. Everything in this soundtrack sounds like it’s being played urgently but wrong, carrying on in Einstürzende Neubauten’s tradition of scratching at things until they sound good. In the space left wide open by that lack, Levi floats microtonal strings and pounding, insistent production. Like David Lynch’s 1977 surrealist horror breakthrough Eraserhead, whose score can be considered an industrial benchmark in its own right, Under the Skin features very little dialogue. Jonathan Glazer’s sparse and chilling Under the Skin follows an alien dressed as a woman who lures unwitting men to their death beneath an inky black pool, a reversal of the usual narrative of sexual predation. British composer Mica Levi’s debut film score fits perfectly into this mold. So much of industrial music is about power: the power imbalance between the individual and the larger social structure around them, the power dynamic between the punisher and the punished. ![]() “It was all a struggle, and I just wanted to lash out at every target I possibly could.” No simple bloodletting, Streetcleaner remains a masterpiece of precision: Broadrick obliterated everything in his path. “I couldn't come to terms with anything,” Broadrick reflected on his teenage years. As inspired as the music was, it was also a reflection of inner turmoil. Its nihilistic sound is defined by programmed drums, low and lurching guitars, and Broadrick’s inhuman howls of pain. After a self-titled EP, Godflesh sharpened their approach on 1989’s Streetcleaner, one of industrial metal’s most uncompromising and influential statements. Godflesh formed when Broadrick, then 15, joined a band that had been experimenting with a drum machine, and he quickly swapped out their tamer influences-Killing Joke, the Cure-with heavier stuff. Yet Broadrick kept moving there were more rules left to disobey. For some musicians, assisting the birth of one genre would be enough. The precocious son of two members of the notorious late ’70s UK punk band Anti-Social, he was listening to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music by age eight and pioneering grindcore as a member of Napalm Death in his mid-teens. LarsonĪs a teenager, Justin Broadrick brought chaos and destruction wherever he went. Grimly, Gira’s allegations of sexual abuse later in his career-disappointing for an artist so fixated themes of domination and submission in his songs-now complicate Swans’ legacy, offering a darker coda still. With Jarboe’s cooling presence coming to the fore, and a cavernous production that reeked of basements and leather, Swans begin to reveal more layers to their compositions, their struggles with religion, and a contrast of light and dark to give their work a full dimension. Swans’ songs, especially in this era, are interrogations: of status quo, of fetishes, of patience, of thresholds. By Greed/Holy Money, they had blown up their sound-two bassists, three drummers, the vocalist Jarboe-to become a chamber group of hulking, post-industrial aggression, marching against the bull market of New York’s cocaine decadence in the mid-’80s. –Sasha Geffenĭesecration, self-loathing, flesh, power: This is the scripture of Swans, the infamously loud and transgressive New York noise band led for decades by Michael Gira. Tackhead’s 1989 album Friendly as a Hand Grenade would polish the group’s multifaceted sound, but it’s their debut where you can most clearly hear their two parent genres knitting together into something new and vital, a fascinating chimera whose echoes can still be heard today. Mixing samples, raps, drum machines, and live instrumentation, the LP ties together the threads connecting hip-hop and industrial, both genres created by artists in neglected post-industrial areas who dared to forge off-label uses for electronic music technology. After Sherwood produced Ministry’s 1985 album Twitch, his predilection for rougher, coarser beats carried over to Tackhead Tape Time, the group’s debut studio album. Tackhead was the name the ensemble gave their heavier, more political work, the music they thought had no real commercial value. Before long, they were playing together under at least four different band names, including Fats Comet and Maffia. In the mid-1980s, British producer Adrian Sherwood formed a constellation of bands with the house rhythm section of the pioneering hip-hop label Sugar Hill Records: drummer Keith LeBlanc, bassist Doug Wimbish, and guitarist Skip McDonald. ![]()
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