Showing posts with label INDUSTRIAL. Show all posts
Showing posts with label INDUSTRIAL. Show all posts

Friday, September 28, 2012

a great personal reminiscence / tribute  re. Coil from Jonny Mugwump at FACT

still have a bit of a deaf spot with them... in fact I reviewed the Macro Dub Infection CD Johnny starts with so must have played it many a time, and that Coil track made no impression on me then...


grown to dig 'em more in recent years, but of all their stuff this is still the one  that shivers my marrow



Coil-talk reminded me tangentially that the highlight for me at Incubate 2012 was the Chris & Cosey set: a sort of greatest hits revue, a bit like what I imagine seeing Sweet Exorcist in their prime would have been like (if they'd actually played live):  slamming yet eerie, sensual and dark, techno but veined with industrial (the famous Tutti cornet came out to play, great reverby gashes of sound from a headless guitar)

this YouTube (shot from someone's phone no doubt) doesn't capture it really




this one is slightly better





Incubate was full of industrial stuff, much of it from Legacy Artists

Laibach, obviously (as discussed)

Nurse With Wound (disappointing, a real flat souffle, a porridge of chuntering Meat Beat Manifesto type breakbeats that seemed to go on for hours + aimless scratching from the Man Himself - who's belatedly discovered turntablizm, it seems - + recited text from a black lady up front -- apparently at some NwW gigs, they actually have an MC!)

There was a rather touching documentary film shown about Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and his late lady love...

Not industrial exactly but industrial-tinged / industrial-and-Goth influenced were Raime, who were brilliant. The texture-play of their sound really comes out when played through a big system, and superb use of cinematic projections (mostly Tarkovsky I think)



Raime at Incubate was a live set, all their own music; this below is a DJ set at Boiler Room and talking of industrial one of the first things they play is Cabaret Voltaire...



Another Incubate highlight was not industrial  but it is Mugwump-related - Maria and the Mirrors. Despite, or perhaps because of technical difficulties that kept bringing the set to a halt and had the band almost tearing their hair out, it was terrifically tense and exciting. "Not industrial at all"-- well, the combination of pounding manual rhythm and sampled/electronic sound-smear did occasionally make me think of The Young Gods and of Cop Shoot Cop, who sometimes get loosely lumped in 'industrial' ...



^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

In other TG news, they are stepping decidedly into Retromania territory with their cover of the whole of Nico's Desertshore.






Friday, July 6, 2012

A New (Old?) Brutalism

Love the retro touch of the "embossed label printer" typography on the cover of Perc's A New Brutality


Overlaid on top of that icon of Brutalist Architecture, Trellick Tower.

Do you remember those embossed label printers? I had one. Everyone had one, it seemed like. Then they just disappeared. Bit like slide rules, rendered obsolete by pocket calculators. But I can't recall what it is was that made the embossed label printers obsolete. 
 


And Perc's A New Brutality.... well, judging by the preview below, it sounds a bit like an old brutalism.





(You can hear a longer preview here, along with a bunch of Perc mixes and EPs and what not)

90s hard minimal techno, with touches of industrial and Test Dept in dancefloor mode ("Compulsion"). Stark, ascetic, punitive...   Slaphead-severe;  proper faceless techno bollocks...  at times flashing me back to that 1992-93 London club Knowledge....  a more refined and subdued / slower and less banging take on 80 Aum and Meng Syndicate... 

here's a preview selection from last year's similar Wicker & Steel



the embossed label look has a kind of officialdom / bureaucratic, folders/filing cabinets kind of look that reminds me of that whole side of industrial to do with reports, data, documentation, dossiers...  records in the archival or governmental sense as opposed to musical

see also this Perc Trax artist


love the title here -- "Greyed Out Life"


And "Mandate" !


Does this relate to the H-ological reinvocation of the Public?  institutions and planning bodies and research units dedicated to the welfare of the commonwealth... 

Brutalism, as an architectural school, was part of this current...  the "we know best" paternalism of urban planning and coordinated development

^^^^^^^^^

bonus beat - Test Dept's Compulsion



"test department" itself sounds bureaucratic...