High Industrial

How did weird esoteric tape music lead to cyberfunk?

Welcome to ddrake.substack.com, a substack written by former music journalist/current industry A&R David Drake. This substack is one dimension of an art project I’ve been working on, one which manifests primarily as a series of DJ mixes courtesy Industrial Streaming Information Logistics (isil.club) exploring a sound I’ve labelled cyberfunk. In contrast with the predominant strains of retro dance culture—particularly disco and techno, which I find boring—cyberfunk has largely been marginalized as “dated” since at least the early 1990s. This substack is an effort to explore the real histories of a fictive genre, and have some fun. Listen to one such cyberfunk mix here.

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In an interview with Industrial Streaming Information Logistics’ CEO several weeks ago, “admin” made it clear “cyberfunk” is not synonymous with industrial, even though it shares many significant ideological and sonic elements. Yet the industrial canon does make up, particularly after 1982, a core component of cyberfunk. Lets call this the high industrial era—when the genre’s embrace of new technology (balanced, as discussed last week, by a healthy dose of techno-paranoia) meant that as new technologies were introduced, industrial music joined pop, jazz, hip-hop, R&B, and other forms in shifting towards dance music in the mid-1980s. Industrial’s contradictory pose of rejecting the “control machines” of popular culture while indulging in increasingly popular aspects of culture fueled a lot of what made it interesting during this period. (High industrial era, like cyberfunk, is a semi-arbitrary, though I think useful, concept invented by me.)

What was ‘industrial music’ prior to the incorporation of cyberfunk beats? While not the remit of this substack, I think for those of you new to this world, it’s worth briefly mentioning that the sound’s origins are fraught conversation that nonetheless starts with acts like Throbbing Gristle, music scenes which cohered in England, Germany, and the San Francisco Bay Area, and through a rising cassette trade in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Certain canonical compilation tapes are worth checking out to get an idea of the musical soup of early industrial, the wide-ranging experimentalism of the scene: where “ambient drone music, low-budget postpunk, appliance banging, free jazz, and noisy Throbbing Gristle wannabes all commingled.”¹ For some, this is an era of prime industrial music, before its coherence (and subsequent commodification and eventual calcification) into a fairly reliable set of tropes. But at this early point, things could move in any direction, and on the best compilations, they really did.

Two of the canonical tape comps of the period—neither of which are on Spotify, though you can find them on YouTube if you’re streaming-oriented—are Gary Levermore’s 5-tape Rising From the Red Sand (1982) and Dave Henderson’s Red Sand-inspired The Elephant Table (1983). The former today might be described as a “data dump,” but you can see how “industrial” seemed to envelope a pretty wide range of experimental, outre sounds from the beginning. The thing is a mass, a world unto itself. It seems to ooze in all directions—not with any forward motion, just kind of bubbling outward. Some of the acts on the tapes would not consider themselves industrial; some, like Merzbow, people might not consider industrial at all.

What excites cyberfunk fanatics, however, is that moment when the bubbling-outward started to indicate a specific direction—a dance-oriented, funk-inflected ‘forward motion.’ This forward motion was driven not by ‘industrial ideologies’ per se, although they aligned in certain ways; but by the underlying momentum of creative work in that era, the zeitgeist which underlies cyberfunk specifically. In S. Alexander Reed’s Assimilate, he credits three impulses for the shift from the amorphous early years of industrial to the high industrial period.

The first was the use of irony, through what Reed calls the explicit political appropriation of pop, “which can include parody, but which usually instead of mocking popular music uses and recontextualizes it to assert social commentary about that pop and the culture that consumes it. In doing so, it also presents the industrial artist as knowing and empowered: he or she can do pop without being pop.” An often acerbic, ironic sensibility in industrial music explains some of its willingness to indulge certain pop tools, a kind of self-serious distancing from the mass-market even while adopting aspects of a pop and dance toolkit.

The second way in which industrial soon found a forward motion in parallel with dance and pop music was simply a byproduct of technology; as Reed puts it in his book, quoting Jarod Lanier, the limitations of early drum machine technology of the time created “lock-in”—the phenomenon wherein machines designed for a creative purpose end up delimiting other forms of creativity: “Lock-in removes ideas that do not fit into the winning digital representation scheme, but it also reduces or narrows the ideas it immortalizes, by cutting away the unfathomable penumbra of meaning that distinguishes a word in natural language from a command in a computer program.”

Reed himself mentions Clock DVA and Cabaret Voltaire’s new synth gear, embracing “new sounds” which were “exciting, but they existed within a range that in retrospect we perceive to be tied to that particular era, and in their digital precision and instant looping encouraged repetitive, rigid music.”

Here is industrial music’s intersection with cyberfunk, and also what differentiates the two genres; for our purposes, the ‘lock-in’ Lanier-via-Reed describes is exactly what makes for a singular cyberfunk aesthetic, one which was maligned for so long even within the genres that embraced it, that it’s become refreshing, a lost universe of repetition and rigidity. Rather than undermining the creative avenues available to artists, its limitations inspired a diverse array of creative surfaces which haven’t been seen since. The strictures he describes is what make cyberfunk exciting—it is later industrial which loses the uniqueness offered by its headlong embrace of these new technologies, which few other genres—as we’ve discussed, mainly hip-hop and pop—were willing to take. Instead, it simply adopted the narrowing rhythmic choices of popular music as it evolved—house, techno, metal, hip-hip—to its own ideological and thematic templates. This was an essential move at the time, to stay abreast of popular music’s creative vanguard, the speed with which music was evolving, and the spirit of industrial’s own futurism. But seldom was industrial music itself at the forefront thereafter; by the 1990s, it had become a synthesist, its only new boundary commercial crossover, a consolidation of its many unique paths in the 1970s and 1980s with emerging innovations in popular music writ large and a surfeit of nostalgia.

The third and final way, according to Reed, that industrial music cohered in the mid-1980s—why its artists and audiences embraced the tools of technology, of dance and of pop—was simply because it was pleasurable to do so. There is, for example, a sincere, almost athletic exuberance to EBM music—like Front 242’s sound, which identifies the body as a source of purity. It could also be a source of indulgence in disgust and revulsion, as in the case of Skinny Puppy. But in many cases it derives from a feeling of ideological contradiction. A common thread in industrial music, up to and including Nine Inch Nails, meant indulging in an aesthetic of masochism—that there was a pleasure in submitting to the structures of popular culture, indulging in one’s feeling of being incapacitated by the control machines and our powerlessness in the face of their relentless, repetitive power.

This kind of creative problem-solving is one of the strongest sources of cyberfunk vibes derived from industrial music; the feedback loop of its artists, audiences, and (importantly and under-estimated, these days) gatekeepers are in large part responsible for the unusual diversity and functional experimentalism of the cyberfunk era.

Some of the earliest cyberfunk to gurgle up from the industrial tape scene came from the group Nocturnal Emissions. An art project of English auteur Nigel Ayers, Nocturnal Emissions’ tape Viral Shedding is responsible for a few of my favorite early cyberfunk recordings, as unintentional as it may have been for its creator. “No Separation” is a canonical track (and one highlighted by Reed), but my personal favorite is the muffled thump of “Suffering Stinks,” which also appeared on Nocturnal Emissions’ tape Dykinesia and of course the classic The Elephant Table compilation. Here in industrial’s amorphous origins are the strands of DNA which give it a unique affective library within the history of popular music, a style and substance which, since the time, have been shunted to the margins of genre.

“Suffering Stinks”’s wheezing funk, a kind of plodding haplessness, and defeated vocalist’s sardonic affect, conjure an ambivalent tone of how tedious it can be to endure suffering. The belittling narcissism of suffering—that there’s not really much heroic or virtuous about it—means the worst part about it might be how nondramatic, how quotidian its humiliations really are. It is not just embarrassing to share with others, but self-important to do so; life is suffering, and when we’re clear-eyed about our own, about the tree falling in the forest that only we see, all you can do is kind of shrug and say, ‘this stinks.’ I think the modesty of the sentiment—‘stinks’ is not the most dramatic verb—suggests a kind of tolerance, an impotence, perhaps even an addiction, to the pain. It’s kind of funny, when you think about it.

1. From S. Alexander Reed’s Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music.