Industrial music and its relationship(??) to fascism

[ManchesterBeth]

he is wearing a burzum shirt there.

FFS so crass. I'm not sure if I want to see him anymore. But he's one of the best in techno...

 

[killer b]

reading the comments, someone says there's a picture of bambi below the burzum logo, so it's an edgy joke I suppose.

prurient was white when I saw him, dunno about kiran sande

 

[ManchesterBeth]

reading the comments, someone says there's a picture of bambi below the burzum logo, so it's an edgy joke I suppose.

Yeah but can you see the Bambi picture? If not, where are they getting this from?

 

[killer b]

it's this t-shirt. that is bambi.

 

[ManchesterBeth]

Oh ok. phew.

 

[killer b]

bit puerile, mind.

 

[ManchesterBeth]

I'll go to see/support dickhead/puerile artists. But not dodge. That's my tipping point. no purchasing of their music, no supporting it, and no promoting it without caveats attached.

So I'm somewhat relieved, although that interview is still very much annoying.

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

Sometimes I wonder how much of this is the point though? To wind up people and create a mystical aura? I know it's crass and that and in no way provocative but...

But why even bother doing that in techno. The whole resistant ethos of techno is contained on the dancefloor. That's the whole point. If techno got less rhythmic, it just wouldn't have much of a point. See for instance squat techno...

I'm sure for Surgeon it's not about winding people up - if he was into that he'd find more effective ways of doing it. How many people know or care when he uses this stuff? I think he uses it because he likes it and would prefer not to think about the politics at all.

The idea that techno is somehow inherently 'resistant' is an odd one. I can see the appeal, it's something I'd like to believe and the non-mainstream nature of it makes it seem plausible but it's not really true is it. It's like killer b says, it's disappointing when people like surgeon or regis turn out to be politically suspect but there's really no reason to think they're more likely to be sound than anyone else.

And FWIW the people behind squat party techno are more 'resistant' than most although it's a fairly empty sort of resistance really.

 

[killer b]

The idea that techno is somehow inherently 'resistant' is an odd one. I can see the appeal, it's something I'd like to believe and the non-mainstream nature of it makes it seem plausible but it's not really true is it. It's like killer b says, it's disappointing when people like surgeon or regis turn out to be politically suspect but there's really no reason to think they're more likely to be sound than anyone else.

I think the militant politics and aesthetic of Underground Resistance set the tone for techno which still resonates now, for many people.

 

[butchersapron]

http://blocweekend.com/surgeon-exclusive-interview/

I believe that you can examine, explore or comment on anything with your art. Just because you write a book about tightrope walkers doesn’t automatically mean that you are one. That’s a ridiculous assumption to make.

Odious comparison - a more accurate one would be between tightrope walking (heh heh - look at me walking the line) a little bit and tightrope walking professionally. Both involve actual tightrope walking.

The suggested comparison is that these people that are up to their necks in this filth are in reality writing etc about it like academics, as observers, as external to it - and that's the common thread among almost all the justifications these people offer, but it's also their shared dishonesty. They are creating and performing within it not writing from without.

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

I think the militant politics and aesthetic of Underground Resistance set the tone for techno which still resonates now, for many people.

Yeah I thought about mentioning them but was too lazy to write a longer post. They're really the only example I can think of of explicitly political techno though. There are some tenuous ones - Perc claims a fairly vaguely left wing element to his music for example - but there's really nothing inherent to techno that says you have to be like that.

If you started naming radical left wing folk artists you could be here for hours but I'm sure no-one would ever claim folk was radically resistant music in and of itself.

 

[killer b]

Punk isn't inherently anarchist, but anarchism still casts a long shadow over it because of some key bands when it was breaking. Same with techno and UR, Axis and the like.

 

[killer b]

(I think you could argue that folk music is inherently radical btw, but I'm not about to do so here )

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

(I think you could argue that folk music is inherently radical btw, but I'm not about to do so here )

Fair enough. The dodgy black metal thread is probably more appropriate given the cross over with all the Nazi folk.

 

[ouchmonkey]

that Burzum shirt is quite funny, something of a miscalculation though I think. The Coil one for the gaga show in paris
'constant shallowness leads to evil' was funnier
Coil always get a free ride on this don't they? that puzzles me a bit as they worked with all them dodgy bastards to start with
and were bang into their cod pagan folk magic bollocks too - no one seems to give shit
meanwhile anyone on say Blackest Ever Black or Candlelight is no questionable because of the label? no logic in that.
I've always been a little concerned over Regis and Surgeon's hard-on for Whitehouse and NON tbh
I don't think they're really suspect though
and so on

 

[butchersapron]

that Burzum shirt is quite funny, something of a miscalculation though I think. The Coil one for the gaga show in paris
'constant shallowness leads to evil' was funnier
Coil always get a free ride on this don't they? that puzzles me a bit as they worked with all them dodgy bastards to start with
and were bang into their cod pagan folk magic bollocks too - no one seems to give shit
meanwhile anyone on say Blackest Ever Black or Candlelight is no questionable because of the label? no logic in that.
I've always been a little concerned over Regis and Surgeon's hard-on for Whitehouse and NON tbh
I don't think they're really suspect though
and so on

I did something on coil on the previous page but spelled the name wrong and now can't edit.

 

[ouchmonkey]

ah found it - yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about

 

[ouchmonkey]

 

[rutabowa]

ask him if he thinks the guy from burzum is a dick.

 

[killer b]

I've always been a little concerned over Regis and Surgeon's hard-on for Whitehouse and NON tbh

I think I'd just like to see a little more honesty - if they think it's sonically and aesthetically remarkable enough to promote in spite of the dodgy politics of it's makers (a view I'd have some sympathy with) then say so. Mouthing the same transparent evasions the likes of Douglas P have been coming out with for 30 years already is just fucking bullshit.

 

[ManchesterBeth]

I think the militant politics and aesthetic of Underground Resistance set the tone for techno which still resonates now, for many people.

Yep. A lot of it has to do with 'faceless techno bollocks', to paraphrase Simon Reynolds. I'm not saying that one can neatly slot techno into the conventional left-right divide — no, that would be ridiculous.

What I'm trying to get at is that techno's meaning is entirely made on the dancefloor. It's funkier than house, it's more machinic, a lot of it emphasises mantric repetition. i wouldn't say it's a drug tech logic a la 90-93 hardcore, but i'd say it's a kind of liberatory modernist austerity.

what i don't get is when techno artists refer to their art in almost baroque-like terms. Rashad Becker puts it well in this interview

“There is revolutionary intent in youth culture, but I don’t think it gets through to the revolutionary subject.”
In labels like White Material, who are shortly to release a four-track compilation presented without artist names, there seems to be a concerted attempt to divest music of authorship once again, and Becker feels some kinship with this. “I liked the quality that was introduced into mass culture with techno,” Becker says. “The authorship being very secondary; the label suddenly being a more manifest carrier of a certain culture than an individual. Many records don’t even really carry an artist name, just a catalogue number. I did like that, just out of an art tradition that started maybe in the ’60s. But we have a strong relapse from that. The way art has devoluted within the last fifteen years is a heavy relapse in Baroque ideas of enablement and talent, and a very strong author. I feel pity about that, but I didn’t set out to blur the authorship. I need something to hold onto when writing, and it’s a certain method and a certain strategy. Then when I feel like the method and the strategy are compelling, and I’m enabled to achieve the sound I have in my mind, then I kind of disappear within the process and the music takes shape. I just throw these people into his possibly uncomfortable place where they live, and then just let them do their thing.”

 

[ManchesterBeth]

I think I'd just like to see a little more honesty - if they think it's sonically and aesthetically remarkable enough to promote in spite of the dodgy politics of it's makers (a view I'd have some sympathy with) then say so. Mouthing the same transparent evasions the likes of Douglas P have been coming out with for 30 years already is just fucking bullshit.

Well, I think there's a lot of personal investment in this. Notwithstanding the fact that Regis actively released the Madwoman EP on Downwards, there is also This interview with Surgeon by Rory Gibb

I think it's kind of distilled by - it's actually a book that William Bennett turned me onto, by Stanislavski, a very famous acting text about method acting - An Actor Prepares. That idea was really distilled for me in this Stanislavski book, the idea about method acting. William sort of summed it up as 'Does it make a difference if an actor, when they're behind the curtain between Acts 1 and 2, stays in character, or has a cigarette and chats to their mates?' It's about intention and what lies behind it, and whether that has an effect. I think it has the most powerful effect.

I interviewed [Whitehouse's] William Bennett a couple of years ago, and that was a fairly major feature in conversation with him. We were talking about his Cut Hands material, and he was explaining he'd come to this feeling that even more powerful than straight up, hypnotic repetition, were rhythms that never quite recur the same twice, that change incrementally with each bar, so you could never predict what was going to happen - and in the process creating a whole new level of sensory disorientation. But then I suppose that's definitely within the Bennett sphere of doing things.
AC: Definitely, and I've definitely seen that occurring, without a doubt, at Cut Hands gigs I've been to, I've seen that effect on a crowd. There's a point where people absolutely lose it, it's incredible. I think repetition and overloading the conscious mind, those are both techniques to hypnotise, so he's just approaching it in a different way. I've seen both of them be very effective.

Also, This Downwards interview with Regis

On sonic pugilism: "Dance music is a great vehicle for sound pressure. It really did break the DNA of rock music, and that physicality is so important to me. That's why I like NON and stuff like that, because I want to be assaulted. Does that say a lot about me? Probably."

I think 'Learn Your Lesson' was the last record both of us actually did in Birmingham, so it was symbolic for that. It was the last record we did on equipment through a desk. It's my favourite British Murder Boys record. 'Learn Your Lesson' was basically us putting Whitehouse onto the dancefloor, and that was great because all of a sudden you've got all these kids going 'Can you play 'Wriggle Like An Eel'? That's when I realised, 'Shit, kids are into good music, not into this bongo loop, really pedestrian tech house rubbish'. That was music for hairdressers, very sanitised and very safe. When me and Tony came together, people were expecting linear techno, so we were being contrary again. But it was picking up the baton, the thread that goes back to the Cabs and whatever, and it's great to be able to do that.

And This more general interview

That's the thing about electronic music in general - what happened to all the stars when all the engineers, the boys from the background, got their chance to make music? Previously rock & roll had the frontman, the fantastic person you wanted to be. That's a problem of electronic music, that the stars are gone. Maybe people don't want the stars, but I certainly do, I love it. I want to see personalities, and now there very rarely are any. You, as a journalist, possibly know that. You've possibly done a whole bunch of interviews with completely dull people. It's that now people are so self obsessed with updating their Facebook profiles and other self creating tools. It's got nothing to do with that good old egomaniac way. The youth are so dull. They need a kick. I wish I could be that person that'd give them that kick. But I don't think that'll happen through music. I don't think music has that kind of power anymore.

What's your point of view on this wave of popularity of so called dark/industrial techno that we now witness? Do you see – as some other people do - it as being a result of the economical and social situation?
KO'C: It's very convenient. If you can afford a computer, the electricity and access to the internet where you write about crisis, you're not in crisis. Crisis is when you've got your last £20 on your dole check and you still try to buy a record and hope it's all gonna work. There is no crisis anymore. People love to think there is some crisis. There is something going on in certain parts of the world, but most of the time people are just worried that their massive pensions are being eaten by someone else. Fuck it, you should have spent it to have a good life, I don't give a shit. I don't see any crisis at the moment. I've never been happier, we're all happy, and we're just looking for problems.

Strikes me as quite the puerile nihilist, 'fake nihilism', as the commenter below put it.

Oh I´m a little bit dissapointed. I´ve been the biggest Regis fan on earth since 1998, I followed him during the 2002-2006 period when hardtechno was virtually dead (unless in Spain, Slovakia and so on)...I´ve written extensively on the blogosphere about his Art, the Downwards spirit and the Renaissance of nihilism through the Regis aesthetics... but his insights about the political situation look childish to me. Joy has nothing to do with stupidity or ignorance, I think he can´t distinguish hedonism from blindness. He´s had a great life, as the result of circumstances that largely overcome his attitude. This idea of "be happy and there´ll be no problem" is, aside from neocon slogan, a very naive observation. I think he´s growing old but he´s kidnapped by the romantic myth of Adolescence. Sometimes fake nihilism is the voice of the most ingnorant bourgeoisie.

Maxleth Intent
OCT 16, 2013 11:23AM
In reply to Observer:
i agree, but i think he is just taking the piss and letting it roll in the interview, there is irony in everything he states and he is referring to a population that has these ideals (the youth he would like to kick but many are also the ones who will buy his records.. irony.. the interview is all irony.. the interview is to create hype for his compilation after all ) (that or else he is a smug deluded prick who has no idea of the shit that is going on...which I doubt.. ).. problem is that many of his mass followers do just blindly agree.. and act accordingly .. no critical thought, no political awareness, just yeah,.. well Regis said to have a good time and we are all happy.

 

[killer b]

Yep. A lot of it has to do with 'faceless techno bollocks', to paraphrase Simon Reynolds. I'm not saying that one can neatly slot techno into the conventional left-right divide — no, that would be ridiculous.

What I'm trying to get at is that techno's meaning is entirely made on the dancefloor. It's funkier than house, it's more machinic, a lot of it emphasises mantric repetition. i wouldn't say it's a drug tech logic a la 90-93 hardcore, but i'd say it's a kind of liberatory modernist austerity.

I'm not sure if it needs to be that complicated - my view is that the identity UR (and Mills & Hood when they went solo) created for techno is so influential that it remains the blueprint - sonically and politically - for what has come since.

Loads of modern dance music is repetitive, austere, mechanical. But it's only techno has the political associations (actually, breakcore does too, for similar reasons): I'd say that's almost entirely down to UR, and the fact that techno is for the most part a pretty regressive music form, still stuck repeating the same tropes Hood, Mills and Banks set in motion 20-odd years ago.

 

[ManchesterBeth]

I'd say that's almost entirely down to UR, and the fact that techno is for the most part a pretty regressive music form, still stuck repeating the same tropes Hood, Mills and Banks set in motion 20-odd years ago.

Dance music as a whole has been pretty regressive since grime and dubstep (and arguably, for some, dnb...)

 

[ManchesterBeth]

killer b also with the Faceless techno bollocks i was referring to the blueprint that UR pioneered, Reynolds was not exactly the most accommodating fan...

 

[ManchesterBeth]

"We started Prolekult up in the spring of '93 as a harder alternative to the more commercial-oriented house we'd been involved with up until then. There was never much of a gameplan involved, just a bunch of preferences and prejudices: a liking for hard, having-it, often Euro-flavoured trance and total indifference to the up-its-own-arse electronic doodling that characterised the UK techno scene at the time.

Sourmash's <i>Pilgrimage To Paradise</i> was a good tune to kick it all off with, emanating as it did from the UK, but packing the punch of a Beltram / F. De Wulf / Orlando Voorn record. Getting off to a start like that, we'd hoped to overcome our sense of musical Europhilia and carry on signing banging home-grown material, but it wasn't to be. Of the twelve tracks included here [on the CD], three quarters were licensed from European labels, reflecting the failure on our part to consistently find the kind of material we were after here in the UK. We're not sure what that says about us, or the UK, or both ...or neither, but we like the vibe surrounding the very up-for-it free party scene that's developed over the past few years and the producers that are now emerging from this sector of the underground are kicking arse. Proper UK acid business.

When it came to adopting a name, logo, etc, for the label, as unreconstructed lefties, we turned to socialist political history for inspiration. "Prolekult" is an adaptation of the Russian word "Proletkult" which was a workers cultural organisation set up in 1907 by the socialist exiles Alexander Bogdanov and Maxim Gorky. The theory went, in simple terms, that at a time when Russia's Tsarist dynasty was at the weakest and most vicious stage in its squalid history, the Bolshevik party was to lead the political opposition, the unions to lead the economic opposition and the Proletkult the cultural opposition. Perhaps the best known work to come out of the Proletkult was the post-revolutionary films of Eisenstein (<i>Strike</i>, <i>Battleship Potemkin</i>), but within a year of his rise to power in 1921 Stalin had effectively stripped the Proletkult of any autonomy, vibrancy or relevance, turning it, as he did all other genuine bases of working class expression, into just another instrument of state power.

Obviously, none of this has much direct relevance to the records we put out as the lack of vocals involved makes overt political statement difficult ("you gotta have house" repeated a few times on Neurodancers' Wippenburg [sic] - the only vocal on the twelve tracks - isn't exactly "Blowing in the Wind" is it?) but it made a change from the cod-futurism to be found on the sleeves and logos of so many techno/trance labels and, in terms of lefty icons over the last two hundred years, we knew we had an extensive reserve of imagery to draw upon. There was also the quiet hope on our part that by using pictures of long-forgotten working class heroes we'd be making our own tiny contribution to the rehabilitation of these political giants who have effectively been written out of our history. We thought that even if the odd person here and there asked "who's that?" then the labels and imagery would have transcended their original role as mere packaging and taken on a higher role as potential consciousness-raisers (man). Unfortunately it soon became apparent that no one gave a toss about which old trot we wheeled out next and after three years and seventeen releases I can safely say that we could put Donald Duck on our next release and no one would bat an eyelid."

Interesting...

 

[ouchmonkey]

those interviews look familiar - I don't really have any problem with any of it tbf

Regis is just brushing that whole thing aside there, I doubt we should read too much into it.
he expands a little maybe on the ideas about personality/facelessness in the recent one about the end of BMB
http://thequietus.com/articles/16782-british-murder-boys-interview
and the idea of 'putting on a show'

The Black Dog were vocal in their disapproval over the inclusion of boyd rice in the sandwell district Fabric mix
but they work with Regis themselves putting together a couple of mixes of early 80's industrial stuff
they called his decision 'stupid' and, like just about everyone else admitted he was 'difficult' to work with
something he admits tbf
I don't think they would fight shy of calling him out on it if they had real concerns about him

he's wound up Sandwell District, and BMB and probably Downwards too
so what comes next might be interesting...

 

[ManchesterBeth]

i was just skimming through this
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Assimilate-...ords=assimilate+a+history+of+industrial+music

And whilst it does affirm industrial's buried (??) connection to afrofuturism/free jazz, There's an argument that sits uneasily with me as a PoC, namely that technological development necessitated that tracks across electronic disco, house and EBM sound similar, hence the gravitation towards industrial sounds in black gay clubs.

i feel like this grossly misrepresents how much the original techno people (especially, think Carl Craig and Jeff Mills) were into this radical European music (for lack of a better term.) I think when you boil it down to technological collision then you seem to instrumentalise the other which can lead to some dodgy conclusions, like why aren't black/PoC industrial fans challenging industrial's flirtation with fascism when really for us it's not so much about some dude holding rancid politics but how the discourse of fascism or some kind of (perceived) spiritual atavism is so embedded in popular culture insofar as taboos around fascism give it legitimacy in the liberal framework by exalting our negative (post-theological) outlook as some kind of affirmation.

killer b frogwoman thoughts?

 

[ManchesterBeth]

The Black Dog were vocal in their disapproval over the inclusion of boyd rice in the sandwell district Fabric mix
but they work with Regis themselves putting together a couple of mixes of early 80's industrial stuff
they called his decision 'stupid' and, like just about everyone else admitted he was 'difficult' to work with
something he admits tbf
I don't think they would fight shy of calling him out on it if they had real concerns about him

he's wound up Sandwell District, and BMB and probably Downwards too
so what comes next might be interesting...

Thing i have with the Black Dog's criticism of this stuff is that it is a bit invested in a kind of Bennite socialism that it just ends up producing the same dichotomy as the liberal criticism of it all. i feel like Stockhausen's reactionary and elitist views aren't challenged nearly enough, yet everyone reveres him (rightly) as an electronic pioneer. It's as if there's some kind of stepping stone where we're like, oops, an artist has gone too far. And thats what distresses me, because you can be a Randian libertarian and not get any shit for it, but as soon as you're fash, the liberals start hunting you down like they've just discovered marxism for the very first time.

Like, do you see where I'm coming from mate? or am I not making any sense at all.

 

[Fozzie Bear]

Thing i have with the Black Dog's criticism of this stuff is that it is a bit invested in a kind of Bennite socialism that it just ends up producing the same dichotomy as the liberal criticism of it all. i feel like Stockhausen's reactionary and elitist views aren't challenged nearly enough, yet everyone reveres him (rightly) as an electronic pioneer. It's as if there's some kind of stepping stone where we're like, oops, an artist has gone too far. And thats what distresses me, because you can be a Randian libertarian and not get any shit for it, but as soon as you're fash, the liberals start hunting you down like they've just discovered marxism for the very first time.

Like, do you see where I'm coming from mate? or am I not making any sense at all.

I think this is what's known as "whataboutery". It's good that The Black Dog have taken a principled stand against fascist influences seeping into techno and electronic music. Perhaps they could do more to criticise other things, but it's a breath of fresh air seeing someone criticise something in that scene rather than being backslappy or aloof.