IDM Mailing Archive

quoted 5 lines Am somewhat amused at this hydra-monster-industrial-vs.-techno

> Am somewhat amused at this hydra-monster-industrial-vs.-techno > debate and at everyone's need to continually speak of having > "graduated" from being an industrial music listener etc. etc. > to the purportedly more elevated plane of techno. How anyone > can completely write off any genre boggles the mind

It's quite easy, actually. :-) [The President of Former Industrialists With A Clue takes the witness stand.] I listened to Industrial for like 12 years or so - at times (later on) nearly exclusively. As 1991 and 1992 approached, I began to notice that no matter how I tried to find the Really kUUl and New Stuff, it kept retreading the same ground. I wasn't hearing anything new and/or innovative, which had always been a driving force for me music-wise. In the meantime, back in '90 I heard - quite by accident - this record by A Homeboy, A Hippy & A Funky Dread called "Total Confusion". This record blew me away! Coming from an Industrial vantage point, I thought to myself, "Wow, this thing sounds like a cross between Meat Beat Manifesto, Skinny Puppy languid keyboard lines, Rap and something-else-which-I-don't-know-what-it-is [I believe it's called "Techno" now - Ed.]. I want more!!!". And I couldn't hear more! There was nothing else like it on kawledge radio. It was new, different and fresh to me. Anyway, by the time of Skinny Puppy's farewell tour in mid-'92, the beast was already tottering, from where I stood. I'd already been going to raves for about a year and a half here in L.A. (i.e. since the end of '90), but was still buying "Industrial" stuff and going to gigs. And as I've said many many times, when Richard played live here in August 1992 it just the climactic blow that killed the beast for good. In less than an hour I heard him make "Industrial" music that blew the pants off of every "Industrial" record I'd bought in eons. Heck, it blew the pants off of pretty much every record I'd heard that was made in the previous 30 years! It made my wife and her (Industrial) bandmate realize that what they were doing was pointless, and the band dissolved a month later. It really had that kind of a staggering impact. My point is simply that I discovered that there was a huge new gap in the sonic palette, and the people boldly treading out there to explore it were labelled as being "Techno". Whereas "Industrial" had drawn the wagons, put up the fences and was pretty much self-satisfied at having established the known boundaries and parameters of the genre. Thus I have NO problems at all with writing off "Industrial" as a genre, at this point. There's also the fact that music parading under the banners of "Techno" annd "House" now covers such a vast expanse of the sonic palette that I'm more than satisfied to live in that parallel universe. I could care less if I never hear another guitar (or fuzzed distorted growling Ogre-esque vocal) again. As for the boundaries getting fuzzier, well sure. These things are bound to happen over time, and I claim it's just further evidence of my theory about Former Industrialists With A Clue[tm] - does anyone think that Silent would have been putting out "Swarm Of Drones" and pushing it to the Techno camps in 1991? Not on your life. But now with so many Industrial artists having come 'round, it's bound to happen a lot more. - Greg