My apocryphal history of this archive · twelve phases of keeping technology, from quill to hand-coded HTML · honest about what I borrowed; vague about who was paid
Preamble
An independent archive of trivia, documents and ephemera from industrial music and adjacent disturbances, compiled continuously, against better judgement.
Industriv is an evolving source of knowledge about industrial, noise and avant-garde affairs: a figuratively living and breathing artefact, a museum, a gallery, and a window to oblivion. The essays are real, the knowledge accreted from over forty years of immersion in the industrial aether.
Industriv was not founded in 2026. I prefer, on paper, to keep the project as having begun the moment any cataloguer first set quill to vellum to record a piece of music for posterity. Whether that cataloguer worked for me at the time is a question I do not entertain.
What follows is the editorial history of the project, in twelve phases of keeping technology. Where a phase pre-dates my arrival I treat the period as retrospectively annexed. Where a phase post-dates a partner's resignation I keep it under their successor without comment. Where a phase is still in progress I assume it will end badly, in keeping with editorial convention.
I have chosen the spectrum of content deliberately: objective about what I include and subjective about what I leave out, or the reverse, depending on my oscillating mood. The code that builds this site is machine-assisted; the knowledge, the judgement and the writing are entirely mine. I have chosen the artist and label pages against criteria, and I keep what is in them for a reason. I wrote and verified every page myself, from reputable sources, line by line, and I did the same for every trivia question and answer.
The content of Industriv is not an exhaustive collection of artists and labels. For that level of detail, the many dedicated online resources may serve you better. You will still find reference pages to notable practitioners, but I am truly exhausted from taming the beast this is becoming. I fully anticipate arguments, gatekeeping and outright offence, so I recommend a gentle laxative to those whose retentive nature would benefit. There are distinctions to honour, endless interpretations of what is industrial and what is not, and just as many opinions and egos. There are many blurred lines, many ambiguities, and many personalities the subject matter takes in and leaves out. I must honour the distinctions that would otherwise dilute the substance of what I have set out to present.
The site cuts deep. Depth and substance prevail. The hidden surprises are yours to discover. Orchestrated, directed, occasionally wrong by accident, deliberately wrong when commanded by context. Sometimes willing to be corrected.
This was never a project with an endpoint. It has begun. There is no end. Its intangibility is the only tangible concept. My position is that there is no position.
§ Timeline
Music, before there was a recording technology, was kept twice: once in performance, once in notation. I date its first activity to the moment any monk picked up a feather and decided that a tune was worth writing down. The format was the manuscript, occasionally the scroll. The cataloguer was usually anonymous and almost always wrong about something.
Throughput was about one page per day. Errors propagated slowly, which I regard as that era's advantage over later ones.
Gutenberg's movable type made cataloguing possible at scale for the first time. By 1500, treatises on music could be reproduced in editions of hundreds rather than ones; by 1700, an archive could be a library; by 1800, broadsheets, pamphlets and manifestos could circulate in tens of thousands.
Errors propagated faster too. Bibliographers spent the next four centuries cleaning up. I note the trade-off without taking a side.
For the first time, a single person could produce text at the visual standard of a print shop without owning one. Cut-up, the technique foundational to the genre this archive covers, was a typewriter practice before it was a tape practice: scissors, paste, two pages, six minutes. Burroughs invented nothing; Burroughs noticed something.
Industrial Records' communiqués through the late 1970s were typed on a single Selectric and photocopied. So were the manifestos, the contracts, the press releases and the dissolution notice. I still use Selectric metaphors when nothing else fits.
The infrastructure of industrial culture below the level of the record. Fanzines (RE/Search, Industrial News, Vague), mail-art networks, samizdat manifestos, photocopied flyers stapled to lamp-posts in the rain, cassette inserts run off behind the counter at a job that did not authorise it. Without these two technologies the genre this site documents would not have had a paper trail outside the records themselves.
I hold the photocopier in particular regard. It is the only phase of cataloguing technology that has ever paid for itself in stolen toner.
The Apple II shipped in 1977. The Commodore PET shipped in 1977. The TRS-80 shipped in 1977. The same year, Industrial Records was incorporated. The historical coincidence is filed without comment. For the first time in human history, one person at one desk in one room could compile, store and edit an archive without a printer, a typesetter or a publisher.
The languages were BASIC, 6502 assembly, Pascal, FORTH. The output was forty columns of green or amber phosphor at 60 Hz. I kept my first machine-stored entry in 1981, on a borrowed Apple II+ running an early version of WordStar. The disk has not been recovered. The entry, presumed lost, was about Cabaret Voltaire.
WordPerfect, WordStar, dBase, the discography entry as a flat text database. The cassette traders of the late 1980s kept their catalogues in WordPerfect 5.1 on 5.25-inch floppies that they swapped at zine fairs and post offices.
I still have correspondence from this era on roughly forty floppies, none of which currently work. The lesson is under preservation. The lesson is also under migrate while you can, but I did not, in fact, migrate while it could.
Bulletin board systems running on a single phone line, with a single user at a time. Dial-up at 1200 baud, then 2400, then 9600. Sysops who lived in the houses where the modems lived. Long-distance phone bills that ended marriages.
alt.industrial appeared on Usenet around 1990 and immediately turned into a long argument about whether Skinny Puppy counted. (They did.) I ran a small BBS in this period. The records were lost to a flood in 1993 and have not been recovered. I treat the loss as the era's editorial signature.
Before the web there was a network. Gopher menus that you navigated with arrow keys. Lynx as the only browser most of us could afford to install. FTP archives of liner notes and discographies, hand-typed onto university Unix machines whose admins were not supposed to know. Email, then mailing lists, then more mailing lists. Everything was text, fixed-width, monochrome.
I find this period's aesthetic completely congenial and have tried to honour it in the present design. The current site renders fine in Lynx, which is not a coincidence.
Mosaic, then Netscape, then Internet Explorer, then the web went mainstream and a thousand industrial fan sites bloomed on free hosts most of which were quietly killed in the years that followed. Hand-rolled HTML in Notepad. Tables for layout. Animated GIFs. Frames. Coil discographies hand-typed by people who turned out, when you reached them by email, to be sixteen years old and living in Maryland.
I ran my first public site on a university server in 1996, lost it to a hard-drive failure in 1999 and did not bother to rebuild it for some time after. Some of the pages survive on the Wayback Machine. I am not currently linking to them.
The era during which everything began to look the same. Templated themes. Sidebars. Comment sections that filled with bots. RSS readers that did not work after Google killed Reader. Plug-in dependencies that broke at the next minor version update.
I opened a WordPress instance in 2007 and closed it in 2009 after a forum spambot defaced the front page with an advertisement for performance-enhancing supplements. Lessons kept. Later advice to anyone considering a WordPress instance has consisted of one word, repeated.
The records moved to streaming. The discographies moved to Discogs. The arguments moved to Twitter, then to Mastodon, then to Bluesky, then back to Twitter, then to wherever they were going next. The fan sites stopped being updated. The wikis stopped being updated. I watched, took notes and held off republishing anything until the dust settled.
The dust did not settle. I republished anyway. The decision is under preferring action to elegance, an editorial position I hold rarely.
The site you are presently reading. Built by hand, keep by keep, against the prevailing direction of the web. No framework. No tracking. No comments section. Inline vector illustrations rather than served-up images. A return, deliberately, to the look of a printed document, because the documents this archive is interested in were almost all printed once and almost none of them have ever been better as websites.
The current incarnation, edited continuously, never declared closed. When the next phase of cataloguing technology arrives I will probably ignore it for several years before grudgingly adopting whatever has clearly lasted. Editorial conservatism is, by editorial policy, the only sustainable form of editorial enthusiasm.
I am, at the time of writing, one person at a desk and a rotating rotting circle of correspondents who do not have day jobs that conflict. The hosting bill is paid out of one pocket. There is, accordingly, no one else to blame.
Corrections, additions and contested points should be submitted via the submission form. Each correction is read; each is kept; not all are accepted. I reserve the right to disagree with corrections I have read carefully. I also reserve the right to be wrong, and frequently am. Accepted amendments will be published in the errata list.
On privacy, briefly: I keep no mailing list and track no one. I collect nothing as you read. Email sent to me is received and kept only so I can read and reply to it, never shared or sold.
The whole archive is still open. Every entry remains subject to revision, and none of it is closed; I will say so here, once, rather than note it at the foot of each entry. The catalogue will settle when it settles.
VAGO · c. the Pleistocene