Australia's most prolific industrial figure, who split a single restless practice across three project names and pointed all of them at the machinery of power.
David Thrussell is filed by the Bureau at Tier II as the central figure of Australian industrial music, a one-man tradition working under three main names out of Melbourne since the late 1980s. The flagship is Snog, formed around 1988 with art-school friends, which crossed the European EBM of Front 242 with the songwriting instincts of Tom Waits, Nick Cave and Swans into a subversive industrial dance that found an audience well beyond Australia.
The other names extend the practice rather than diverging from it. Black Lung, his solo electronic project from 1994, drops the vocals for electro-techno and industrial ambience and, paradoxically, sharpens the politics; nearly all of it has appeared since 1999 on the German label Ant-Zen. Soma, the duo with Pieter Bourke, takes the cinematic, soundtrack-minded route into dark ambient and techno. Across all three, the catalogue is enormous.
What ties it together, beyond Thrussell himself, is a lineage and a politics. His stated influences read like a roll call of this archive, Cabaret Voltaire, Clock DVA, Lustmord and Sydney's SPK among them, and the records carry a thread of anti-corporate satire and conspiracy reference, sleeve essays and titles like Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars turning them into pamphlets as much as music.
The Bureau's reading. Thrussell is filed at Tier II as Australia's most consequential figure in industrial dance and political electronics.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene