Die Form is the long-running project of Philippe Fichot, a French audio-visual artist who began it in 1977 not as a band but as a private practice: a run of experimental cassettes issued on his own Bain Total label, several under aliases such as Eva-Johanna Reichstag and Krylon Hertz. The earliest of these were noisy and improvised, heavily indebted to musique concrète, and they place the project's roots squarely in the late-1970s tape underground rather than in the synth-pop it is sometimes filed beside. The name, German for "the form" and borrowed from the Bauhaus journal, is also a pun on "deform" and the French difforme, a clue to what the work is about.
From the start the project was a single body of work across several media. Fichot composed and performed the music, took the photographs, designed the sleeves and staged the performances, and the whole was organised around transgressive themes, eroticism, the clinical, death and the body, presented without the ironic distance that usually accompanies such material. The first vinyl, Die Puppe (1982), issued in an edition of a thousand with a Fichot photograph of a porcelain doll holding a syringe on the cover, gathered these esoteric electronic experiments into something with shape: inventive drum-machine rhythms under disturbing lyrics.
Some Experiences With Shock (1984) is the record that matters most for this file. It pushed the sound into a colder, more caustic place, a rare example of what its own notes call medical music, with track titles drawn from the operating theatre and the burns ward. It is the Die Form record most often named as an influence on the electro-industrial that followed; cEvin Key of Skinny Puppy is among those who have pointed back to it, and the line from this caustic, body-fixated material into the harder end of industrial is the project's clearest connection outward.
From Poupée Mécanique (1987) onward the music grew more melodic and accessible, though Fichot's subject matter kept it well outside the mainstream, and over the following decades the project moved through darker, more neoclassical and club-facing registers. That later development is real but it is not why Die Form is filed here. The Bureau keeps the project for its origin: the Bain Total cassettes, the musique-concrète experiment, and the clinical industrial of the early-to-mid 1980s, a French parallel to the body-and-tape work going on elsewhere in the underground.