Hunting Lodge are one of the earliest do-it-yourself industrial groups in the 1980s American underground, and a useful corrective to the idea that the early industrial map ran only through Britain and the Continent. The group formed in Port Huron, Michigan, a town on the edge of St. Clair County, and built its catalogue from collaged percussion, live recordings, tape, and synthesised noise, on its own terms and largely on its own label.
The two figures at the centre were Lon C. Diehl and Richard Skott. Diehl managed a record store and was a B-movie enthusiast; he had played in a short-lived experimental band called Hate/Grey. Skott was a punk-rock guitarist whose earlier project was named Screw Machine. In the summer of 1982 (May, by the band\'s own account) they formed Hunting Lodge, bringing in Karl Nordstrom and his brother Thomas to help with the visual-art side. The first show was on 9 September 1982 at the Harrington Ballroom in Port Huron; it was recorded and issued as a private-edition cassette later that year.
The same year, Diehl and Skott launched S/M Operations. It began as a vehicle to release a magazine and turned into a DIY label for their own recordings, later issuing work by the noise artist Shame Exposure and the outsider-music figure John North Wright. This is the pattern of the early American underground in miniature: a band, a zine, and a label folded into one operation, run from a record-store counter rather than from any institution.
After the Harrington Ballroom tape came the much-sought 23 Minutes of Murder cassette. Karl Nordstrom then left, returning the line-up to the two core members. A cassette called Exhumed followed in 1983 on the German label Datenverarbeitung, an early sign of the cross-continental cassette exchange the band would sit inside.
The debut full-length is Will (1984), on S/M Operations. Nine compositions collage industrial percussion, live recordings, early sketches, and synthesised noise, with references drawn from Crowley, Nietzsche, and the Watergate figure G. Gordon Liddy. The record carries guest appearances by Andreas Muller of Datenverarbeitung, Francisco Lopez, and Masami Akita, better known as Merzbow. That guest list is worth pausing on: in 1984, a Michigan band was already exchanging work with the figure who would become the central name in Japanese noise, which places Hunting Lodge early in the international noise network rather than at its margin.
The catalogue moved through the established channels of the early post-industrial world. Hunting Lodge appeared on Side Effects, the imprint linked to SPK, among its first-wave-orbit roster; later the band turned up in the catalogue and compilation context of Soleilmoon, the Portland label that built one of the clearest sustained transatlantic post-industrial networks. The method stayed close to its origins: collaged percussion and live recording and tape, assembled into long-form pieces, sitting in the first-wave orbit rather than in the later, more purist power-electronics mode, even where that label is applied.
The Bureau\'s reading. Hunting Lodge belong in this archive at Tier II, as an early American-industrial node rather than a first-rank founder of the form. The case for inclusion is twofold: the band\'s place among the earliest DIY industrial groups in the American underground, and its role as the seed for the substantial noise output that came out of Michigan in the years after Will. The documentary anchor is the run of S/M Operations releases and the later Dais Records reissue programme, which is the current access point for the early material.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the postwar era · last revised c. the postwar era