La Nomenklatur is one of the more uncompromising French industrial projects, and the Bureau files Tiburce's solo act at Tier II for its place in the radical French scene and its founding role at the Les Nouvelles Propagandes label. Begun in 1986 out of the split of the band Minamata, it makes militant, politically charged industrial known for extreme live sound and early tapes. It meets the centrality test through its anchoring of the LNP label and the documentary test as a name the French industrial underground routes through.
The project came directly out of Minamata, one of the most radical French industrial bands of the 1980s. When Minamata's three members disagreed about the band's direction after recording Niigata 1964–1965, they stopped, and Tiburce formed La Nomenklatur as his solo continuation. The lineage matters: this is the harder, more confrontational wing of French industrial carrying forward, not a fresh start.
La Nomenklatur is inseparable from Les Nouvelles Propagandes, the French label founded in Tours to release Minamata and its members' new projects. The project's debut cassette, La Légende des Voix, was the very first LNP release, later reissued on CD by Ant-Zen, and the project remained the label's cornerstone act. LNP was active until the mid-1990s and returned after 2007 to support live performances by La Nomenklatur and its sister projects, so the two histories run together throughout.
The stance was militant from the start. La Nomenklatur was known for extreme sounds on stage and on its early tapes, a confrontational, manifesto-driven project in the political-industrial mould. After roughly fifteen years of silence the project returned in 2011 with World at War, framed explicitly as a manifesto on a world it sees as already at war over raw materials, energy, ideology and power, a cry of anger continuous with the anger of its 1980s beginnings.
The Bureau's reading. La Nomenklatur is filed at Tier II as a radical French industrial project and the cornerstone of the Les Nouvelles Propagandes label. Its contribution is a militant, politically charged industrial carried out of Minamata and sustained, across a long silence and a 2011 return, with its confrontational stance intact. It is cross-referenced to Ant-Zen and the industrial forms it works in, and read here as one of the harder voices of the French scene.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Edwardian era · last revised c. the Anthropocene