The Sydney first wave at full maturity. The medical-catastrophe manner across a whole album. A German compound title as the statement.
Leichenschrei is SPK's second LP, released in 1982 on their own Side Effects (SER 03). It follows the debut Information Overload Unit (1981) by about a year and is the band's mature first-wave statement · the sound set, the tone in place, the band able to hold extended pieces alongside the short, abrasive interludes the first wave had done much to invent through Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and Whitehouse. The Sydney line-up · Graeme Revell as the main writer, Sinan Leong on vocals, Karel van Hees collaborating, in the Sydney scene the band worked in from 1979 to 1983 · carries the record.
The title is the band's most direct statement of its subject. Leichenschrei · the German compound of Leiche (corpse) and Schrei (scream or cry) · sets the album in the medical-catastrophe territory that Hamburger Lady (Throbbing Gristle, 1978) had opened up. The album's argument is that industrial music can carry the injured and the dead body as its actual material across a whole record rather than in a single track · that the death-industrial palette can fill an album rather than serve as one colour among many. The title is the organising figure, not a passing reference.
The record is continuous with the first wave but works its own way. Where TG's D.o.A. (1978) alternated extended structured pieces with short abrasive interludes, SPK stay closer to extended form throughout: tracks of four to seven minutes, built on the slow build-up of texture and rhythm rather than on switching between modes. The writing is denser at length than TG's, on the claim that industrial music can hold its ground across long durations and not only in short bursts.
Sinan Leong's singing is central. She works between sustained tone and clipped phoneme, treating the voice as material rather than as melody or lyric. The band's later pop turn on Machine Age Voodoo (1984) takes her voice into commercial electronic song · the inverse of what she does here. The Bureau treats her performance on Leichenschrei as among the band's finest.
The instrumentation carries the mature sound. Revell runs synthesisers and treated instruments as the base · the various electronics, the tape collage, the contact-microphone amplification, the found-object percussion that Einstürzende Neubauten had done much to establish. SPK's relation to the German first wave (Neubauten the main Berlin counterpart, the German industrial scene emerging from about 1980) runs close here; the Bureau treats Sydney and Berlin as the main non-UK first-wave centres of the period.
The whole presentation pulls one way. The cover, the track titles, the liner notes · all sit at the same pitch as the music. The album's claim is that industrial records carry their subject in their making as much as in their writing, and that the medical-catastrophe mode can be the whole of a record rather than an addition to it.
Its lasting importance is as a foundation. Leichenschrei is the point SPK reach full first-wave maturity · the sound set, the tone in place, death industrial held across a whole album. What follows (Auto-Da-Fé, 1983; the pop turn of Machine Age Voodoo, 1984; Revell's later solo and film-score work) builds on it, even where it sounds quite different. The later death-industrial field · the Italian and Swedish players of the late 1980s and 1990s, and the noise-and-industrial scene since · builds on ground this record helps lay.
Where it sits: the main SPK first-wave statement; the band's mature death-industrial record; continuous with the UK first wave (TG, Whitehouse) while quite its own; close to the Berlin first wave (Neubauten the main counterpart); and the ground for death industrial's development after 1985 across Europe and America. It catches Sydney first-wave industrial at the point it finishes defining itself, and the work that follows builds on it.