My view on archive scope has, until the present document, been unstated. The archive's nine sections (History, Forms, Manifestos, Artists, Labels, Audio, Visual, Lexicon, Scenes) carry the what, when, where, why and how of the industrial, noise and avant-garde tradition; the Labels section and the cross-linked artist entries carry the who. The question this document addresses is which who. The framework is conservative by design: an entry here is a serious editorial commitment, not a completeness obligation. The archive aims for editorial depth on a curated roster rather than coverage of every entity that has ever touched the tradition. The document below records the method.
The parent brief sets the scope. This archive of industrial, noise and avant-garde disturbances documents the tradition, not its full personnel record. The tradition spans Luigi Russolo's 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises and the futurist-noise-intonarumori opening; the post-war musique-concrète and electronic-studio cluster (Schaeffer, Stockhausen, the GRM, the WDR Studio for Electronic Music); the Fluxus and avant-garde-performance pre-history (Cage, Black Mountain College, the Vienna Actionists); the post-1976 industrial founding (Throbbing Gristle, COUM Transmissions, Industrial Records, Cabaret Voltaire, SPK, Whitehouse, the first-wave UK and Continental scene); the 1980s noise and power electronics constellation (Japan, Italy, Northern Europe); the 1990s death-industrial and harsh-noise tradition; the dark-ambient and ritual programme; the contemporary figures; and the archive's adjacent territories (the post-industrial scene, the dance-and-rhythmic mode, the visual vein, and the methodological idiom).
The three inclusion tests. Test 1: Founding or codifying. Did the entity originate, name, codify, or first instantiate a form, technique, scene, sub-genre, label-category or institution within the tradition? Examples: Russolo for noise-as-music; Throbbing Gristle for the 1976 industrial founding; Whitehouse for power electronics; Vomir for Harsh Noise Wall; Steven Stapleton and Nurse with Wound for the NWW list and the long United Dairies imprint; Genesis P-Orridge for the post-Throbbing Gristle ritual programme through Psychic TV; Brian Williams for the post-1992 Lustmord dark-ambient and ritual-ambient programme. Test 2: Tradition-internal centrality. Is the entity cited, sampled, collaborated-with, distributed-by, or otherwise routed through by multiple other entities within the tradition? Examples: the NWW list as canonical reference; the collaborations across the post-1976 first wave; the Schimpfluch network of the Swiss / Japanese / German / American extremity tradition; the sister-rosters of the canonical labels. Test 3: Documentary necessity. Without the entity's keep, does some department-level entry (a form, a manifesto, a scene, a work, a label-cluster) become incoherent? Where the answer is yes, the entity earns an entry on documentary necessity grounds even where Tests 1 and 2 are marginally met.
The inclusion rule. An artist earns an entry by passing at least two of the three tests. Failing all three: no keep, regardless of how interesting, prolific, well-loved by me, or significant in adjacent traditions the artist may be. My position is that the absence of an entry is not a value judgement; it is a scope decision. The framework is conservative by design.
The label test is separate and more permissive. A label earns an entry by satisfying at least one of: (a) released the canonical entries in a form (e.g. Industrial Records for industrial founding, RRRecords for American noise, Cold Meat Industry for Northern-European dark-ambient, Touch Records for the long UK avant-and-experimental cluster); (b) operated as a curatorial centre within a scene (e.g. Nettwerk for Vancouver electro-industrial, Mute for early UK industrial-and-after distribution, Aquilifer Sodality for Italian harsh-noise); (c) functioned as a connector node between scenes (e.g. Touch's role bridging Cabaret Voltaire, Chris Watson and the contemporary experimental field; Dais Records' role bridging contemporary American figures with the historical IR-and-after tradition). One of three is sufficient. The label-test permissiveness reflects the documentary value of labels as the fixed points a scene forms around even where individual roster acts may not themselves pass the artist-tests.
The cross-reference convention. I treat hyperlinked names as a commitment: a hyperlinked cross-reference indicates a documented entity at the destination. Plain-text mentions in body prose do not carry this commitment and may name entities the archive references without keeping. The hyperlink-is-a-commitment rule is the central cross-reference convention of the archive and anchors the editorial position the present document records.
The tier convention reminder. Artists I keep earn one of three tiers. Tier I: the foundational and tradition-defining figures; long 1,500-2,000 word editorial bodies, 25-35 vitals-pills, 35-50 cross-reference rows, 400-500 word coda. Tier II: single-genre or single-scene figures of real weight; shorter editorial bodies and pill counts; significant but less foundational. Tier III: notable but more limited figures, including cross-tradition reference-anchors. Tier ∅: the open placement. It applies only to an artist who has already passed the inclusion tests, and whose body of work is active enough that I cannot yet place it confidently at I, II or III without that judgement looking premature later. A Tier ∅ entry is a held verdict on rank, not a lesser rank and not a provisional inclusion: the question of whether to keep is settled before the tier is considered. It carries no implication that the artist will later rise to a higher tier, and the empty set is never a holding place for entities that failed the inclusion tests. An active career is not by itself a reason to be included here; many securely-ranked figures are at I, II or III while still working. The document below addresses whether to keep an entity at all; the tier at which to keep is a separate decision, made per keep once inclusion is established.
The post-punk and new-wave boundary. Post-punk and new wave are an adjacency the archive borders but does not document as a tradition in their own right. The remit is the industrial, noise and avant-garde line; post-punk is the parallel scene the first wave grew up beside, and shares a moment and a city or two with, but is not my subject. A small number of entries sit close to this border, and each was admitted on stated grounds rather than on its post-punk character: Swans for the no-wave-into-experimental-rock weight and the industrial-rock-adjacent early brutalism; Robert Rental for the UK DIY-electronic line that fed directly into the first wave; Hula for its place inside the Sheffield scene; Nervous Gender for the industrial edge of the work and the Live at Target document it shares with Factrix and Z'ev, and explicitly not as an industrial band in the strict sense. These are border filings made on the inclusion tests, not a precedent. An act whose centre of gravity is post-punk, new wave, art-punk or DIY-indie does not earn an entry by having touched the industrial scene or influenced a documented figure; where the influence is real it is noted in prose, and the act is not included. The test is the same one the EBM-as-genre, industrial-metal-commercial and collaborator-chain exclusions apply: centre of gravity, not contact. No wave is the one nearby scene the archive does document as a form in its own right, as the American parallel-founding-moment to industrial proper; it is named here only to mark that it sits inside the remit, not alongside post-punk on the boundary. I record this boundary because the post-punk adjacency is the most natural direction for unplanned expansion, and the framework is conservative by design.
The revision policy. The framework may be revised by future editorial decision. Changes to the inclusion tests, the label test, or the cross-reference convention will be documented in the entry's revision history. My commitment is to state the rule, not to make the rule unchangeable. A stated rule that I later revises remains a stated rule; an unstated rule is no rule at all.
My closing position. The archive is mine, the rules are mine, and the editorial freedom to admit particular entities is the central scope-control method of the archive. This document exists so that future decisions may be made consistently rather than ad-hoc, and so that the reasoning behind each placement is documented and revisable. The framework is conservative by design and I intend to keep it so.