Nervous Gender formed in Los Angeles in 1978, the founding line-up of Gerardo Velazquez, Edward Stapleton, Phranc and Michael Ochoa. With The Screamers they were among the first bands to make a punk attack entirely out of synthesisers, no guitars at all, and the term applied to them now is synth-punk. The Bureau files them at Tier III, and it does so carefully: not as an industrial band in the strict sense, but for the industrial edge of their work and for one specific document that ties them to the tradition this archive keeps.
That document is Live at Target (1980), the compilation recorded at the San Francisco venue Target and issued as both an LP and a video. It is seminal twice over, as a punk recording and as an early industrial one, and the company Nervous Gender keep on it is the point: the other contributors were Factrix and Z'ev (credited there as UNS), both filed here. Nervous Gender found early acceptance in that scene before the synth-punk category existed to hold them, and the abrasive, confrontational character of the music, the distorted keyboards, the transgressive and unabashedly queer subject matter, sat as easily beside industrial as beside punk.
The band was deliberately provocative and resolutely queer at a moment when that was rare and costly in the LA scene; the staging was confrontational and the lyrics satirical and explicit. After the first year the membership never settled: Don Bolles of the Germs drummed from 1979, Paul Roessler of The Screamers joined in 1980, and a rotating cast followed. The studio collection Music From Hell (1981) became a cult synth-punk record. The band ran in various forms through 1988, ended after founding member Gerardo Velazquez died in 1992, and reformed in 2007 with old and new members. The Bureau records them as a genuine adjacency: an LA synth-punk band whose industrial edge, and whose place on Live at Target, earn it a file here.