On whether it is industrial.

An inquiry that declines to conclude

Someone will always ask whether it is industrial. They ask it the way other people ask whether a tomato is a fruit, except that the tomato people eventually go home, whereas these people have a fanzine.

Let me set out the state of the field as it presently stands, which is to say in ruins, and has stood in ruins, by general agreement, since before any of us arrived, the ruins being the only structure anyone will admit is genuinely industrial.

The first thing to understand is that nobody agrees on anything. The second thing to understand is that the disagreement is the one stable feature, the load-bearing wall, as it were, and that any attempt to resolve it is correctly regarded as an attack on the foundations. A man stood up at the Tilburg symposium in what was either 1991 or 1993 (the minutes are themselves disputed, on the grounds that minutes are a bourgeois imposition) and proposed a definition. He has not been seen since. We assume he is well.

Consider the canonical test case, the one every faction returns to: a man, alone, near a radiator. Is it industrial? It depends entirely, we are told, on the man, the radiator, and the nature of the nearness. If the radiator is on, this is held by the Aberdeen Granite school to be merely domestic, a record of central heating, sentimental. If the radiator is off, the Lower Saxony Quiet maintains that it qualifies, since the absence of heat is itself a comment on labour. The Slough Plateau faction rejects both readings and insists the man should not have been allowed near the radiator in the first place without filing the appropriate documentation, and that the real work, the only honest work, was the documentation.

This is roughly where it begins to get complicated.

Take the matter of the hyphen. There are those who write death industrial, those who write death-industrial, and a third group, smaller, fiercer, who write death industrial but mean it differently, and can tell, and will tell you, that you have got it wrong, by ear, from across a room. The Wolverhampton Schism of 1987 was fought entirely over the hyphen, and the Wolverhampton Schism of 1989 was fought over whether the Schism of 1987 had been about the hyphen at all, or whether that was a cover story for a deeper schism that nobody is permitted to name. Both Schisms produced compilations. Both compilations were titled Settled. Neither settled anything.

The labels do not help. Flange released the foundational document of the wet-concrete movement, a forty-minute recording of a floor curing, and were immediately denounced by Bib-Cock for selling out, on the grounds that the floor had been commissioned, and that a truly industrial floor would have cured whether anyone was listening or not, ideally with nobody listening, ideally in a building that had since been demolished. Bib-Cock were in turn denounced by Bunion Tapes, who pointed out, correctly, that Bib-Cock had a distribution deal, and that distribution is a form of comfort, and that comfort is the enemy. Bunion Tapes distributed exclusively by leaving cassettes in the gutter outside specific addresses in Tilburg, which the Tilburg Hum regarded as showing off.

You will want, at this point, names. Here is where the consensus collapses entirely, because to name an artist is to claim them for a faction, and to claim them is to start a war.

Is Pylon Cortege industrial? The early Pylon Cortege material, the three cassettes on Sump Pump Recordings, is held by nearly everyone to be foundational, the real thing, austere, unpleasant, correctly unlistenable. But after they signed to Punctured Gonad and added a second member, a man who had previously been in a band, with songs, the question was reopened, and reopened violently, and the consensus now is that the first three cassettes were industrial and that everything since has been, in the devastating phrase of the Limerick Drone Schism, "music."

Grigolo Gugliotta's Spleen are not industrial, and never claimed to be, which is precisely why the Düsseldorf Damp insist they are the only genuinely industrial act of the period: the refusal of the label is itself the most industrial gesture available, more industrial than any radiator. By this logic, of course, the most industrial artist who has ever existed is a man in Aberdeen who has never recorded anything, has never heard of any of this, and would be appalled to learn he is the subject of a 1,400-word position paper in the journal Sphincter Disfunction.

I have not mentioned The Babbabucci Method, and will not, on legal advice.

The scenes spawn sub-scenes the way damp spawns more damp. The Trondheim Hush split from the Scandinavian quiet over the question of whether silence could be too clean. The Milton Keynes Roundabout School holds that all genuinely industrial music must be recorded within sightline of a roundabout, a position widely mocked until somebody checked, and discovered that an alarming proportion of the canon does in fact meet this criterion, after which the mockery was quietly withdrawn and the Roundabout School began charging for membership. The Second Bratislava Recension exists solely to issue corrections to the First Bratislava Recension, which has never been located, and which a growing minority believe was invented by the Second purely so that it would have something to correct.

There is the recurring figure, present in every scene, who insists that nothing recorded after a particular year counts, the year varying by individual but the certainty being constant. For one it is 1981. For another, 1979. There is a man in the Surrey Tin Works circle who maintains that the genre peaked, and concluded, in 1977, before any of the recordings he is referring to were made, on the grounds that the idea was complete by then and everything subsequent has been mere implementation, and that implementation is, you will not be surprised to learn, the enemy.

And then someone, always, near the end of the evening, asks the only question that genuinely cannot be answered, which is whether Throbbing anything still counts, or whether the foundational acts have, by being foundational, by being liked, by appearing on tote bags, ceased to be industrial at all, and whether the only truly industrial position left is to disavow the entire history and start again with a single man and a single radiator, at which point we are back at the radiator, and the radiator is, as ever, either on or off, and we still cannot agree which state is the more sincere.

The matter remains before the committee. The committee has not met. The committee, on closer inspection, may not be industrial, and several members have resigned in protest at the suggestion that it is, while several others have resigned in protest at the suggestion that it isn't, and the question of whether a resignation is itself an industrial act has been referred, pending further documentation, to a sub-committee, which is currently a man, alone, near a radiator.

We will revisit the question when there is less to say about it, which is to say never.

Filed quietly by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Edwardian era · revised endlessly, by everyone, without authority