Scenes.

The Scenes department files the geographic clusters that produced recognisable regional traditions in industrial music. Each city-case argues for the city's coherence as a tradition, with the venues, studios, residential context and local infrastructure that produced the tradition documented at editorial weight.

The Scenes department exists where the editorial argument can be made about the place itself rather than about the practitioners working there. Geography overlaps with the artist and label files; the Scenes department captures the part of the method that lives in the city's walls, in the building debris, in the rent levels, and in the room-acoustics of the venues that anchored the tradition. Audio · Studios & Venues documents individual buildings as discrete sites (50 Beck Road, Western Works currently filed there); Scenes places those buildings inside the regional tradition each anchored.

Seven cities are filed: Sheffield (the British industrial-electronic capital), Düsseldorf (the Rhine axis, the German electronic-music tradition's anchor), West Berlin (the Mauer-Jahre walled-enclave case), London (the first-wave consolidation centre), Chicago (the EBM-pivot scene's American node), Tokyo & Osaka (the dual-anchor Japanoise founding scene), and Los Angeles (the dual-tradition deathrock-and-industrial-noise founding city). Three further scenes extend the department beyond the founding seven: the LAFMS (the Los Angeles Free Music Society, filed as a collective), Shanghai (the youngest scene, the Chinese noise city built without a local lineage), and France (the first scene filed as a nation rather than a city, the French post-industrial and bruitist network).