Theologian is the New York industrial and power-electronics project of Lee M. Bartow, begun under that name in 2009 as the continuation of his earlier Navicon Torture Technologies (NTT, 1997-2009). The Bureau treats the Bartow catalogue as one working practice across both names: the renaming marks an aesthetic shift, not a clean break, and the record runs continuously from 1997. The change came with a sustained collaboration programme and the parallel growth of the Annihilvs label Bartow had founded in 1997.
Annihilvs Power Electronix is inseparable from the project. Bartow founded it in summer 1997 to release the NTT catalogue and allied work, beginning with the NTT / Negative Eight split Amalgam, and it later took in several international acts. Through the 2000s it handled the bulk of the catalogue while individual releases went out through allied labels: Malignant Records issued the 2001 NTT debut album Scenes From The Next Millennium, with Crucial Blast and Handmade Birds releasing later Theologian work.
Scenes From The Next Millennium is the first cross-link between Bartow and the American post-industrial label network. Built from material recorded across the mid-to-late 1990s and 2000 on Tascam 424 MKII and Porta One cassette four-tracks, it placed NTT alongside the Malignant roster of Yen Pox and IRM, establishing Bartow within the post-1994 American secondary scene.
The 2009 shift to Theologian opened the practice out into a multi-member configuration, currently Bartow with Daniel Suffering (Whorid, Slavernij) and Dave Brenner (Militia Men, Heidnik). The Theologian-period catalogue is markedly more collaborative than the largely solo NTT, and documents an expanding network of working figures across the American post-industrial cluster.
Two collaborations mark the reach of that network. Soft Tissue (2016), with the Oakland project Lament Cityscape, is the clearest case of the post-metal crossover Bartow calls blackened synth-death: produced at Underland Studios, mastered by James Plotkin. Nature Is Satan's Church, with The Vomit Arsonist, ties Bartow to the post-2010 power-electronics second generation; both projects circulate through Annihilvs and Malignant, the two labels through which the cluster's record largely runs.
Bartow's parallel Apex Armories live-events and tour-organising work has been the scene's live-programme anchor through the 2010s. The label, the artist practice and the live programme are not three separate operations but one sustained scene-building effort. The Bureau files Theologian at Tier II as the central organising figure of the post-2009 New York industrial and power-electronics scene.