There is music everywhere if you decide to listen for it. The rhythm of machinery. The resonance of metal. The repetition of a production line. A radio transmission drifting through static. The hum of electricity. The strange change in character when a recording is copied onto tape, played back, distorted and copied again.

For most of the history of recorded music, many of these sounds were things engineers tried to remove. Noise was unwanted. Distortion was a fault. Mechanical repetition was something musicians were supposed to overcome rather than imitate.

Industrial music emerged from a very different way of listening. It didn't ask whether a sound was musical. It asked what could be musical about it.

Before Industrial Had a Name

Industrial music did not suddenly appear with the invention of a particular synthesizer or drum machine. Its roots spread through several decades of experimentation in which artists had already begun questioning the boundary between music and sound.

In 1940s France, Pierre Schaeffer developed musique concrète by recording sounds onto disc and later magnetic tape, then cutting, looping, reversing and rearranging them. A train, a piano note or a human voice could be separated from its source and treated simply as sound.

John Cage pushed the question further. If environmental sound could become part of a composition, perhaps listening itself was as important as the act of making music.

By the 1960s, tape recorders had escaped the specialist studio. Artists could record the world around them, manipulate it and feed it back into their work. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop constructed extraordinary electronic sound from tape, oscillators and everyday objects. In Germany, groups including Can and Faust began treating the recording studio itself as part of the composition.

None of this was Industrial music. But the door had been opened. Sound no longer had to begin with a musical instrument.

 

Something Was Changing in Britain

By the middle of the 1970s, Britain was not an especially optimistic place. Traditional industries were declining. Unemployment was rising. Cities built around manufacturing were changing. Political tension, economic uncertainty and a growing distrust of institutions formed the background to everyday life. At the same time, technology was becoming increasingly accessible.

Tape recorders were relatively inexpensive. Electronic components could be bought and assembled. Synthesisers remained costly, but second-hand equipment and cheaper instruments were beginning to appear. Amplifiers, radios, microphones and effects could all be repurposed.

Punk would soon demonstrate that technical virtuosity was not a prerequisite for making culturally important music. Elsewhere, another group of artists was arriving at an even more fundamental question. Why should music have to behave like music at all?

Industrial Records

In 1975, Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Chris Carter and Peter Christopherson formed Throbbing Gristle from the remains of the performance-art collective COUM Transmissions.

They were not approaching music from the conventional route of musicians forming a band. Their background included performance art, photography, electronics, visual art and confrontation. Sound was simply another medium available to them.

Their performances could incorporate electronics, tape recordings, distorted voices, repetitive rhythms and unsettling imagery. The intention was not necessarily to entertain. It could be to provoke, disturb or simply force an audience to pay attention.

In 1976 they established their own label. They called it Industrial Records.Its slogan was equally memorable:  Industrial Music for Industrial People.

The phrase was partly provocative, partly descriptive and partly a joke. But it stuck. A genre had acquired a name. The irony is that the music subsequently called Industrial would never settle into a single recognisable sound. That was perhaps the point.

 

Sheffield on Tape

About 50 miles north of Throbbing Gristle's base in London, another version of this experimentation was developing in Sheffield.

Cabaret Voltaire began with Stephen Mallinder, Richard H. Kirk and Chris Watson experimenting with tape machines and electronics during the early 1970s. Their surroundings were difficult to ignore. Sheffield was a city whose identity had been built around steel and heavy industry, just as those industries were entering a period of profound decline.

But Cabaret Voltaire didn't need to drag the factory into the studio. The city was already outside the door. Tape became central to their work. Voices, broadcasts, environmental recordings and fragments of existing media could be recorded, repeated and transformed. Synthesisers and primitive rhythm machines sat alongside bass, guitar and clarinet.

The tape recorder was particularly important because it blurred the distinction between documenting a sound and creating one. A recorded voice could become rhythm. A broadcast could become atmosphere. An accidental fragment could become the centre of a composition. The world outside the studio was becoming part of the instrumentation.

 

The Beauty of the Wrong Sound

Traditional musical instruments arrive carrying centuries of expectations. A piano is designed to produce piano sounds. A violin is designed to respond in a particular way to the movement of a bow. Even the early synthesizer inherited familiar ideas of pitch, scales and keyboards. Industrial musicians were increasingly interested in sounds that carried fewer instructions.

Metal being struck did not arrive with a correct way of playing it. Neither did a tape loop, a radio transmission, feedback from an amplifier or the mechanical rhythm of a machine. That ambiguity was useful. It meant that texture could become as important as melody and repetition as important as harmonic development.

Distortion could exaggerate a sound rather than damage it. Tape saturation could give recordings physical weight. Feedback could become an evolving tone. Repetition could create tension precisely because it refused to resolve. These weren't necessarily attempts to make music sound like a factory. They were attempts to discover what else music could be made from.

 

When the Building Became an Instrument

If Britain's early Industrial scene often brought machinery into music through electronics, tape and imagery, Germany's Einstürzende Neubauten took the idea somewhere more physical.

Formed in West Berlin in 1980, the group began incorporating metal, power tools, scrap material and objects found around construction sites into performances and recordings. The distinction between instrument and environment became increasingly difficult to maintain.

Sheet metal could become percussion. Springs could resonate. Pipes could be struck. Architectural spaces could contribute their own reverberation. The approach was dramatic, but underneath the spectacle was a surprisingly musical idea. Every physical object has acoustic properties. Strike it and something happens.

The name Einstürzende Neubauten roughly translates as "collapsing new buildings", an appropriate image for a group emerging from a divided city filled with construction, destruction and unresolved history. Here the industrial landscape wasn't simply something being represented. It could literally become part of the performance.

 

The Machines Became Smaller

During the early 1980s, the technology of electronic music changed quickly. Synthesisers became more affordable. Drum machines became programmable. Sequencers could repeat increasingly complex patterns. Effects processors became cheaper and more sophisticated.

Then sampling began moving beyond institutions and extremely wealthy studios. This changed the relationship between Industrial music and the physical world. Previously, if an artist wanted the sound of a machine, a piece of metal or a particular environment, they might record it onto tape and manipulate the recording manually.

A sampler could turn that recording into something playable. A metallic impact could be mapped across a keyboard. A fragment of speech could be triggered rhythmically. Machinery could be cut into pieces and rearranged. A sound recorded in the real world no longer had to remain connected to the event that produced it. The sampler did something particularly suited to Industrial's way of thinking. It made anything potentially musical.

Not because everything suddenly became pleasant or harmonious, but because everything could now be captured, repeated, pitched and performed. The distinction between instrument and recording was disappearing.

 

The Machine Finds the Dancefloor

Industrial music had begun as something deliberately difficult to define. Inevitably, other musicians began taking parts of its vocabulary somewhere else. In Belgium and Germany, groups including Front 242 and Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft developed harder, increasingly physical forms of electronic music built around sequenced synthesisers, drum machines and repetitive rhythms.

The term Electronic Body Music, or EBM, emerged during the early 1980s. The name was revealing. This was electronic music intended to be felt physically. Some of Industrial's confrontation remained, as did its fascination with repetition, machinery and controlled aggression. But the rhythm was becoming more explicit. The machine had discovered the dancefloor. This was an important transformation because it demonstrated that mechanical repetition did not have to feel cold or detached. It could move people.

Drum machines and sequencers could produce rhythms with a consistency no human drummer could replicate. Rather than disguising that precision, electronic musicians could exaggerate it. The machine didn't have to pretend to be human. Its lack of humanity could be part of the attraction.

 

Industrial Escapes Industrial

By the end of the 1980s, the word Industrial described an increasingly broad collection of music. Some artists moved towards rock. Others towards electronic dance music. Sampling became increasingly important. Digital processing allowed sound to be distorted and reconstructed in ways that would have been extraordinarily difficult a decade earlier.

Eventually the ideas became more useful than the genre itself. Electronic musicians across techno, experimental music, ambient, IDM and countless harder forms of dance music began working with sounds that earlier generations might simply have regarded as unpleasant, broken or unusable.

Autechre, for example, are not an Industrial group in any straightforward sense. Their music emerged from a different time, culture and technological environment. But listen to the attention given to texture, repetition and the behaviour of machines and an older idea can still be heard. Electronic instruments do not always have to imitate traditional ones. They don't even have to behave predictably. The machinery itself can provide the material. Industrial had helped make that idea culturally imaginable.

 

The Sound of Imperfection

There is another curious legacy hiding inside the story. Modern digital music technology is extraordinarily clean. Software can generate oscillators with almost no unwanted noise. Recordings can be edited with microscopic precision. Timing can be corrected perfectly. Digital copies can be reproduced indefinitely without degradation.

Yet musicians repeatedly introduce imperfections deliberately. Distortion, saturation, tape emulation and bit reduction are used to add texture and character. Feedback is encouraged, mechanical repetition is allowed to slip slightly out of alignment and sounds are deliberately recorded through cheap microphones or old cassette machines. Entire industries now exist to reproduce characteristics that earlier engineers worked hard to eliminate.

Industrial music certainly wasn't responsible for all of this. Dub, musique concrète, early electronic music, punk and countless experimental traditions all contributed to the changing relationship between musicians and imperfection.

But Industrial made an unusually forceful argument for texture. A sound didn't need to be clean to be useful. Sometimes the dirt was the useful part.

 

Finding Music in the Machine

Industrial music is difficult to define because perhaps it was never really one sound. It was an attitude towards sound. The first generation had access to relatively primitive tools: tape recorders, electronics, microphones, effects, radios and whatever objects happened to be available. Later musicians inherited samplers, digital processors, computers and software capable of transforming almost any recording beyond recognition.

The technology changed enormously, but the instinct remained surprisingly familiar. Listen differently.

A machine contains rhythm, a building contains resonance and a recording contains textures its creator may never have intended. Even a mistake can contain possibilities.

Industrial's lasting contribution to electronic music may not be a particular beat, instrument or production technique. It may simply be permission to pay attention to sounds that conventional music had taught us to ignore. Once you begin listening that way, the distinction between musical and non-musical sound becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. The machine didn't have to imitate an instrument. The machine could be the instrument.

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