Pouppée Fabrikk
The Dirt
Alfa Matrix

The Dirt‘s pre-release single “Bring Back the Ways of Old” was pretty literal, even by the standards of neo-oldschool EBM. Pretty much everything about the 2013 comeback album from Sweden’s Pouppée Fabrikk hearkens back to their earliest material, before an increased quotient of guitars legendarily alienated a significant portion of their audience. As listens go it’s a bracing affair, its grittiness and strength flowing from rapidly cycling basslines and crashing drums with little else to distract from or dilute the experience.

Roughly half the songs on The Dirt are cleaned up and re-recorded versions of old demos that predate the release of their first album, 1990′s Rage. Comparing the album versions of the tracks to the original recordings found on the second CD of the release reveals little variation; production facelift aside, these songs were born hard, and remain so. “Invader 39″ and the crawling “Satan’s Organism” are ‘roided up and given some additional drum programming but remain mostly unchanged, and only the edgier synths and clearer mix on “Bright Light” distinguish it from its embryonic form. I listened to the album a few times through before looking into which tracks were resurrected and which were wholly original to the release and never at any point was I able to distinguish between them, a delivery on the promise made by the sneering “Bring Back the Ways of Old”.

The new songs on the LP don’t differ especially in approach, although you can certainly hear some influences from singer Henrik Björkk’s various side-projects creeping into them. The ominous pads and samples of monks chanting during the intro/outro to “Death is Natural” suggest some of the black ambience of Mz.412 and Nordvargr (albeit far less oppressive and bleak), but as with the moaning, creaking machines audible on “Stahlwerk” they’re purely ornamental, and largely abandoned by the time the drums and basslines come crashing back in. That’s fine though, really: aside from Björkk’s menacing growl, Pouppée Fabrikk’s best asset is their all-or-nothing rhythm arrangements. Whether it’s the guitar-assisted chug of “H8 U” or the speedy kick-snare patterns on “Symptom”, PF are constantly pushing forward, and your choice as a listener is either come with or get out of the way. I’d suggest the former, played at a loud enough volume the danger of being runover by the album seems perfectly real.

Is it ahistorical to call Pouppée Fabrikk the first neo-oldschool band? Chronologically they emerged long enough after DAF, Die Krupps and Nitzer Ebb to not be counted amongst their ranks as body music progenitors, and you can certainly hear their rawness echoing through any number of anhalt projects currently making the rounds. Listening to The Dirt in tandem with the recent digital remasters of their first three records (available via Bandcamp) would certainly seem to support the idea; for all the bands repping classic EBM’s aesthetics and values, few have as legitimate a claim or a record as solid to back it up. Not that Pouppée Fabrikk have anything to prove: long on muscle and short on embellishment, The Dirt speaks for them.

Buy it.

Okay folks, it’s time for some real talk. It’s kind of obvious that one of the recurring themes in most of my articles for this fine site is fairly harsh criticism for people’s attitudes in reference to industrial music and culture, and you know what? I just spent two full days listening to Revolver Magazine’s exclusive preview of the entirety of Skinny Puppy’s Weapon and I just can’t keep up the cynicism. Thus, I’d like to instead share with you an opinion that I feel increasingly confident about asserting: In America, it would appear that industrial music, within the greater context of dark alternative as a whole, is experiencing a surge of relevance that may point to a change in our collective fortunes. Here are a few factors that indicate why this might be the case.

5) The Opening of Complex

While venues that exclusively catered to underground and/or alternative culture events might seem like a mythical beast for people in this day and age, it wasn’t actually that long ago that such venues not only existed, but thrived. Many have either closed down (New York’s legendary CBGB, the first and last word on American punk, shut its doors in 2006) or diversified from their classic role (Chicago underground music institution Neo has recently began successfully experimenting with the house scene in an effort to offset low attendance at other events), as membership of the greater underground music culture receded dramatically. However, this year the folks at Los Angeles’ Das Bunker challenged this trend and, after years of planning, raising capital and wrangling with various licensing boards, opened their own music venue in the LA suburb of Glendale. Drawing on the vast network of connections DB has developed over the course of its existence, the live show roster immediately took on a too-good-to-be-true air, hosting major shows (and often exclusive complimentary back catalog shows) from some of industrial’s luminaries, jaw-dropping combinations of notables and burgeoning acts from all over alternative music’s constellation, and weekly karaoke and trivia events that have caught the fancy of many of LA’s finest.

From a logistical perspective, Complex also bucked another huge trend in underground music venues when it opened. Let’s face it; we in the underground music world can count ourselves lucky when we step into a venue and not be accosted by smells best kept to a men’s bathroom. I’ve lost track of the amount of times that, in a fit of desperation, I’ve turned to venues with mold problems, faulty electrical systems, dead rats in the walls, pipeworks from the age of Elizabeth, beer that tastes like it was filtered through a dead skunk’s liver or a sound system that most closely resembles someone belching into a funnel. Complex opened its doors with a well-appointed atmosphere, a tidily-curated beer menu [The senior staff concurs. - ed.] , and a Funktion One sound system, widely regarded as the best brand in live PA systems, period. Let’s make no bones about it, a venue like this in most cities would immediately become choked with EDM coattail-riders and a storm of Tiësto remixes from start to finish. That Complex has arrived to make its floors the playground of alternative music is an enormously positive sign.

“The concept for Complex was to become the coolest live music space in Los Angeles. Not the biggest, not the most popular, but the coolest. And I think we are on our way. We do a lot of shows with a wide variety of promoters and styles, but all are people who are recognized in their respective scenes as tastemakers. And with my background in industrial, it has been a lot of fun to put together shows with acts whose audiences may not be familiar with each other but have sounds that complement each band and both allow one to gain some new fans from the other while at the same time making for a great party.”
– John Giovanazzi, Complex LA/Das Bunker

Dan Gatto's Continues hits the stage at LA's Complex

4) Viva Festivals!

Birthed from the comparably intimate C.O.M.A. Festival, the Kinetik Festival in Montreal did what many thought was impossible: became an institution. We as a scene and a community spent so long bemoaning the collapse of our base of supporters that the idea of a festival operating out of North America could make it past one year was outlandish. The idea of it becoming an international phenomenon, something that people flocked to from all over the world, would have just drawn questions about your sanity if you’d proposed it. Yet Kinetik did exactly that: it made it clear that with a little canny marketing and a lot of elbow grease, North America could play host to an industrial festival fitting on the world stage. The excitement as the date draws near is palpable every year, and even when they take a break from going full-throttle for a year and offer a reduced, more manageable lineup, it’s still the place where everyone wants to be once May rolls around.

It is not in bad company, either. Calgary’s Terminus Festival has drummed people’s desires up to a fevered pitch with a heavy-hitting lineup offering a cross-section of what’s hot all over the dark electronic spectrum. Playing a very strong hand filled with recent favorites of the discerning industrial connoisseur, Terminus has done the impossible: made a world-class destination of the province of Alberta. Who’d have thought? On the other end of the spectrum, NYC’s Triton has put together a lineup that will appeal to anyone interested in contemporary EBM.

Let’s do the math: three major festivals in North America, each of them able to stand on their own and tell the world, “Come on over to this side of the Big Wet Thing, we’ve got something for you.”

Terrorfakt plays Kinetik Festival in 2008

3) Recent Events Concerning Chicago Industrial

My bias might be written in huge block letters on my head with permanent marker when it comes to the Cold Waves Music Festival, considering how much difficulty I had putting my experiences at last year’s initial iteration of the festival to paper. However, Chicago has a very particular relationship with industrial, having played Rome to the greater empire of American industrial throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s due to Wax Trax! Records’ prominence throughout the genre. Chicago was to industrial what New York City was to punk: an enchanted port that introduced the entire country to a brazen, challenging new form of music that whipped an entire generation into a frenzy. The past decade and a half or so has seen a dramatic reduction in force on Chicago’s dancefloors and concert hall floors, which caused no amount of concern among people who saw the music they’d committed to themselves losing sway. The Wax Trax! Retrospectacle in 2011, a three-day commemorative event that featured some of the label’s heaviest hitters swooping down on Chicago to pay homage to label co-owners Jim Nash and Danny Flesher (Nash died in 1995, Flesher in 2010), was such an enormously successful and important event that it gave many in Chicago cautious hope for the future.

One must certainly wish that tragedy didn’t seem to be the required catalyst for great works to unfold, but life is what it is. Much as Flesher’s death had spurred the Retrospectacle, the untimely departure of Jamie Duffy, one of American industrial’s golden sons, was the impetus for 2012’s Cold Waves. Again, this was such a success that the show-runners immediately entered talks to do it again, this time even bigger, in 2013. This culminated in the massive two-day exposition that is the festival’s 2013 iteration, which generated an enormous amount of buzz upon its announcement. Without going into too much detail about the lineup, it has built upon the air of adventure and new beginnings that the 2012 festival imparted on many of its attendees and performers and presented a cross-section of the dangerous, fascinating musical phenomenon that made Chicago industrial the end-all-be-all for so many people for so long. With such a successful string of events under its belt after years of dwindling returns, there’s plenty of cause to suspect that the fabled city is back on the rise.

Caveat: I live in, am in love with and operate out of Chicago, so it would be utterly impossible for me to be impartial about it, so feel free to take my optimism and aggrandizing words with a grain of salt.

“The result of the original Cold Waves memorial show proved to be greater than anyone anticipated… Not only did people flock to the Bottom Lounge from all over North America, but also from all corners of the world. But the real effect of this show was greater than simply selling out a 700 person venue, it re-united friends, mended broken relationships and sparked an interest in Industrial music as a whole again. The energy and emotion that was felt on that Friday evening led to new collaborations and new inspirations. That inspiration has brought us to do the second Cold Waves festival. Our aim is to have this become a yearly festival and one that will be a destination event for years to come… Our aim with future Cold Wave festivals will be to weave some of the scene’s younger bands in with the veteran acts to perpetuate interest in the coldwave genre, while continuing to celebrate the spirit of our fallen brother, Jamie Duffy.”
– David Schock, WTII Records/Cold Waves Music Festival

Chemlab performs their final show ever at Cold Waves I

2) Skinny Puppy’s Weapon Released On An Industrial-Centric Label

Since Skinny Puppy’s re-inception after the Doomsday Festival in 2000, the Canadian industrial pioneers have released each of their records on German independent label SPV GmbH (either directly or through sub-label Synthetic Symphony), which these days is more closely aligned with various strains of metal than anything coming out of industrial. This all changed when they decided to release Weapon with Philadelphia-based Metropolis Records, a label that, regardless of the biases for or against it many may have, has probably been the most important outlet of industrial music in America for over a decade.

I personally think that much of the criticism of Metropolis’ tactics are unfair; not only have they served as a vital outlet of distribution from labels throughout the world, they also saved many bands from obscurity when smaller labels like 21st Circuitry and Pendragon closed their doors and their artists found their way onto Metro’s roster. Their experimentation with artists from other genres was viewed as an inexcusable breach of faith by some hard-liners (the signing of rockers Electric Six was a deeply divisive issue, for instance), but in the wake of the breakdown of the recording industry as a whole, attempting to diversify to maintain a strong bottom line and a growing fanbase is far from the worst thing a label can do. In the past few years they have doubled down on releasing many highly-regarded industrial albums and courting legendary artists such as Alison Moyet of Yaz fame. However, the well-deployed promotional campaign for Weapon has, if it pans out, solidified the idea that a label concerned chiefly with industrial music can capture the world’s interest.

Not too long ago, label head Dave Heckman spoke to I Die: You Die about how difficult it is to convince people that an industrial label can be taken seriously. After such a scathing statement, to have a band as important and influential as Skinny Puppy put their faith in Metropolis is a huge sign, one that indicates that North America’s industrial community can and will complete on a global level. This is saying nothing of the actual quality of the release, which in my opinion is top-notch. In many ways Metropolis Records is the standard bearer of North America’s industrial community, the only large-scale label to weather the storm of bankruptcies and consumer retreat that’s led to a majority of other American labels either maintaining a very small position in the marketplace or shutting down operations in the face of looming costs of business. However, treading water is obviously not enough to say that a venture is healthy; in many ways, Skinny Puppy choosing to align itself with Metropolis is a coup, one that will catapult the label onto the global stage, as the band’s fanbase is undeniably worldwide. We shall see what the future holds for the label’s stakes and what kind of sales figures the album leads to, but from the outset, this much attention for what is essentially a craft label means that industrial music, specifically coming out of North America, has barnstormed the industrial music world that transcends the community itself.

“I don’t think the label has ever been about one specific genre. We have always tried to do the EBM/Industrial stuff, but quality releases outside of that as well. The mentality of being exclusionary will only hurt a scene, a band, or a label. If something is good, and makes sense, it can only be a good thing. I think it’s obvious that Skinny Puppy’s reach and influence has long surpassed the boundaries of one specific musical genre. They’re the band that pulled me into this type of music, along with countless others. It’s a dream to be able to work with them.”
– Jim Smith, Metropolis Records

Skinny Puppy transcends multiple realities and become beings of light.

1) The Rise of Minimal Synth, First Wave EBM, Witch House and Dark Alt Titans

For much of the late ‘90s and essentially all of the ‘00s, American industrial was almost entirely beholden to the European strain when it came to style and aesthetics of the music. There had been a long history of trend-trading across the continental divide, with bands like KMFDM hopping the pond to become Seattleites, Die Krupps bringing the tradition of guitar-driven industrial to German audiences, as well as the obvious influence that bands such as Front 242 brought to the electronic angle in America. However, around the turn of the millennium, with coldwave on the decline and American labels closing up shop, Europe’s influence over American industrial started to become hegemonic in form: the biggest bands on everyone’s lips were always European, bands on our side of the Atlantic began aping their styles, and the fashion styles started to become indistinguishable. It seemed like the idea of a quintessentially American form of industrial music had started to become an archaic concept.

However, something changed in the late ‘00s. Bands like //TENSE//, Gatekeeper and White Car began to develop a certain level of buzz amongst the indie music blog scene, incorporating a heavily industrial-influenced sound with visceral performances, often in small venues (or even in people’s apartments), and word began to get out about them. At the same time, bands like Light Asylum and Austra erupted onto the music world and gained the fancy of major tastemaker music sites, bringing a fresh interest in dark aesthetics to the music world at large. Finally, artistic movements like minimal synth and witch house lurked on the underbelly of music before coming to the foreground, changing the geography of the discussion about industrial music as time went on and artists from these genres became more and more accepted by the traditional industrial scene.

The important thing about these turns of events, which I must be woefully brief in outlining, is that they spell a change in roles in regards to North America’s relationship with industrial music, especially of the European variety. Instead of being almost wholly informed by scenarios coming out of Europe, the last five or so years have seen North America standing on its own two feet when it comes to dark alternative, producing acts that have caught the attention of many from within and without the industrial scene, and reestablishing American industrial acts as a reliable and unique export after many years of being relegated to receiving product from elsewhere.

That’s not to say that many bands have not experienced plenty of success and influence during the intervening years; acts like Assemblage 23 and Imperative Reaction proved that this side of the pond could stand up and be counted when it came to producing solid, successful albums. However, the game-changer has been the vast diversification in dark music, injecting a much-needed shot of inventiveness, a break from formula and reflection on what made all of us love dark music in the first place.

Light Asylum’s Shannon Funchess reaches out and touches someone

—

This is not to say that every city is going to experience this perceived renaissance. Sure, it’s an exciting time to live in a major metropolitan area, on tour routes and within walking distance of receptive, forward-thinking clubs and record stores. However, a lot of smaller locales with much less demographic turnover than, say, a major urban environment or a well-established college town have had an enormous amount of trouble keeping their clubs open, their shows from collapsing and, in many cases, their entire local scenes from pulling a Roanoke Colony and simply vanishing into the surroundings while the shop isn’t being tended. I’ll definitely cop to being spoiled by having a huge, vibrant metropolis like Chicago as my base of operations, a scenario that has given me no small amount of freedom and open space with which to play around with ideas and establish my own theories. These theories and ideas are probably going to be useless to someone trying to keep their local scene from buckling under such pressures as economic instability and decline of interest, and I’m far from unsympathetic to the trials and tribulations of people giving it their all to keep things going.

However, maybe it’s simply time to consider that the standard business model we’ve been employing for the past ten to fifteen years has just run its course and is starting to just become unsustainable. One of the more unflattering and long-running attitudes of the outward-facing collective personality of Our Thing, to quote the Great and Powerful Brulex, is maintaining a kind of constant half-sneer towards people that didn’t exactly fit the bill for Most Likely To Enjoy Weird Aggressive Electronic Music. For example, the general clutching-at-pearls fear of the cursed hipster invading industrial nights (an irrational and obnoxious terror that I certainly was guilty of for longer than I had any right to be) has created a stiff barrier that is turning away people who are interested in exploring industrial music at the door, thus harming us collectively by preventing an influx of new blood. Think of it biologically: a closed-off gene pool doesn’t flourish. It becomes inbred and drooly and weird. The traditional scene these days just isn’t populous enough in most American cities to justify setting up roadblocks to discourage the fearsome hipster from coming in and giving it a shot.

It’s a good time to explore some new ideas. Some things I left off the list – like haute macabre being a major player in the fashion world, Nine Inch Nails whipping the internet into a heated fervor when they announced they were returning to action, and industrial-influenced techno artists coming from overseas to play before big crowds at North American dance clubs – are even more indicators that there’s something out there beyond our collective event horizon that we could tap into. Furthermore, the people who might come in the door if we embrace these turns of events and the looming interest in our doings aren’t exactly alien beings; while chatting with Shannon Funchess of Light Asylum at a recent show in Chicago, she expressed great interest in returning home to catch Leaether Strip’s performance in New York City near the end of their tour.

Far be it from me to advocate throwing the baby out with the bathwater, though. While it might be tempting to say that the traditional/mainstream scene should be considered dead on arrival and instead we should all focus on the future of hipster goths (or cryptsters, if you will), that’s stupid and unhelpful because alienating people who have displayed their own brand of commitment is unfair. Kinetik Festival’s vast, surging seas of folks festooned with goggles, hair extensions and cyber fashion is proof enough that shooting them down as a non-contributing factor ignores obvious facts. Plus, tearing down one hegemonic force just to replace it with another is the critical flaw in every failed revolution, one that would be pointless and counterproductive to embark upon here. Let’s just say that it’s potentially a very cool time for us to all transcend our petty differences and embrace what might be a very cool turn of events for this thing we all ostensibly love.

M‡яc▲ll▲ + V▲LH▲LL
Malleus Maleficarum
Phantasma Disques

What a difference a year makes. When the mysterious production teams behind V▲LH▲LL and M‡яc▲ll▲ collaborated on their GĦØSŦS OF ΛNŦĮQUĮŦҰ split in 2012, we couldn’t help but listen to it in the framework of the new and productive intersection of industrial and post-witch house sounds, and position it alongside work from ∆AIMON, C/∆/T, and other artists exploring that same connection. Having spent the interim period tracking both M‡яc▲ll▲ and V▲LH▲LL’s individual output via digital singles and remixes, though, it felt more natural to approach Malleus Maleficarum from the perspective of each group’s progression since they previously worked together. Both have charted distinct paths for themselves, and both show refinement and expansion of their aesthetics here.

Beginning with the A-side, there seems to be a much more regimented division of labour within M‡яc▲ll▲’s tracks on Malleus Maleficarum than we’ve previously heard from the NY outfit: tight synth bass acts as a tremoring foundation for more heavily filtered and tweaked leads. Atmospherics are more stripped down than before, with builds and falls in walls of synths (as on “MVRDEЯESS”) and samples being called upon to communicate mood, producing crisper, less ambivalent compositions. M‡яc▲ll▲’s proximity to dark electro has never been closer as it has on this release (and not just due to the similarity “Ĵєannє d’Λr甑s chord changes hold with The Retrosic’s “The Lucky Ones”).

Speaking of samples, it’s funny, but on this suite of tracks which often make explicit reference to haunted houses (and whose title refers to a medieval treatise on witches), M‡яc▲ll▲ has never seemed less witchy. Apart from a couple of trap-esque beats here and there, Necrotek feels like a much closer neighbour of the specific spooky occult moods M‡яc▲ll▲’s going for than, say, Mater Suspiria Vision (M‡яc▲ll▲’s labelling their new tracks as “bloodwave” on Soundcloud, which is pretty cool as far as self-applied genre monikers go).

If M‡яc▲ll▲ have never sounded tighter, V▲LH▲LL have certainly never sounded this sprawling. Children’s wind up toys tinkle along their more customary scraping noise on “DΣ▲D FIΣLDS”, and a similar juxtaposition crops up on “RΣ▲PING TIMΣ FIN▲LLY”, where loping, wheezing carnival pads gasp past staccato beats and familiar “set ships’ prows against icy breakers” Viking horns.

It’s not just sounds that feel more varied with V▲LH▲LL, though. The trading back and forth of male and female vocals (oddly framed by wet, clopping synths) on “▲ THRΣAT” feels like the work of a far more chill band, possibly of the Projekt ilk, before noise crashes in again with suitably Nordic lyrics (“In the name of Tyr and for the glory of Odin”). “SNΦW ▲NGΣLS” and “THΣ SH▲PΣ OF HUGIN” each have a lilting dreaminess of their own, the former druggy and unsettling, the latter seductive and almost waltzing. If not quite ballads, these are certainly a new type of V▲LH▲LL track at a structural level, and show chops above and beyond their already-proven talent for sound sculpture.

When we first started tracking bands of M‡яc▲ll▲ and V▲LH▲LL’s ilk, it wasn’t just for the strength of their existing material (as great as it was), or for what their blend of sounds represented in terms of genre-bending; it was also because they seemed like they could strike out into just about any new territory at a moment’s notice, each heading in different directions like a darkly explosive diaspora. I’m not signing off on Malleus Maleficarum because it’s “the future of dark music” or any such grandiose claims; I’m signing off on it because it’s the future of two dark bands, both of whom have staked claims in strange new lands, far from home.

Buy it.

THYX
Below the City
THYX Records/Metropolis

The first THYX album The Way Home came out a few short months after the release of Stefan Poiss’ latest as mind.in.a.box, and in some ways benefited from the comparison. Minus the conceptual underpinnings of his collaborations with Markus Hadwiger, the project felt like an outlet for Poiss to stretch out creatively and play around with his brand of hyper-composed future EBM. One short year later and we have Below the City, an album more focused and specific than its predecessor, and while less spontaneous and off-the-cuff sounding it’s no less enjoyable and highlights many of Poiss’ strengths as a songwriter, programmer, and most of all, performer.

The word I use most often in reference to mind.in.a.box is “progressive”, and I think that holds true with his work as THYX. The level of craftsmanship in his productions is staggering, and while often times that level of studio acumen leads to people making boring music with impeccable technique he’s always managed to keep a very relatable human element at the center of his work. Some of that certainly stems from his vocals, which have grown from perfunctory if unspectacular to fairly accomplished, bolstered by his clever use of modulation and effects. Yes, the music on Below the City is built up from all manner of ultra-slick synth programming, but it’s Poiss himself who stands at the center, not only as producer but as an artist.

Stefan’s tendency to sing in a higher register seems to be a sticking point for some listeners, but on songs like the single “Network of Light” it fits perfectly, granting a grand, soaring quality to the smooth and speedy sequences that ramp up and drop back between chorus and verse. The funky “Roses” is equally well-served by Poiss’ vocals, accompanied by a synthesized electric guitar (long one of Stefan’s secret weapons) and bubbly major key sequences for an effect that would be corny if it wasn’t so genuinely fun to listen to.

That’s the key to Poiss work as THYX I think, that willingness to let it all hang out and make music that is replete with sentiment and lacking in any of the customary irony that so many EBM artists use to distance themselves from their audience. True, you might occasionally raise an eyebrow at him going into a full-on wail (like on his collaboration with Machnima artist Ray Kofoed “Survival Instinct”) or rocker croon (as on the piano led ballad “Alien Love”), but I find it hard to hold it against him when the songs themselves are benefited by it.

From a genre standpoint I think of what THYX does as an update and expansion of the intricate, techno-minded body music that X Marks the Pedwalk and New Mind were making in the late 90s. Where the rise of futurepop around the turn of the millenium quickly supplanted those sounds with simple trance-fed leads and basses leaving it as a largely unexplored branch of EBM, Poiss calls back to them in service to his songwriting. I suppose that’s somewhat evident in all his material to a degree, but it’s in THYX, freed from any other conceits and concepts, that it seems to really breathe and take on a life of its own. Below the City is the sound of a virtuoso unconcerned with where and how his music might fit into any greater scene or legacy, and in that respect his vision is as far ahead of the curve as his technical skill.

Buy it.

I remain convinced that this 'man' is actually part of an elaborate British plot to retake the colonies via charmingly foppish thespian androids.

Kirlian Camera, “Materia Obscura/Dark Matter”
Oh, hell yes! Our slavish devotion to Kirlian Camera has been well documented on these pages, and we’re tickled pink to get our first taste of what’s to come on Black Summer Choirs. Starting out somewhere between “The Desert Inside” and a James Bond theme and ending with some middle eastern strings, this brings together many of the sounds and moods we’ve come to love from KC over the years.

Distorted Memory, “Lose Control”
Since being bowled over by last year’s Temple Of The Black Star release, we’ve spent no small amount of time around the HQ positing where Jeremy Pillipow might take Distorted Memory next. While Jeremy told us that Black Star wasn’t necessarily an indicator of the band’s future, we can hear the odd trace of that record’s forays into witch house and dark ambient being overlaid atop DM’s more traditionally aggressive mode on this tasty new tune. The track plus a classic stripped mix by the one and only Dejan Samardzic are available by donation while we wait for forthcoming (possibly Nietzschean-themed) LP The Eternal Return.

Solitary Experiments, “Trial And Error”
There’s never been anything especially showy about Germany’s Solitary Experiments, but their combo of futurepop and electro always seems to hit the spot. Any of the various versions of “Glory & Honour” and “Seele Bricht” remain club catnip to me. It’s been about four years since their last proper LP, so it’ll be interesting to see what (if anything) has changed when Phenomena is released. Bit more VNV on the vocals than we usually get from SE, but that’s fine.

Nagamatzu, “Malaria”
The always excellent Systems Of Romance tipped me off to overlooked English 80s darkwave act a few years ago, and now it seems that the band themselves are reissuing key points of their back catalog via their own Motorcade Records label, with some distro help from the fine folks at Dark Entries. Ranging from sample/beat heavy numbers like this to more gloomy fare, Nagamatzu kicked thirty kinds of ass, and I’m pleased as punch that their work will be reentering circulation.

Zex Model, “Dominate DNA”
Paul Von Aphid, of Russia’s Modern Howl, unveils a new old school project. While a little underdeveloped structurally, there are some fun gurgling noises on the First Mutation EP. Hearing the same love for old-time Mentall that By Any Means Necessary drops on this track.

A caveat: our criterion for this feature was recognition, pure and simple: did the members of a band go on to achieve a wider degree of it after their time in their earlier bands? While plenty of these earnest beginnings do exhibit some artistic value apart from their historical significance as starting points, others…don’t. We’ll let you be the judge of which is which.

Before Strawberry Switchblade: The Poems

Well before she was the utility player for basically every top-tier neo-folk project in the late eighties and early nineties but not long before she was in Strawberry Switchblade, Rose McDowall was in a punk act called The Poems with her then husband Drew, who you may remember from his involvement in a little band called Coil. The post-punk trio (rounded out by a third member who’s name even our extensive Googling can’t uncover) only released a single 7″, and were apparently no longer a going concern by the time SS were formed. Their notability really only extends as far as their membership, although they do occasionally turn up on various obscurities blogs, usually with a rip of their sole single “Achieving Unity”. A quick search should reveal it, along with this cut from a Glaswegian punk compilation.

Before Skinny Puppy: Images In Vogue

A familiar name to new wave die hards or Vancouverites over a certain age, Images In Vogue released a swath of singles and three LPs over the 1980s. Behind delightfully named vocalist Dale Martindale on the drums was none other than a young Kevin Crompton, AKA cEvin Key (with Don Gordon – later of Numb – on guitar, no less!). Key ditched IIV to go full time with Skinny Puppy in 1986, but not before helping record their signature single, “Call It Love”. Sadly, cEvin was nowhere to be seen at the (otherwise fun) Images In Vogue reunion gig at the Commodore about ten years back.

Before Ministry & Thrill Kill Kult: Special Affect

The story, which Al Jourgenson will tell to anyone with a pulse and auditory organs, is that Ministry’s early synthpop direction was purely the result of being strong-armed by major label goons who figured a cod English accent and some mopey leads would be easy money. It’d be easier to accept Al’s version of events if this (admittedly solid) art rock band with Al’s guitar bolstering similarly affected vocals from TKK’s Groovie Man (and one of the guys from Concrete Blonde) never existed.

Before Nine Inch Nails: Option 30

The best thing about the existence of Option 30 is that every couple of hours somebody somewhere on the internet discovers that Trent Reznor was in a marginal new wave cover band and completely loses their mind. To be accurate Trent was in a couple marginal new wave bands (Exotic Birds being the most notable one, although Slam Bamboo opened for Glass Tiger!) before becoming the defacto ambassador to industrial for a generation of music fans, but unless you’re a mean-spirited dick you’ll have a hard time holding it against him. We were all young once, with weird haircuts and tacky shirts, and most of us don’t have to deal with half the internet pointing it out on a regular basis.

Before Ministry (the other half): Blackouts

Now this is some great stuff. Hailing from Seattle, the Blackouts counted amongst their numbers both Paul and Roland Barker, as well as Bill Rieflin. Sitting somewhere between Bauhaus and The Gun Club, their collected EPs and singles from 1979-1985 were reissued a few years ago along with plenty of bonus stuff on a highly recommended comp from Washington institution K Records.

Before Rotersand: The Fair Sex

At least by the standards of Our Thing The Fair Sex are actually kind of notable on their own terms; the late eighties/early 90s EBM and darkwave act released a string of albums and by all accounts still a going concern some 25 years after the release of their debut The House of Unkinds was released. What you may not know is that Rascal Nikov, the imposing front man for futurepop warriors Rotersand cut his teeth programming and playing keyboards for them. Per Wikipedia Rotersand’s Gun was also involved in The Fair Sex in some sort of a production capacity, although their Discogs entry doesn’t give any indication whether he was credited on record or not. Enjoy the club hit “Not Here, Not Now” embedded below.

Before The Cure: Lockjaw

You could always tell that Simon Gallup was the tough in The Cure, whether you looked at his leather jacket, his hair, or the way he wore eyeliner more to menace than to beguile. Dude still looks like a stone rockabilly killer even after all these years. Anyway, not to be confused with Fools Dance, the short lived, dreamier project Gallup was involved with in the early 80s while he was on the outs with Smithy, Lockjaw was his first crack at the can, and was a much more raucous bit of business. Bonus points for tossing a Spiderman joke onto your 7″ sleeve.

Before Leaether Strip: Decode

Okay, this one is a bit dubious, as we can’t find a single source for it other than a passing mention of Claus Larsen of Leaether Strip being involved with Danish synthpop band Decode, who released one 7″ “Planet of Youth/Amazing Waves”, in ’86. We’ll still include it in this article because the a-Side of the single is actually pretty damn good, and the orchestral touches seem in line with something Uncle Claus might have had a hand in. Also someone named “Paw Larsen” is specifically credited with arrangements on the b-side, which is either confirmation or the source of the confusion depending on how it pans out. Anyone in a position to confirm or deny should drop us a line in the comment section!

Before KMFDM: Kingpin/Shotgun Messiah

Tim Skold’s career stretches well out both before and after his tenure in KMFDM, but his first breakthrough came with an 80s Swedish rock band indebted to glam metal (which switched names midstream). It’s interesting to think about how the use of guitar in KMFDM has changed over the years and the question of whether or not this early devotion to a very American style of metal could have oh fuck it we just included this one so we could post this infamous photo.

Before Malaria!: Mania D

Formed in 1979, by the time Mania D’s debut cassettes were hitting the market the various members of the all-girl trio had already individually been in and out of early incarnations of Einsturzende Neubauten, Liaisons Dangereuses and Die Krupps, not to mention founding side-project Malaria! in their spare time. While their associations with various early industrial and EBM acts are notable, the music Gudrun Gut, Beate Bartel and Bettina Köster made together wasn’t half-shabby, between sax led punky workouts like “Track 4″ and Malaria!’s all time classic NDW jam “Kaltes Klares Wasser”, their accomplishments extend well beyond being footnotes in the history of other long-running acts from Our Thing.

Before Dead Can Dance: The Scavengers

Good gravy, Mr. Perry! The polar opposition between this and, well, just about everything Dead Can Dance represents suggests that Pete Shelley’s lawyers might have got in touch with this precocious New Zealand band, prompting a young Brendan Perry to run headlong into any genre which would keep him from being accused of being a Buzzcocks soundalike ever again. While this is a fun bit of fluff, that’s probably for the world’s greater benefit.

Before Icon Of Coil: Hellheim

Not to be confused with the viking black metal band also from Norway, the Hellheim we’re talking about (also sometimes known as The Helheim Society) here was a metal project featuring contributions from Sebastian Komor of Komor Kommando and Icon of Coil fame. Seb, then credited as “Zeb”, provided the drums programming and synthwork for the act, fusing black metal with industrial sounds, a mixture that presaged his guitar oriented Melt project. Helheim’s ’96 MCD release Fenris was reissued in 2012 along with a bunch of tracks by guitarist Zorn’s side-project Vendetta Blitz.

Got another “before they were big” name from our end of the pool? Post it in the comments!

Gnome & Spybey
Three
Crime League

I love Mark Spybey’s work, full stop. I have since before I knew it was his, when he opened for the Pink Dots the first time I saw them. After having my third eye thoroughly squeegeed (to borrow a phrase from Mr. Hicks), I ran to the merch booth to find out who that laconic gearhead with the sublimely melancholic sounds was, and Dead Voices On Air became a regular part of my musical life. In the past few years, I’ve been taken not only with the creative renaissance Spybey seems to be experiencing as DVOA (by all means check 2010′s From Afar All Stars Spark And Glee if you haven’t as of yet), but also his collaborations with Tony D’Oporto, AKA Gnome. That creative pairing returns for a third LP on Michael Morton’s Crime League imprint.

Spybey’s work at a member of Zoviet France and Download, in addition to his solo output as DVOA, speaks for itself beyond the scope of this review. There’s no mistaking Three‘s proximity to DVOA (indeed it dovetails closer with that project’s recent work than either of the earlier Gnome collabs), but that closer attunes the listener’s ear to the subtle differences. It’s very difficult to pin down what Gnome brings to the equation, but I can say that despite sounding just as airy and deep as his latter-era work as DVOA, Three (not unlike the At Willie’s Place/Beyond Willie’s Place records before it) has less of a melancholy mood. It still has that aching, wondrous sense of the sublime, but with a more guileless, quixotic naïveté.

The sounds which burble up from restrained atmospheres often seem to be engaging in a fumbling self exploration, discovering their own timbres and frequencies, as on “Dreamed Of Being A River”. There are also minimal interludes, restrained and bound by their own uncertainty, with wounded strings eking forward with pained steps. These moments of clumsiness or withholding, alternately charming and evocative, only serve to bolster the record’s later moments of sublime confidence. The (very Coil-sounding) second passage of “The Murmur of the Rivers Mouth” adopts an almost sacred mood, where Spybey’s voice emerges for the first time, repeatedly intoning “And I stand with empty hands in the murmur of the river’s mouth”. This declaration of openness, of self-assured surrender, feels like nothing short of a vindication or benediction.

Though calm throughout, Three is an arresting experience. Like last year’s X-TG releases, this is a record which politely yet firmly asks you to set aside any other activities you might have planned, and even if you don’t initially acquiesce, has subtle magicks which will wrest earthy pursuits from your hands and send your soul off in search of deeper concerns. Spring is here, Albion is renewed. Hallelujah.

Buy it.

Kite
V
Progress Productions

The onset of middle age is a palpable force in music criticism. The sweet, melancholic electropop plied by Kite is catnip to music writers in their mid-thirties, evoking a more innocent, dramatic time far removed from things like day jobs and taxes and RSP contributions. I think it’s that keening quality that causes the Swedish duo to be saddled with the “80s” tag by lazy writers; although their sound certainly has antecedents in the synth music of the me decade (which is far less monolithic an institution than most would have it), listening to their new EP V should make it clear that their strength flows from glorious, naked emotion that lifts them miles above being a simple retro act.

The music on V flows from the widescreen feel of previous release IV, trading in its broad, chunky synth stabs for glorious deliberate builds in arrangement. Kite have always excelled at immediacy, and while that’s certainly still the case here, each song holds some new peaks of elation for the back-end. Opener “Wishful Summer Nights” makes quite the impression with its backmasked vocals in the first minute but it’s when a winding lead and thudding drums emerge that it really takes off, almost half its length passed before it coalesces into a full blown song. Similarly “If You Want Me”‘s falsetto vocals and scraping synthline hold the listener’s attention until an honest and direct lyrical hook emerges, following through to an instrumental section wrought with so much sentiment it easily boosts the track into the top tier of Kite’s short but impeccable songbook.

It’s that capacity for big, genuine feelings that makes what Kite does so magical. The wistful “Dance Again” could have been cloying in someone else’s hands, but between a progression that moves gradually builds from hope to triumph and Nicklas Stenemo’s strangely consoling voice, it doesn’t miss a beat. The importance of Stenemo’s singing to Kite’s success can’t possibly overstated: weird, warbling but never anything less than sincere, it has far more range than a cursory exposure might suggest. Witness how he injects notes of contempt and longing into the dark, bubbling “I Can’t Stand” or the distant cries at the climax of “The Rhythm”, weaving between or riding atop carefully sequenced drums and basslines without ever getting in the way or falling behind.

It’s not much of a secret how Kite have maintained such a mind-boggling level of consistency. With only twenty-five songs spread over five releases since they first emerged a half-decade ago, their quality control is almost unparalleled, each EP a gradual improvement that defies the downward trajectory that plagues so many musicians. Kite’s music keeps climbing higher, taking up more and more space with each expansion until it almost feels impossible that they could get any bigger or better at what they do. Whether they can or not is unimportant; with V they’ve sealed the deal, leaving behind simple genre tags and associations in a blast of pure elation. Highly, effusively, exuberantly recommended.

Buy it, please.

Speaking of the Los Angeles trip, good god y’all, that was a packed three days. Between finally getting to check out and spin some tunes at the infamous Das Bunker, seeing the hotness that was the Dive/Blush Response/High-Functioning Flesh show at Complex, a brief stop-in at Part Time Punks, seeing the mind-boggling Lil’ Death event first hand and drinking practically half the craft beer in the county, our heads are still spinning. Huge ID:UD thanks to our pal Rev. John for showing us the town, and shouts out to all the awesome folks we met while there. Safe to say we’ll be back sooner rather than later!

Aesthetic Perfection, “Antibody”
To be perfectly honest friends, we weren’t sure how to feel about this single from the upcoming Aesthetic Perfection album when it hit Youtube the other week. Daniel Graves has been relentlessly pushing the sound of his project forward with each release, and we had to wonder if the song (which to me feels like a pared down, pop-oriented evolution of All Beauty Destroyed) wasn’t a direction we just weren’t super interested in. The fact that after a week of not hearing it we could still hum it says a lot though, and consequently we think it’s safe to say we’re feeling it. Be interesting to see in what ways this reflects the new album’s tone and texture when it sees the light of day.

Headman feat. Scott Fraser & Douglas McCarthy, “NOISE (Hardway Bros Axis Forces Dub)”
Something from a little outside our wheelhouse, but with definite appeal for those seeking some dark electro sounds that border on Our Thing. Headman has been producing originals and providing remixes for the likes of Franz Ferdinand and The Gossip since the turn of the millenium, this new single finding him in the company of DJ Scott Fraser and Douglas McCarthy. This remix by the Hardway Bros amps up the underlying darkness of the funky original cut with great results, check out the whole 12″ if this strikes your fancy, particularly the hard-edged mix by Daniel Molosco.

CONCLΔVE – Ocean Star (DR0WNED IN S0UND by V▲LH▲LL)
We love it when a remix has the alchemical quality of combining two known elements to produce something entirely different and cool. This remix of CONCLΔVE’s “Ocean Star” is marked by neither the gauzy melancholia of the original or the snow-covered nordic steelo of remixers V▲LH▲LL, referencing instead the plodding funk of early post-industrial with a hint of Martin Hannet style soundscaping on the finish. Nice stuff from two of our favourite players in the post-witchhouse game.

Animal Bodies, “Lies in Your Eyes (Snowy Red cover)”
We’ve been keeping an ear to the ground regarding the Weyrd Son label’s Snowy Red tribute for a few months now, and it’s finally up for pre-order. One of Vancouver’s best new acts offer up a smoking take on “Lies In Your Eyes”, preserving the gauzy melancholy of the original but giving some of their jangling coldwave flavour as well. Very excited to give this release a full listen.

Tearist, “Civillization (Draw Japan remix)”
Draw Japan’s a new name to us, but dude’s Soundcloud has erupted into a flurry of activity in the past week with promising originals, covers, and mixes of other new(ish) names (a clutch of which are collected on a free Bandcamp release). Here’s a cool take on a Tearist joint which gives Yasmine’s vocals a new, fuzzed-out landscape over which to roam and keen.

NIN – Broken [HQ Version] by LaTo59

Alex: It’s hard to imagine that anyone involved in the making of the Broken movie ever seriously thought it would get a commercial release. Created by Trent Reznor and Peter Christopherson as a means to link the videos for Nine Inch Nails’ Broken into a mini-movie, it metaphorically picked up where the infamous video for Nine Inch Nails’ “Happiness in Slavery” left off, amping up the mixture of sadomasochism, violence and general grit to a level commensurate with the themes of the record, that is to say, fairly extreme even by today’s standards.

As with most NIN fans of a certain age, the first time I saw Broken was on a high generation bootleg VHS with bad tracking problems, acquired for a nominal fee from some guy on alt.music.nin or one of the other off-brand newsgroups dedicated to the band. It would have been 1997 or so, and as ridiculous as it seems in retrospect, I was actually pretty scared to have it sent to my parents’ house, lest my folks discover I was ordering faux-snuff porn through the internet. I had read extensive descriptions of the events of the movie, and it had taken on a mythic quality in my mind, something so extreme that even having seen it was a mark of rebellion and worldliness. (As a point of comparison, earlier that year I had taken a two hour bus ride to a shitball video store with lax renting policies to acquire a copy of Buttgereit’s Nekromantik, which for some reason seemed like less of a big deal despite being way more vile and objectionable, not to mention actually legally banned in my home province.)

Taken in that context, the fact that Trent or someone within the NIN camp put up the whole of the movie’s 20-some minutes to stream on Vimeo for all and sundry (at least until it got taken down for a terms of service violation a few hours later) seemed totally incongruous. How could something so potent, so transgressive be accessible at the click of a link? On Facebook even? Which leads me to my first line of questioning: is Broken still as shocking and gut-churning as it ever was now that we’ve had years of the internet messing with our internal disgust compasses? Or is this feeling just residue from a more innocent time?

Bruce: I have to cop to not having seen Broken uncut until comparatively recently, when those same shoddy transfers you were hunting down were finally digitized, but I think the answer to your question is twofold, and really needs to be thought of in connection with the history and legacy of NIN. On one hand, Broken might not now look so different from any tossed-off torture porn movie, but on the other it still does look (and feel) very different from any contemporary video endeavors from any but the most marginal of bands. It’s important to remember that while the Broken video itself was “underground”, NIN were anything but at the time: they had heavy major-label support, loads of MTV airplay, and had acquitted themselves well on the inaugural Lollapalooza. While you could probably find any number of industrial-related acts putting out stuff just as gory (if not legitimately upsetting), none of them are a couple of years away from headlining stadium tours and references on the Simpsons. My point is that while yes, we can find stuff just as transgressive, it isn’t sitting in remote proximity to whatever we could call crossover success or popularity.

The issue of innocence and nostalgia you raise is a key one, and again I think we serve Broken better if we cleave to NIN’s specific trajectory rather than our own histories. It’s interesting that so much video controversy was attached to NIN in the 90s, from the hilarious “Down In It” mix-up, to urban legends about the content and origin of Broken, to even the edited-down content from it which appeared on Closure (my friend’s mom had to buy the copy we all duped in high school due to the Virgin Megastore requiring ID proving you were 21 before selling it), especially in light of Reznor’s comparative respectability within broader culture these days. In an age in which Trent wins Oscars, scores AAA video games, and is spoken of as one of the more mature and “serious” artists the 90s produced (alongside Radiohead), I think what’s being triggered isn’t just our own subjective memories of tape duping and bootleg swapping, but remembrances of an objectively very different period in NIN’s history.

Speaking of changes in general culture, one thing that jumped out at me while watching Broken was the dovetailing of industrial culture’s obsessions with serial killers, which have been there from the beginning (“Very Friendly“), and a bump in general pop culture’s fascination with them in the 90s. I could be way off base, but it seems like that era fixated on them not just as emblems of social ills as in the past or as the unremarkable quarries in today’s procedurals, but as stylized antiheroes, beginning with the success of Silence Of The Lambs and perhaps reaching its apotheosis with the NIN-relevant depraved mindfuck of Se7ven (Fincher perhaps also closed the door on this trend with Zodiac, in which the killer is an unknowable lacuna, the pursuit of which is futile). Do you think industrial’s relative general popularity in the 90s had something to do with this intersection of interests? Does Broken‘s serial killer theme feel to you like a continuation of industrial culture’s interest in that area or a marker of something from the broader zeitgeist?

Alex: Well, I don’t know that I can logically attribute the popularity of serial killer chic with industrial rock in the 90s; it wasn’t really a widespread theme amongst the few popular acts (242′s “Serial Killers Don’t Kill Their Girlfriends” notwithstanding). There is something to the idea of Trent deliberately referencing a classic industrial trope though; especially in light of how the more popular he got, the more he felt the need to do things like release remix albums loaded with people like Coil and Jim Thirlwell. Despite having basically given a big ‘ol kiss-off to industrial (remember that famous FLA diss?), he kept going back to it for a few years afterwards in various capacities. I’m sure he’d probably deny that, but whatever his relationship with the Wax Trax roster is a matter of public record, he might have thought the contemporary electro-industrial stuff of the time was bullshit but he was at least conversant with the larger history of the genre. It’s not like he was working with Sleazy because he liked the videos Pete directed for Bad Company or something.

There’s also I think a good case to be made for Trent’s general desire to keep his image as extreme as possible in the face of rising popularity. He’s always had a streak of contrarianism, and getting the record company to pay for a simulated torture session (note that the Interscope copyright notice is still on the end of the video) seems pretty characteristic of him in the early 90s. Like, compare the videos for “Wish” which is basically pretty goofy, all Nine Inch Nails Beyond Thunderdome, and “Happiness in Slavery”, where Bob Flanagan gets his dick and internal organs fucked with before being ground up into sausage meat, totally unusable for promotional purposes. Was it Trent reacting to his newfound fame with acts of calculated self-sabotage that ended up being anything but? Was he just trying to get away with as much as possible, using the system to undermine itself? Was he just piqued by something creatively with no further thought given to how it might eventually turn out? Who knows? It certainly didn’t hurt his image as an edgy outlier in the music of the era at any rate.

I really don’t feel like we need to go over the individual beats of the movie; the significance of it as a piece of art by a commercial musician is actually way more interesting to me than the actual film itself at this point. But I guess it should be asked: is the Broken movie still as shocking as it once was? I think I actually find myself unsettled by the toilet gimp suit and the steak scene moreso than the actual torture portion of the video at this point in my life.

Bruce: Yeah, I think I’d agree with that, and with those bits making it onto Closure I was exposed to them much earlier than the more explicit gore. I think individual mileages will vary as far as what is shocking or disturbing, based on personal phobias, beliefs, and the like, but I do think that pure gore and torture have to have lost at least some of their impact upon the general populace, again in an age of routine torture porn flicks. More uncanny, indefinably disturbing material (and dare I say more artful?) like the pieces you mention might trigger something more in modern audiences simply on the basis of their relative uniqueness. I think much of the “shock” which people are talking about this week in connection to the video’s resurfacing has more to with its history and cachet, as Rob Sheridan pointed out.

How about this: it’s difficult to think back to contemporary reactions to individual points in a discography like NIN’s which most people reading this will know like the back of their hand, but the brief, unified, and unremittingly aggressive sound of the Broken EP must have come as a shock to most listeners after Pretty Hate Machine, even those well aware of Reznor’s connections to the Wax Trax posse. The funk metal of “Last” is as close as Broken comes to the poppier side of PHM, and the sheer amount of guitars Broken features remains unequaled in Reznor’s work. Maybe part of the impact (or impetus) of the Broken film comes from its introduction of an utterly new and different incarnation of the band?

Alex: Since the movie never saw release, I can’t see how the actual content of it impacted how people saw the band, although it is pretty linked to the perception of Broken as the angry, dangerous NIN record. It’s important to remember that although the idea of alternative music as a movement was in full swing by ’92, Nine Inch Nails were less 120 Minutes and more Headbanger’s Ball (the clip for “Wish” notably having been nominated for Best Metal Video at the MTV Music Video Awards). I don’t think it was ’til the monstrous success of The Downward Spiral that Trent was really canonized as an alternative icon. Hell, the video halfway responsible for that actually plays like the Broken interludes, albeit with the more flashy, commercial sensibility of Mark Romanek taking the place of Christopherson’s lingering, uncomfortably sexual imagery.

The more I think about it, the more I feel like the importance of it is entirely divorced from the specifics of its content. For how extreme it was at the time, I don’t know that it makes much of statement, Trent would be involved with a far clearer and more cogent statement on how we relate to mass murderers via their depictions in the media with his work on Natural Born Killers a few years later. It’s a nice corollary to the Rolling Stones’ Cocksucker Blues and the KLF’s White Room movie, their obscurity in the otherwise very public record of their subjects is what makes them interesting. Having them available to see at any time in the comfort of our own homes neutralizes that to a degree, which is unavoidable but still a bit of a shame. Now that the veil has been lifted, what importance will Broken continue to have in the grander scheme of NIN’s history?

Bruce: I think you’ve nicely synthesized the seeming schism between big bands and their obscure movies, so I won’t speak any further to that. As to Broken‘s future impact or legacy? I think at the very least it already serves as an excellent indication of the breadth of Trent’s work, insofar as it already feels like the work of a very, very, very different band from the one which, say, released an instrumental 36 track non-album, pioneering the pay-what-you-want/multi-tiered release format which we’ve come to take for granted (to paraphrase Virginia Slims, “you’ve come a long way, piggy”). That Broken is now there for younger, more casual NIN fans who maybe came on board for The Fragile or even Year Zero and want to dig back into the archives is important. Even if, like Trent’s old tourmates say, nothing’s shocking anymore, being able to get a sense of what was once shocking or transgressive about NIN has value.

As for me, I do think that the majority of the thrill I got from seeing Broken in this context did come from a sense of nostalgia, both for that era of NIN and for the whole experience (which we’ve already discussed) of feretting out secret and underground material like this pre-Internet. Thankfully, with NIN’s reactivation waiting in the wings, we won’t have to wallow in that nostalgia for long. I can only hope that the new incarnation of NIN, whatever form and aesthetic it takes, is just that: new. Broken is now out there in the aether for those of us who want to revisit it from time to time. You can’t go home to the abattoir again, but you can still recall some of the fun you had there.