The Industrial Veil of Darkness

There was a certain type of underground avant-garde that through underground record labels and obscure and sometimes secretive tape labels released what was then called industrial music, which is only distantly related to what is called industrial music today. There is a certain darkness to much of the more well-known material, which often featured macabre themes and was very gritty, uncommercialized, and expressed an experimentalism that was detached from the social milieu of academic art music, while still being influenced by some of the artists from that scene.

The music was uncensored, experimental, noisy, non-commercial and often steeped in negativity, occultism, chaos, and darkness. I would ask the reader to consider whether the darkness expressed by this kind of music is akin to the darkness somebody would experience as they imagine that the ruling class has created a world around them designed to enslave, exploit, and kill them.

Fascism, serial killers, cults, weird sex--themes like these were foisted on the listener. Was it simply the world of fear that envelops someone in the working class or middle class as they struggle to survive in a world that wants to exploit them and discard them to the grave? It must be noted that in the 1980s, the Judeo-Christian world's tendency to drown its workers in alcohol, sadomasochism, delusion, war, and sometimes outright oppression when the alternatives didn't work was in full effect. Philosophical enlightenment was not readily available to the worker, and it was deemed dangerous to provide it, like in most societies.

Perhaps enlightenment coupled with a lifetime immersion in negativity could create the type of person who would make the type of records that dotted the landscape of industrial music. There was no rule in place that required the artist to move beyond the negativity that is characteristic of their class; sometimes it seemed that someone was motivated to reproduce the trauma within themselves upon the human race as a whole. Creative "currents" festered beneath mainstream consciousness, which almost seemed to be pushed off to the side by the denizens of this particular segment of the underground as they created their dark Eden of outsider art.

If hardcore punk took something similar to an Aristotelian worldview that looked to the physical, tangible, cold, hard reality of life for knowledge and raged against the darkness in the minds of those who failed to understand it, the experimental industrial music of underground and tape labels showed and perhaps tried to interact with a dark world of damaged Platonic Ideas of darkness or perhaps some kind of sinister noumena that were jarred about by the minds of the drug-addled, occultists, psychopaths, and other dark souls.

It was almost as if the experimentation of industrial music was an attempt to understand the chaos of existence in the modern world in order to find some way to exploit it to gain power. In this sense it aspired above its supposed station in life and would thus be considered pretentious--but the question is: did this experimentation succeed in elevating the artists and empowering them, thus transcending its ostensible pretentiousness?

Later music that was influenced by the artists in this underground include popular, mainstream industrial rock acts like Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, and Marilyn Manson, and it also influenced many styles of electronic music, such as acid house, electronic body music (EBM), dark ambient, and various forms of noise music.

The proliferation of tape decks, photocopied zines, and other innovations allowed by consumer electronics would allow this style of music to proliferate among the underground, and so it was that technology would empower people on the fringe of society to organize themselves to produce and distribute art. This was the culmination of several decades of innovations, and began a fragmentation in music that would culminate in the Internet and the vast amount of power afforded to individuals through home computers.

Many people would compete to utilize this power, both to create and destroy, and in some ways this industrial music, as a creative force, was potentially both creative and destructive as well.