[Dancecult-l] Neil Huthnance; serial music

[tobias c. van Veen]

Hi Neil,

That's great to hear about yr research .. I have a love/hate affair with
industrial culture, so please forgive the following,

> I'm starting to develop a sense that "darkwave", "isolationist" and early
> "industrial" music in particular trade on not only serial composition
> techniques, but also, with varying degrees of critical awareness, something
> like a one sided emphasis on the face of modernism Raymond Williams described
> as concerned with "extreme and precarious forms of consciousness...a
> paradoxical self realisation in isolation". I wonder if the themes of the
> music can therefore be traced to the producer relations Williams criticised as
> typical of "the new conformism" in artistic avant garde circles?

What do you mean by "isolationist" ?

If anything the industrial scene / music movement / disculture might give
someone like Williams something to think about, or at least introduce a gap
between the (self)representation of a culture that disses "culture" and its
strategies of organisation. The industrial scene, like punk, was
hand-in-hand with the DiY movement of 'zines, global independent
distribution, pressing, recording and DiY culture-in-general. "Bands" like
Throbbing Gristle existed as communes, with principles of free-love and
identity deconstruction and radical performance.

It's also hard to imagine industrial culture as new conformism -- though
Throbbing Gristle, NSK and Laibach's ambiguous relations to fascist imagery
and ideology is complex, I tend to see it as a magnification of existing
conditions (Maggie Thatcher's Britain) and a _covert operation_ of
demonstrating already existing fascist tendencies at the time (such as TG's
performances of "Discipline" wherein the entire audience was drawn into
marching and chanting à la a neoNazi parade -- an experiment or
demonstration in how easy it is, how easy it is...). Then there's
"industrial" groups like Test Dept. that created and produced and recorded
their entire work by working with miners and other working class groups (see
their album _Terra Firma_) -- here industrial music is, in sound and praxis,
a collective process, and even a self-determined Marxist one at that.

Thus all of this would have to be contrasted with the "themes" of the music
as you say, but reading these themes is certainly complexified -- to whom
might such themeatics (themeatics which are often wordless, electronic,
nonrepresentational, areferential, alien, "cold," mechanical -- industrial)
appear as isolationist? To the dominant culture, perhaps, the "bourgeoisie"?
To others, such sounds might ring out a clarion call, a rally of
togetherness over the vast distances expressed in the wasteland of
industrial capital, wherein industrial music becomes the dark light, the new
dark romanticism...

Much intrigued to hear where your research draws you..

best,

    tobias