Dystopian techno for disused factories

In 1976, when Industrial Records - the label founded in the UK by Throbbing Gristle - came into being, no one could have foreseen the many evolutions and transformations the "industrial" phenomenon would undergo in the decades to come. Later, in the 80s, techno was taking its first steps in Detroit. At the time, the American city's car factories were in dire straits. Industrial music in England, too (as its own protagonists recount in the excellent documentary "Industrial Soundtrack For The Urban Decay"), developed amid a severe industrial crisis that by 1976 had already set in in cities like Sheffield, home of Cabaret Voltaire. Only a few years later, there would be fierce social conflict in the coal mines of Wales, championed by Test Dept on their 1984 "Fuel To Fight" tour.

A backdrop of deep economic crisis, coupled with a loss of faith in "magnificent progressive destinies," led many artists of the era to reflect on themes of the posthuman, of dystopia, and of alienation in the relationship between man and machine. Many figures orbiting the punk subculture looked to industrial experimentation and the nascent new wave for new forms of expression through which to stage a different kind of "no future." Techno, too, in its own way, offered an escape route from depressed suburbs. After all, the future certainly looked bleak, desperate, apocalyptic - but also unwritten.

Meanwhile, Detroit techno and Chicago acid-house became global phenomena with strong countercultural and libertarian overtones. It's worth remembering that Juan Atkins and Richard Davis's Cybotron, famous forerunners of techno, were themselves great admirers of Kraftwerk's music, as well as much European wave. In those same years, Berlin became a crossroads for fruitful exchanges between post-punk experimentation, noise attitudes and the new frontiers of electronic music. In the capital of the GDR, for instance, an atypical project like Hypnobeat emerged, staging, as early as the very first Eighties, a peculiar sound built on electronic tribalism produced by a Roland TR-808. Furthermore, out of the experiments of the Neue Deutsche Welle came Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft, standard-bearers of what would later be called Electronic Body Music. The acronym EBM ended up denoting a new, post-industrial-leaning genre that combined punk fury with robotic rhythms not so far removed from techno, also paving the way for new beat and trance sounds.

From the mid-Eighties to the early Nineties, some post-punk and goth-scene veterans perfectly embodied a cyber-punk vision, precisely through the evolution of EBM, courtesy of bands like Clock DVA, Nitzer Ebb and Front 242, while in Canada the electro-industrial sound of Skinny Puppy and Front Line Assembly was taking shape.

At the dawn of the Nineties, Psychic TV, one of the most important post-industrial projects to rise from the ashes of Throbbing Gristle, made a major shift, beginning to experiment with acid-house sounds and riding the emerging rave-party phenomenon. PTV helped bring to the UK what would become the foundation for much of the electronic music that followed there. Meanwhile, Richard H. Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire himself devoted his time to advanced, experimental forms of ambient, techno and house, releasing several albums on Warp.

From the Nineties to today, the cards have increasingly been shuffled together. Techno beats and various forms of post-industrial began drawing closer, creating new sonic hybrids. Acid and mutated forms of EBM met industrial noise and tribalism, taking on borderline shapes: on one hand, adrenaline was stirred and bodily urges released through the ritual of an ever more hammering dance; on the other, a pessimistic gaze was cast on a dark, dystopian world, following the spirit that had animated industrial music at its origins. A certain strain of techno grew ever darker and less inclined to compromise with mainstream hedonism, unleashing its more experimental, unconventional nature.

The ten selected albums attempt to map out how this particular union between the industrial and techno genres was forged and consolidated. It's a genetic mutation whose roots sink into the very foundations of both genres, both born from the ashes of a post-war world that had already fallen into crisis by the second half of the 1970s. Since we still live in times of crisis, that relationship seems to remain deeply relevant and artistically fertile today.

Hypnobeat – Huggables – 1985

Listening back today to James Dean Brown's earliest experiments holds some genuine surprises. The project was born way back in 1983 in Berlin, with the collaboration of Pietro Insipido and other occasional contributors. Starting in 1983, Hypnobeat became an industrial/experimental act offering a neo-tribal approach to electronic music, using, among various pieces of analogue gear, an inevitable Roland TR-808. What came out of it was a kind of acid electro-funk that astonishingly anticipated the techno and acid-house sounds still in embryonic form at the time in Detroit and Chicago. The two tapes making up the album "Huggables" capture Hypnobeat's remarkable 1985 sound perfectly. Since 2012, Brown has revived the project alongside Helena Hauff (also playing at Berlin Atonal in 2017) in a riot of vintage Rolands and analogue equipment. In this way, Hypnobeat has bridged both the past and the future of techno (and) industrial music.

Psychic TV – Towards Thee Infinite Beat – 1990

The years between 1988 and 1992 were a period of great ferment for Genesis P-Orridge's band. After Alex Fergusson's departure and the arrival of American Fred Giannelli, PTV began experimenting with acid-house sounds, helping to bring to the UK the kind of sound born in Chicago toward the end of the Eighties. In those years PTV were involved in the then-nascent world of raves and illegal parties. What drew them in was their ritualistic, counter-cultural undercurrent, which meshed well with the band's psychedelic, shamanic vision. In some ways, their post-industrial, post-human outlook was perfectly suited to embracing the demands of the new electronic wave, itself a product of the same social substratum that had given rise to the industrial revolution a decade earlier. It's worth remembering that in the UK it was acid-house, not Detroit techno, that was the true primordial soup for the future sounds of IDM and drum'n'bass. "Towards Thee Infinite Beat" is the symbolic album of PTV's shift, a change of course that was little noted by critics at the time, only to be reassessed in recent years thanks also to the emergence of techno-industrial sounds rediscovering the allure of old Rolands and an old-school acid sound, almost as a kind of return to their roots. The track "Alien Be-In" from "Towards Thee Infinite Beat" was remixed by Silent Servant in 2015, as a sort of tribute to the masters who ferried (post-)industrial ideas into the world of techno and illegal raves.

Fixmer/ McCarthy ‎– Between The Devil… – 2004

When thinking about the relationship between Electronic Body Music and techno, it's almost impossible not to consider the collaboration between Douglas McCarthy — frontman of Nitzer Ebb, the genre's founding band — and the talented French producer Terence Fixmer, founder of Planete Rouge Records.

Their debut remains, to this day, an unsurpassed union between the adrenaline of an exceptional vocalist like McCarthy and Fixmer's boulder-crushing beats. Tracks like "Freefall", "I Run" and "Destroy" would soon become dancefloor classics for the black-clad crowd. Ultimately, the album updates the sound of that old-school EBM masterpiece "That Total Age" (the album Nitzer Ebb made in 1987) for the techno-industrial of the new millennium.

In "Between The Devil…", and even more so on their second full-length, "Into The Night", the duo would also devour future/synth-pop and electro-punk impulses. Contemporary forms of techno EBM also owe one of their founding pillars to Dave Clarke's explosive remix of the track "You Want It".

Adam X – Fate Unknown – 2005

The founder of the legendary Sonic Groove was a pioneer of New York's techno scene in the Nineties. In the early 2000s he began weaving sounds from Electronic Body Music, power-noise and industrial into his productions and DJ sets. The grafts worked, and in 2005, with the album "Fate Unknown", the New York producer crafted one of his finest works, also laying down the genre's coordinates. A track like "Robot Rebellion In 2071", for instance, is a hit that fused apocalyptic science fiction with a cyber-punk imagery straight out of a warehouse rave. "Fate Unknown" also shows a sound tilted forcefully toward acid-techno (already present in Adam X's earliest productions back in the early Nineties too), a combination that would remain an undercurrent, and something of a nod, however subtle, to certain acid-house experiments by Psychic TV during the Fred Giannelli era. This explosive blend of acid, EBM and industrial would also carry considerable weight for younger artists such as Silent Servant, Phase Fatale and Sweden's Celldöd.

That Los Angeles producer Seth Joshua Horvitz, aka Rrose, has always been one of the most inspired members of the Sandwell crew is widely known among insiders and among the most die-hard fans of the historic label that was laid to rest on December 31, 2011. The mammoth work put together in the summer of that year together with his friend Bob Ostertag sounds like the ultimate manifesto of a techno template that defined an era and remains a point of reference for any producer looking to move "brazenly" through the shadows. An album dense with liquid pulses, post-atomic dub-techno grooves ("Pointilism Variation One/Two") that sound like DeepChord strictly on amphetamines and (dis)persed in an extremely radioactive jungle. Throughout the album's grooves a constant adrenaline-charged tension dominates, mutating with every damn variation. A work that fuses Berlin and Detroit with the swagger of someone who knows exactly what they're doing and doesn't hold back on exploration, as outlined in the edges of the magnificent "Wack Variation One". Try imagining Cobblestone Jazz stripped of any jazzy varnish and fed on depleted uranium, and you'll have a more precise idea of what's going on. Essential.

British Murder Boys – British Murder Boys – 2015

Antony Child, aka Surgeon, and Karl O'Connor, aka Regis and a thousand other things, form the duo British Murder Boys; a partnership that gave its very best in the 2003-2005 period, with a series of purest techno EPs with Detroit-leaning inclinations but with a fundamentally dark, Teutonic, acid-to-the-bone approach. A blend that de facto anticipates the moods and expressive urgency of labels crucial to the European underground movement, such as the beloved and sadly lamented Sandwell District run by David Sumner, Juan Mendez, Peter Sutton and O'Connor himself. The compilation released in 2015 on Sutton/O'Connor's Downwards is an atomic compendium of killer, dead-straight-kick broadsides and tracks pulled out from way back in 2002 that still sound terribly fresh, like the opening "Learn Your Lesson". An essential box set, not just a precious container of scattered gems like "Fist" — a clot of electro guts mixed with a techno structure that would come into vogue in the years to follow — but a genuine manifesto of a productive alchemy that's unique in its own way; the supreme fusion of distant approaches united under a blatantly bleak vision of that thing called techno music.

Headless Horseman – Headless Horseman 007 – 2015

William J. Youngman aka Headless Horseman is one of those artists who stay quiet in their own forest bristling with vintage machines and drum machines, only bringing them out when the clouds grow heavy and the temperature hits zero degrees Celsius. The only album to his name under the Headless Horseman guise greedily gathers up all the various ideas he'd come up with in the 2013/15 period, adding here and there to a stubborn, plodding rhythmic structure a massive dose of deflagrations that in some ways align him with important names on the Berlin techno-industrial scene like Ancient Methods. If to this damn need to pound away like a madman in the dark of a frozen, impenetrable forest we add the clear intention to get hips swaying in a sinuous way, reworking in his own manner the more danceable rhythms of Primal Scream, the whole thing takes on that touch of pure magic, impossible to describe except at high volume ("Blood Drop"). Headless Horseman's seventh seal spreads a shadowy, dizzyingly explosive techno, perfect for a rave torn apart in the heart of a derelict steel mill.

Orphx – Pitch Black Mirror – 2016

Rich Oddie and Christina Sealey began making music in 1993 and have never stopped since, always keeping firm their loyalty to a technoid template with a strong industrial pull, with touchstones of the caliber of Throbbing Gristle and Guerre Froide. So: a cold, aseptic dance, cybernetic to the bone (carbon-based, of course). The 2016 album "Pitch Black Mirror", released on vinyl through Sonic Groove and on CD through the sumptuous Hands — a Dortmund label that since 1993 has been among the most prolific in rhythmic noise and power electronics — fuses with fitting bleakness the moods displayed over the course of two full decades, between coldwave turmoil reworked in a tribal-industrial vein ("Blood In The Streets"), dizzying dark-techno accelerations ("Transmutation"), hypnosis complete with ghostly siren sounds mixed with minimal-style lashes enough to make even the coldest of early-80s pioneers pale ("Walk Into The Broken Night"), in a spasmodic crescendo as horrifying as it is redemptive. File under: turn off all the lights, turn up the volume, and exorcise your ghosts right now.

Ancient Methods ‎– A Collection Of Ancient Airs – 2016

Originally, Ancient Methods was a duo made up of Conrad Protzmann and Michael Wollenhaupt, but it soon became the latter's solo project. A driving force of the Berlin techno scene, Wollenhaupt was for years also a resident DJ at Tresor, as well as having collaborated with Regis on the Ugandan Methods project and with Orphx as part of the trio Eschaton. "A Collection Of Ancient Airs" is a CD compilation, released on Berlin's "aufnahme + wiedergabe", of his early 12" productions. A track like "Knights & Bishops" exemplifies Ancient Methods' mature style, described as a kind of "pitch black techno war funk". It's a form of techno-industrial with dark, tribal tones that, drawing on its Central European roots (including as iconographic imagery), sits far from Detroit techno. Wollenhaupt's work would go on to influence many younger artists such as Blush Response, S⅄RIN and Headless Horseman.

Vatican Shadow – Media In The Service Of Terror -2016

To fully quantify the experience of a total, all-consuming figure like Dominick Fernow, miles of paper wouldn't be enough. A vast body of work, punctually and deliberately obscene and at the same time so singular as to be indigestible and elusive even to the most hardened followers of the much-vaunted American noise cauldron. This immense Wisconsin producer's techno reincarnation under the moniker Vatican Shadow nonetheless finds its raison d'être in a dark blend that never gives up a compositional approach intrinsically bound from the outset to profound themes, such as Islamic-rooted terrorism, reported by Western media with sloppy carelessness in order to instill yet more terror (as if that weren't enough) in the population. It is no coincidence, then, that the cover of the emblematic "Media In The Service Of Terror" depicts the beach at Sousse, Tunisia, after the violent terrorist attack of June 2015. Unlikely, knowing fusions between East and West thus emerge, like the sinuous melodic line of "More Of The Same" laid over a techno carpet. But there are also moments of pure ambient stasis meant to package a tension that's alive and present in every instant of the record ("Interrogation Mosaic"). A singular work that aims to dig into the fears of Western man — a neurosis fed beyond all measure by media that are all too often out of control, just like Fernow's music itself.

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