From Extreme to Shock: Revisiting the Visual Output of the Industrial Music Scene

Speaking after Ozzy Osbourne passed, art historian and curator Nicolas Ballet said it was actually listening to extreme metal that led him to discover early noise and industrial music. Industrial is a genre that continues to remain submerged away from the mainstream and thrived in that manner in the early ’70s and ’80s, as its practitioners then would have wanted. The UK was one of the fertile grounds for the proliferation of the genre, although in a very different working-class interpretation of ‘industrial’. Osbourne, with Black Sabbath, would take post-industrial Birmingham’s metallic clang and hammer to generate heavy metal.

Osbourne snarls at us in an incarnation of the musician as vampire, revealing two sharp canine teeth with runic script around him on the album cover of Speak of the Devil (1982) – the satanism that was ascribed to Osbourne was something many industrial practitioners welcomed and in turn generated their own visual output, which Ballet explores in his book Shock Factory: The Visual Culture of Industrial Music, charting the scene’s graphic contributions within the larger canon of art history, a space which had once shunned learners from pursuing the sonic. “They were told to go to the conservatory if they wanted to make sound,” said Ballet.

Three monochrome shots of Gary Gilmore blindfolded and bound at the moment of his execution are juxtaposed side by side on a postcard. This was produced and circulated by Yorkshire music and arts collective COUM Transmissions, whose members reenacted a moment which would linger over the American popular imagination over the next few years: someone who had demanded to be executed, merely a couple of months after the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment. “Both Gilmore’s execution and Manson were contemporary events in our lives,” said past COUM member Cosey Fanni Tutti to Ballet. “Both events were about power, control, (and) manipulation of a ‘system’.”

The discovery of Manson’s cult had tainted the American nationalist dream of the suburban utopia, and neither did it feel right for the industrial artists to believe in the countercultural hippie idyll amidst Thatcher’s rise to power and the ongoing Cold War. In 1967, the artist Paul Thek exhibited a life-sized effigy of himself in a tomb which has now come to be titled Death of a Hippie, considering how Thek had originally surrounded the figure with paraphernalia related to drug use. It was, in many ways, the end of flower power as the industrial artists resorted to using shock tactics to highlight the fractures of the ’60s and counter a generation’s numbness through mass media, particularly television. “Television can control public opinion more effectively than armies of secret police because television is entirely voluntary,” quoted Ballet from John Reston’s speech in Michael Crichton’s Looker (1981), which questioned the power of the TV signal. “Television is the American ideal. Persuasion without coercion.”

Visual and sonic shock would counter this “zombification by mass media”, said Ballet, which took shape in “darker forms of resistance to make the scene’s dissidents more visible”. The film Halber Mensch recorded the German experimental group Einstürzende Neubauten performing in what seemed like the disused backyard of a commercial building in Tokyo that was piled high with metallic rubble and all the remnants of post-industrial urbanism. Television screens flashed eerily as if bringing a message from beyond the permissible as Neubauten performed with a fire raging behind them. “This taste for decaying structures, however, was not simply intended to evoke cathartic violence,” wrote Ballet. “It was also a way of envisaging the construction of an alternative future from the ruins of an old model.”

‘Sound Light Rays to Control Mobs’ read a zine circulated by the English music and visual arts group Throbbing Gristle, which Cosey Fanni Tutti had formed with her previous COUM member Genesis P-Orridge. Titled Industrial News, the zine spoke about a new anti-riot weapon that used light and sound to provoke nausea and epileptic fits that was being developed by the British government. As Ballet recounted, sonic and visual experiments being conducted for military arsenals were nothing new, considering that during the Second World War the US Army’s psychological operations played on Vietnamese beliefs around the necessity of proper burials for the soul, and Ghost Tape Number 10 was developed, where sounds of ‘dead’ soldiers begged the Vietnamese army to surrender and go home. A young girl’s voice crying “Come home, daddy!” was also added to the mix, and although the soldiers realised it was a recording, they ended up firing and revealing their positions.

This aspect of state mind control intrigued industrial artists like P-Orridge who, like many others, was taking from the writer William S. Burroughs, who was thinking of similar effects on the body, like the capacity of infra-red sound to produce rhythms in listeners. P-Orridge noted that indeed low frequencies made their audience “feel very ill and that they felt this undirected fear as if we were controlling them”. Thus, P-Orridge would subsequently shout out words like ‘discipline’ and ‘persuasion’ that reverberated through a listener’s body.

Mark David Chapman was reading Catcher in the Rye before murdering Lennon, and apparently Jeffrey Dahmer was listening to the Sheffield band Clock DVA’s Buried Dreams as he killed his victims – although those press reports can’t be substantiated, Ballet noted. “Those bands were not interested in mind control for nothing,” laughed Ballet before continuing on a serious note that, “A few of them were also interested in serial killer histories, and Danny Devos of Club Moral compared the desire to create for an artist to the desire to kill for a murderer.” Taking from Marcel Duchamp’s 1923 work replicating a wanted poster of a supposed George W. Welch for whom $2,000 was being offered as a reward.

Along with two mugshots of Duchamp, the poster also mentioned Welch’s alias, Rrose Sélavy, the artist’s female alter ego. Devos worked similarly in his treatment of a weekly paper which had published the faces of two murderers, and he replaced their faces with his own, albeit modified according to the duo’s physiognomy. A television report on the arrest of Peter Sutcliffe after he was suspected of being the Yorkshire Ripper was sampled along with vocalist William Bennett’s screams in the album Dedicated to Peter Kürten Sadist and Mass Slayer by the English noise band Whitehouse. It was supposed to subvert the immunisation towards such horror for an everyday audience who had gotten used to mainstream media valorising such figures.

This extended towards their performances, with Australian group SPK wielding a flamethrower at their San Francisco concert and igniting an audience member’s clothes, albeit causing no injury. Ballet wrote how the Osaka noise band Hanatarashi had forms signed by the audience forsaking responsibility for any bodily harm during their performances. “The goal was to deprogram the consumer of cultural goods to make them aware of their own conditioning,” said Ballet, “even if it means through cut-up visuals or transforming their own body.”

Thus, the gallery almost became a “research lab”, as Ballet terms it, and at COUM’s first public performance at the Royal College of Art in 1975, Peter Christopherson appeared to slice his arm open and then proceeded to stitch it up. “We do blood and milk and wine enemas – which are real,” recalled P-Orridge in the documentary Other Like Me: The Oral History of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle. “It still disturbs people when we show them for some strange reason. My personal belief is that you can do anything you want to yourself – your body is your property, it’s yours to do with as you choose.” Perhaps that’s why Fanni Tutti was taken by Gilmore’s conviction to stand by his decision for execution. “A landmark event akin to an Art action,” she had told Ballet.

Whitehouse had used a low-resolution photocopied portrait of Kürten for the album’s sleeve that erased everything beyond the anatomy of his face and the suit he was wearing. Copy art and xeroxing was a practice that the industrial bands frequently resorted to as a cost-effective way of circulation – which was also eccentric enough to reach and inflict themselves upon wider audiences – they would mail-order their visual products to random addresses. They were influenced by the DIY nature of Duchamp, but particularly the larger Dada movement and how it used collage. “Collage was a new way of creating visuals and also understanding how to deprogram themselves through this technique by recycling different materials to create new ones,” said Ballet.

A diseased man stares blankly through empty eye sockets into the distance as machinery splinters his head on the album cover of Ostranenie 1913 (1983) by the experimental band Nurse with Wound, which was based on Raoul Hausmann’s photomontage Tatlin at Home (1920). While the Berlin Dadaists were enthusiastic about new technology, as Hausmann wrote about his desire to “portray a man who had nothing in his head but machines, automobile cylinders, brakes and steering wheels”, it takes a more insidious turn in Nurse with Wound’s interpretation.

Many artists also appropriated Soviet imagery – a significant move amidst the Cold War. Vinyl cover designs for Session 85 by the French industrial band Prima Linea took from the Constructivist posters of Russian artist, poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky, with red and black silhouettes almost carrying sonic weapons. “Soviet imagery was chosen for its revolutionary tradition by bands like Test Dept,” explained Ballet. “As it referred to the world of industry and a desire to create a more equitable social model – Test Dept did a special tour for the strikers in the mid-’80s in the UK.” A poster for the US band Constructive Terrorism warned its audience not to come looking for entertainment, with its two members holding guns.

While artists saw their deviation from art history and critique of society as a certain form of “aesthetic terrorism”, the use of totalitarian imagery meant that the scene also attracted far-right sympathisers. “What if the public takes seriously what Laibach mockingly imitates, so that Laibach actually strengthens what it purports to undermine?” queried Slavoj Žižek before answering that Laibach, and thereby such performances, frustrate the system through over-identification, which topples the dominant ideology’s efficiency.



Feature image: COUM Transmissions, Gary Gilmore Memorial Society, 1977. Copyright COUM Transmissions, Cossey Fanni Tutti, and The Estate of Genesis P-Orridge