The Survival of the Industrial Sonic in a Deindustrialized West

I've got a new column up at PopMatters on Industrial Music throughout the 90s- that is, not the music most of us in our teens encountered as "Industrial" (though that stuff gets a mention too), but the ways in which the sonic of (de)construction and manual labor survived as an aesthetic in a time when it was becoming a ghost in the Western world.


There's some discussion of this over at SR's blissblog in this post (and makes reference to my first of these columns, as last year's column on minimal synth), which is actually part of a discussion started here about how the eighties is now the endless well of referentiality that the 60s once were. Some useful links in there too, including an interview with Blackest Ever Black/FACT's Kiran Sande, a nice coinage piece by Kek-W on "Work" music, and a link to a Guardian piece on Perc as London riot soundtrack music (More on that in part 3 (hopefully of 3) in my industrial trilogy set for PM.