Body To Body

To understand how Front 242's genre-defining version of Electronic Body Music evolved into the varied spectrum of industrial club music we have today, we need to look at one of the first divisions that occurred in the timeline between EBM and new beat. EBM hit the public domain slightly ahead of new beat, though they both blew up around the same time in the mid-to-late '80s.New beat was the fun and club-friendlier sibling to EBM. It was Belgium's version of acid house, and a precursor to European house and techno. Kept to a lurching 90 to 115 beats per minute, new beat was described in 1991 by musician and journalist Richard Norris as "a sparse, relentless Mogadon groove." New beat's "benzo" affect is articulated further by S. Alexander Reed in: "The aesthetic they sought was an emotionless heaviness, a menacing calm. It was an idea that pointed directly toward industrial music's fascination with disciplining the body and silencing the mind…"Allegedly, new beat was invented by "accident" in the Antwerp nightclub Ancienne Belgique when "Flesh" by the Ghent group A Split Second was played at the wrong speed. DJs like Marc Grouls, Fat Ronnie and others continued to play pitched-down records, which led to a flurry of labels repackaging and reselling existing records at these slower speeds, to try and cash in on the trend. Clubs like Boccaccio in Ghent, Confetti, Ancienne Belgique and Skyline became new beat hotspots, while Maurice Engelen and Roland Beelen's Antler-Subway Records became one of the major champions of this new Belgian club craze.Speaking to Norris in that samepiece, Engelen described new beat as taking the "best ingredients" from other dance music styles, including EBM and acid. "New Beat is a reaction to disco," he said, "completely soulless—it's sterile music created to dance to and nothing else." Reed writes that the new beat music Engelen backed on Antler-Subway used EBM's signature heavy quarter-note kick and bassline, but replaced its "blankly undead vocals" with "callisthenic entreaties to dance and have sex."New beat became extremely popular, souring into a silly parody of itself by the end. EBM acts kept their distance from it. As Patrick Codenys said to Redbull Radio, it was "not really Front 242's scene." Other EBM artists were more outwardly hostile towards new beat. One Belgium-themed music compilation, curated by German label ZYX Records released in 1988, wrote in all-caps on the back of the sleeve: "This record will show you the roots of Belgian electronic music, young musicians who don't want to ride on the new beat wave. They want to do 100% aggrepo for your body mechanic!" (Aggrepo being another name for EBM).Germany developed a big EBM scene during the second half of the '80s, and a kind of classic EBM scene still thrives there today—one completely independent from the EBM/techno world I experienced in Barcelona at Razzmatazz. This is evident in enduring festivals like the huge goth and industrial meet-up Wave-Gotik-Treffen, which happens annually in Leipzig, and the smaller Familientreffen , which celebrated its 14th edition this summer.Frankfurt was a hotbed for EBM in its heyday, and Andreas Tomalla, AKA Talla 2XLC, was at the centre of it. He worked at the record store City Music, and from 1984 ran the historic Technoclub—which in its early years was in fact an EBM club. Technoclub was one of the first venues to play purely electronic music. Its music policy diversified when it relocated to the Dorian Gray at Frankfurt airport, where it remained until the club closed in 2000. "Then it was a real techno club," recalls Gabi Delgado, who visited Tomalla whenever he was in Frankfurt. "But downstairs in the Dorian Gray there was Armin Johnert who did Bizarre Club, and that was EBM." In 1989 Nizer Ebb performed at the club's fifth birthday. You can watch the set in full online.In Berlin, at the dawn of the '90s, techno began flooding into the newly reunified capital, thanks to clubs like UFO, DJs like Tanith and the large scale raves of Tekknozid. A rift emerged pretty much from the off between the budding techno communities in Frankfurt and Berlin, with one city representing the old guard—the industrial roots, EBM—and the other the new, which was taking cues more from Chicago and Detroit. The EBM vs techno debate spilled across the German music fanzine, which had offices in both cities. Tanith and Jürgen Laarmann repped the new techno from Berlin, while Armin Johnert defended Frankfurt."I would engage Armin Johnert in fights," says Tanith in, the oral history of techno in Berlin. "Techno was defined differently in Berlin and Frankfurt, even if it did come out of the same primeval mud. Johnert always celebrated macho Front 242 marches or Suck Me Plasma stuff by Talla. I preferred Underground Resistance and R&S records."Underground Resistance—and to some extent, Final Cut , the band Jeff Mills started with Anthony Srock before fully pursuing techno—appealed to both camps. Mark Ernestus explains in: "Musically, Underground Resistance worked for both the EBM-orientated Frankfurt idea of techno and the Berlin variety. It was influenced by both soul and industrial. Their sound was exactly in between, and everyone could agree on it."In Berlin, the hard techno sound of Underground Resistance and other Detroit (and British) artists was beginning to formalise around the club Tresor. In Frankfurt, in the city's flagship Dorian Gray club, another kind of techno was emerging: trance. It was pioneered during the club's Sunday daytime sessions by resident DJ Dag, and picked up later by Sven Väth, who made it the sound of Frankfurt.Andreas Tomalla would also be instrumental in fostering the trance explosion in the city, pushing it through his matrix of labels under the Music Research umbrella. Purer trance would land on Suck Me Plasma, for example, and trancier EBM would arrive on the industrial-focused Zoth Ommog. The latter was home to acts like Leæther Strip and Bigod 20, Tomalla's popular EBM/industrial band, which he formed in 1988 with Perlon's Markus Nikolai and Zip.1988 was the year EBM and industrial music exploded onto the public consciousness. Front 242 released their landmark album,—its lead single, " Headhunter ," was the "most famous EBM track ever recorded," according to Reed. They sold 90,000 copies through WaxTrax!, one of the label's most successful releases. The following year, Trent Reznor releasedon TVT Records, his debut album as Nine Inch Nails, which tipped the scales for industrial music. Reed refers to the ensuing period, which lasted until the mid-'90s, as the "major label gold rush," in which labels scrambled to sign industrial bands off the back of NIN's success.With industrial rock exploding in the US at the dawn of the '90s, something else was starting to bubble up from the underground: techno. "I remember in '92 when I played at Dorian Gray, the EBM sound was not big at this time. Many people were jumping into techno," Adam X recalls."I found that the vitality and the spirit and the energy moved away from EBM into the rave culture, and industrial morphed into this rock sub-genre," says Rhys Fulber. He remembers a gig in Baltimore in 1992 when Front Line Assembly played with Adam X—the moment EBM and rave culture briefly intertwined, before "branching off into their separate ways."At this point the industrial community split down the middle. One side gravitated towards rock and guitars—even Front Line Assembly released a rock-indebted LP,, which featured guitar riff samples from heavy metal groups Pantera, Metallica and Sepultura. The other embraced club culture and experimental forms of electronic music, fractioning off into sub-genres like futurepop, electro-industrial (also called terror EBM, hellektro, aggrepo and aggrotech) and rhythmic noise.The rise of techno fundamentally changed the sound of EBM during this period. Reed writes that techno was becoming important for another reason: "To some, there was a nagging feeling that industrial, long assumed to be the self-evident vanguard of pop, had been surpassed not just in popularity but in experimentalism by techno…"

Body Pressure

In the last few years we've seen EBM increasingly brought into the techno arena, but this is still a fairly recent development. The sounds were totally separate when Adam X was first turned on to EBM and rhythmic noise at the tail end of the '90s—after many years of DJing and producing techno. "I could barely get gigs playing this stuff," he tells me. "I'd come from an industrial club dressed up in leather, in combat boots, coming into a techno party with people looking at me, like where the fuck are you coming from, what the hell are you listening to, Adam?""I would get a lot of shit from techno producers in the scene for pushing what I was doing," he continues. "I lost a lot of bookings over it and then I started going on tour with industrial bands. I'd make nothing. Coming from raves of 3,000 people and making legitimate money back then as a DJ, it was a humbling experience."It's taken years of hard work for Adam X and his label Sonic Groove to be in the respected positions they are now, straddling both the industrial and techno worlds. Terence Fixmer is in a similar position. Signed to Ostgut Ton and playing regularly at techno clubs and festivals around the world, he has also reactivated Fixmer/McCarthy. Over the last few years he's started making EBM-orientated records again under his own name, most recentlyEP for aufnahme + wiedergabe. But unlike Adam X, Fixmer's route into techno actually began with EBM and new beat.Growing up in France near the border of Belgium, Fixmer was a regular at Skyline, a mansion-turned nightclub in the village of Aalbeke. "People who went to Skyline were called Skyliners," he tells me. "Everybody dressed the same: all in black, with special trousers, a special haircut. We all knew each other and liked the same music." For Fixmer, techno was a modernisation of EBM and new beat, and when he started producing techno it was with the "soul" of EBM. His track " Electrostatic ," released first on Planete Rouge and then licensed to DJ Hell's International Deejay Gigolo Records, served as the gateway to the EBM/techno sound that would define Fixmer's early career. It would later be called Techno Body Music or "TBM" by journalists trying to define Fixmer's sound, most comprehensively delivered on his 2001 debut album,Fixmer was one of the first acts to bring techno and EBM together. "Between '92 and '98 techno was techno," explains Fixmer. "When I did, I was re-injecting what I love about EBM into a techno context, so people from the EBM scene started to open up to it." When Fixmer started collaborating with Douglas McCarthy from Nitzer Ebb and performing at festivals like Wave-Gotik-Treffen, he started reconnecting with the EBM scene. "I discovered there were still bands doing EBM, and I was the bridge," he tells me. "But the bands from the EBM scene were not playing in the techno scene. Fixmer/McCarthy was the first band to play in both techno and EBM worlds."Fixmer never came from industrial and doesn't consider any of his music industrial, despite often being labelled as such. He doesn't really consider himself EBM these days, either. "For me, it's not my sound anymore," he says about thereissue on Ostgut Ton. "It's strange this old track has come back and is being played again by people like Kobosil." Has it resulted in a revived interest in Fixmer's back catalogue? "Yes, totally. Right now people play 'Rage' and 'Red Section,' some Fixmer/McCarthy, and I think, should I release them, remaster them?"Reissues and reissue-focused labels like Dark Entries, Mannequin and Minimal Wave have certainly helped to stoke interest in historic genres like EBM, exhuming long-lost gems and making them playable again. Eclectic digger DJs, niche club nights like Fleisch in Berlin and MVSB's BODY and M II M (mouthiimouth) events in London, a fertile online radio culture and greater access to music in general via the internet have all played their part, too.On EBM's recent visibilty in techno, journalist, DJ and aufnahme + wiedergabe artist Chloé Lula says: "I think a lot of it has to do, simply, with creative producers—like Silent Servant, Phase Fatale, Alessandro Adriani, etc—reinforcing the connections between modern electronic music and its roots in '80s industrial and post-punk." She also believes there's perhaps a more covert political force at work. "More aggressive music has always tended to be the soundtrack to more tension-fraught times."For those entrenched in the EBM and industrial scene for many years, like Terence Fixmer and Adam X, or for the more emergent artists who grew up with this music, such as Sara Taylor, the fad of EBM is a growing concern. Taylor tells me there's been a big revitalisation in LA's industrial scene, with people expressing more interest in goth and industrial subculture. "It's wildly out of control in a way," she says. "Sometimes I get sort of resentful at someone using goth as a fashion statement, wherein I don't think any of them got called a weirdo or flipped off for ever being that way when they were in high school."Adam X dislikes the overuse and mislabeling of EBM in techno, which caused the Facebook post last year. "It's an insult when I see things called EBM when they are not," he says. "Too many times I've watched people in techno get trendy. It becomes a fashion statement and then they're onto the next thing. This is a lifestyle. It's a part of us, for people who are into this sound."Terence Fixmer has been misrepresented in the past. He doesn't want to be "trapped" by his historic EBM associations and has concerns over EBM's recent trendiness in techno. "People like this EBM sound now but at some point it will be uncool," he says. "I don't want to be imprisoned by this sound. I am an artist, I like to be free, and to express myself. I like darkness, intensity, atmosphere, not labels."There are more troubling issues lurking in EBM's chronology. In her essay, published last year in a collection called, Alison L. Fraser calls out Andy LaPlegua and his electro-industrial outfit's harmful attitude towards women. She mentions an incident at 2014's edition of Kinetik festival in Montreal, when Ad·ver·sary and Antigen Shift played this video in the closing minutes of their set. It highlighted the violent, racist and misogynistic content in music by Combichrist and one of the festival's other headliners, Nachtmahr.The crux of Fraser's argument lies in LaPlegua's lack of critical ownership over the politics of his music. Comparing Combichrist with the radical and politicised origins of Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, et al, she concludes: "He failed to do what his industrial predecessors tried to do [...], which is take our reality and show it to us in all its actual horror. Instead, LaPlegua took something already normal in mainstream society—violence against women—and made it goth."Fraser's argument isn't new. The author, academic and political activist Anton Shekhovtsov wrote at length on the dangers of industrial music's de-politicisation. He specifically critiqued post-'90s era bands who appropriated fascist imagery without political impetus. He called music of this kind "apoliteic" and warned that, by abstaining from political ownership or meaning, apoliteic music had the effect of normalising, popularising and even promoting the totalitarian values embedded in the aesthetics of such bands.Extremist ideology infiltrated the EBM scene in the '90s, causing a seismic shift that Rhys Fulber experienced firsthand. "When I started touring with Front Line Assembly, I was exposed to some unsavoury elements of that genre," he tells me. "Front 242 were dogged with that for a while too, and it seemed like people were missing or misinterpreting what they were actually trying to say. Then the genre turned into this macho, cliché-laden thing, and it sort of lost what it was and became something else."Simon Reynolds laboured the point of industrial dance music's inherent maleness in a piece for the New York Times , published in 1991. Referring to it as "industrial disco," with Front 242 as its poster boys, he wrote: "Industrial disco is generally fascinated with the extremes of human experience, and in particular with the extremes of male psychology," going on to state that it was "supremely masculine" and like "a glimpse into the hellish void at the centre of the male ego." In another piece for, published around the same time but centred solely on Front 242, Reynolds confronted the band directly on their "very male" sound, image and aesthetic. "We are male, but not macho," was Patrick Codenys' response.They might have been more so in the early to mid-'80s, when the band felt the need to aggressively impose themselves and their music upon the world, as Codenys confesses to Reed in. Following critical reception from the music press at the time, Front 242 responded with "masculine overkill," writes Reed, referring to their paramilitary stage antics and martial-style music. Reed concludes that the results "did little [back then] to attract women to the already male-dominated electronic scene," an imbalance that Reed says improved significantly with the arrival of Skinny Puppy's liberal politics and the industrial pop of Nine Inch Nails.

We're In This Together

I'm in London. The sun is beating down on the Southbank where hoards of afterwork drinkers are massing, toasting the start of the weekend with £5 beers in plastic cups. But I'm not with them. I'm inside the Royal Festival Hall, surrounded by middle-aged tattooed goths dressed head to toe in black. I'm about to see Nine Inch Nails perform as part of Meltdown, the UK's longest-running artist-curated music festival. This year—its 25th edition—has been curated by The Cure's Robert Smith.The Royal Festival Hall is packed and electric with anticipation. We're seated as smoke machines steadily choke the stage. Then, through the fog the band appears, including Alessandro Cortini on guitar and synths. There's a split second where we all consider staying seated before the room unanimously leaps to its feet for the first song, "Somewhat Damaged," from the band's 1999 double LP. Balled fists punch the air and voices strain along with Reznor's teen-angsty lyrics about being too fucked up to care and losing faith in everything; we all reconnect with our former selves. Everyone loses their shit during "Terrible Lie"—including Reznor. In a fit of exuberance, he hurls his guitar at the stage hand afterwards. Later, aching reverence grips the hall for the broken-heart piano ballad "Something I Can Never Have."Towards the end of the show NIN perform music from their new record,. It's fast, rocky and pummeling at first. Then Reznor, drummer Ilan Rubin and lead guitarist Robin Finck step out, leaving Cortini and Atticus Ross, who co-producedwith Reznor, alone on stage. Together they whip up an electronic maelstrom of distorted industrial noise and a blitzkrieg of breakcore beats. For me it's the highlight, the moment where NIN prove they're not mainstream industrial rock relics but a plugged in and utterly formidable modern act. Fad Gadget keyboardist Jean-Marc Lederman said thatsignalled "the end of historic EBM." And yet, this was not the death knell ringing for EBM, but the cacophonous chiming of its future."EBM is being better represented now than it was 15 years ago," says Rhys Fulber, who recently released his debut solo album on Sonic Groove. Like Fixmer, Fulber is a member of EBM's old guard keen to keep pushing the genre forward. "For anything to be important it has to keep moving," he says.A number of artists and labels are invested in EBM's reinvention. Dais Records, for example, is making interesting connections between traditional industrial music—releases from COUM Transmissions, Genesis P-Orridge, Psychic TV, and spoken word by William S. Burroughs—to contemporary EBM acts like LA's Youth Code and High-Functioning Flesh. Meanwhile, veteran acts like DAF are still regularly performing, with frontman Gabi Delgado delivering as rousing a show as ever. Even Nitzer Ebb are reuniting in 2019, and in October Pylon Records will release a box set of the band's five Geffen/Mute albums.Regarding the current mood of revivalism and apparent trendiness surrounding EBM, Adam X is particularly outspoken. He seems to be the one shouting the loudest in defence of the genre that has in fact been constantly evolving, in and out of the shadows, for more than 30 years. Some of us might only just be waking up to it. But for others, EBM was an essential gateway to club music. "This is our passion," says Adam X, speaking for the EBM community at large. "This is not a fad for us, this is not a trend."