Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music

This edited collection delves into the industrial music genre, exploring the importance of music in (sub)cultural identity formation, and the impact of technology on the production of music.

With its roots as early as the 1970s, industrial music emerged as a harsh, transgressive, and radically charged genre. The soundscape of the industrial is intense and powerful, adorned with taboo images, and thematically concerned with authority and control. Elemental to the genre is critical engagement with configurations of the body and related power. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this collection analyses the treatment of subjects like the Body (animal, human, machine), Noise (rhythmic, harsh) and Power (authority, institutions, law) in a variety of industrial music's elements. Throughout the collection, these three subjects are interrogated by examining lyrics, aesthetics, music videos, song writing, performance and audience reception.

The chapters havebeen carefully selected to produce a diverse and intersectional perspective, including work on Black industrial musicians and Arabic and North African women's collaborations. Rather than providing historical context, the contributors interpret the finer elements of the aesthetics and discourses around physical bodies and power as expressed in the genre, expanding the 'industrial' boundary and broadening the focus beyond white European industrial music.

Offers a multi-disciplinary perspective on the key aspects of industrial music The book includes analysis and interviews with artists, bands and video makers involved in the scene First book on industrial music and culture to address explicitly intersectional elements on race, gender and sexuality

Auteur

Jason Whittaker is Head of English and Journalism at the University of Lincoln. He mainly writes on the reception of William Blake, but also has published on digital technologies and culture as well as post-punk and industrial music. His most recent books include Tech Giants, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Journalism (2019) and Divine Images: The Life and Work of William Blake (2021).

Elizabeth Potter is a PhD student at the University of York. Her thesis focuses on William Blake's marginalia to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1798). She analyses the manuscript notes on material and conceptual levels to provide insight into Blake's aesthetics and artistic philosophies. Beyond her thesis, she is also interested in transatlantic studies, visual culture, and affect theory.

Résumé
"This timely and diverse book presents accounts of new developments in industrial music. ... this is a very pertinent update on the present condition of industrial music ... . As a singular niche the music would appear by now to have well established itself ... . " (Clark Allison, internationaltimes.it, March 26, 2022)

Contenu

1. My Body Disgusts Me: Swans, Biopolitics, and the Liberation of the Body; James McCrea.- 2. Nadafa: Women's Bodies in Arab Hip Hop and Industrial Music; Steve Collins, Rachael Gunn, Susie Khamis.- 3. "The Odds of the Body": Clipping and Escapaing the Power Hold on the Black Body; Daniel Gillespie.- 4. All Too Human: Industrial Bodies and Anti-Bodies in the Time of Aids; Jason Whittaker.- 5. Cabaret Voltaire: Industrial Dada; Ben Eyes.- 6. Chance Meeting: disembodied voices in the work of Nurse with Wound and Cabaret Voltaire; Rupert Loydell.- 7. The Last Attempt at Paradise: Early Industrial Culture in Kansas; Francis X. Connor.- 8. Industrial Music and Inner Experience: Aural Abrasion as a Window to Post-Subjectivity; Jay Fraser.- 9. The Occultural Side of Industrial: far from its Origins to Industrial Black Metal; M. Cecilia Marchetto Santorun.- 10. "Happiness and Slavery", or Industrial Erotic; Elizabeth Potter.