Tuesday, August 21, 2018

EBM

cool super in-depth piece by Holly Dicker for Resident Advisor on the history - and contemporary influence / resurgence - of EBM  - aka Electronic Body Music

I often used to de-abbreviate the term incorrectly as European Body Music - which i actually think is a better term, given the ancestral role of DAF, Liaisons Dangereuses, Die Krupps, etc

if I was to do Energy Flash again, one of a bunch things I'd add is more on the non-disco, non-American, Euro-industrial prehistory of rave

it's there implicitly and name-checked with the coverage of Belgium, gabba etc - but there is more to say about this other dance-oriented club culture of the Eighties that was going on at the same time as the black street sounds like electro, synth-funk, freestyle, early minimalist rap and proto-house - a scene / sound that was stompy, Euro, and descended out of industrial if veering often into a sinewy sort of fun

mind you, i never found it easy to dance to industrial -  i remember going to a place with the Stud Bros and Stubbs (champions of Front 242, Skinny Puppy, Front Line Assembly, a; grumh, et al at Melody Maker), right in the centre of London - it might have been a particular at Gossips now I think about it - and it was dedicated to industrial and EBM - and recall finding that the beat got tiring quickly -  too hard stomping, too nail-gun regular  - there was something missing, a shimmy that house added

an old piece of mine about what I called "industrial disco" circa 1991











3 comments:

Unknown said...

EBM was extremely important in places like the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany for the house and techno scene evolving in the late 1980s. Pretty much all the soon-to-become big DJs used to play this stuff, alongside US (and UK) house, or stuff like Bomb the Bass. Germany's legendary dance/electronic music magazine "Frontpage" started as a EBM/Industrial magazine in 1989. Of course, EBM got looked down on by "serious" music critics - possibly bc it was very rigid sounding, but also bc EBM partly had militaristic, almost fascist in a way, aesthetics.

Simon said...

yeah it walked that line between Constructivist and Fascist aesthetics - cult of muscled manly body.

Tim 'Space Debris' said...

That's all a bit funny I recently bought Assimilate which is an old book now and have been listening to me old Skinny Puppy and FLA records.

I didn't realise it was trendy. In fact I thought it was probably the complete opposite ie. very not cool.

Wasn't there a bit of interest in EBM 5 or six years back? Maybe when Gesaffelstein released Aleph?