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