CENTRAL INDUSTRIAL – THE BEGINNING OF A NEW SCENE

While Punk grows on massive calls to destroy the System, in mid 70s , in London’s suburbs, another small circle of artists carried out their own revolution focusing on a different potential. The approach chosen was to reflect Society’s most disturbing horrors. Industrial Music was born, thanks to the genius of Throbbling Gristle with the slogan “Industrial Music for Industrial People”. Their experiments combined noise with controversial issues: the sense of people as changed components, reorganized, remodeled by the economic structure in which they are required to adapt; “spare parts” of the “Society” gear. There was no escape from everyday life, but basked in it, projecting the sounds of the work environment onto the audience in an exaggerated way.

Industrial Records label, from which the name of the musical genre was derived, saw the production of the artists who gravitated around it, ranging from music to mail art, from performance art to other artistic disciplines.The Industrial has proposed many currents and sub-genres, but in general it is proposed as a minimal, rhythmic electronics, full of samples of industrial sounds enriched by distorted and sick voices, to recreate in music and denounce the greatest human aberrations; all the dirt and things that governments deny and don’t say.

The leading figures of this movement included groups and artists such as, Throbbing Gristle, passing through the first Human League, to arrive at the cold robotic new wave of Cabaret Voltaire and Clock DVA.
Later, in the mid 80’s, Ambient Industrial music projects like Coil and Richard H. Kirk enriched the sound making it poetically apocalyptic with rarefied atmospheres.

The genre quickly infected all over the world, finding fertile ground also in the east and in Japan, generating the ramifications that we know today as Post-Industrial music.
Throbbing Gristle claim to have finished their mission in 1981 and split up: Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson founded Psychic TV, while Cosey Fanni Tutti and Chris Carter continued their musical adventure together with the names of Chris & Cosey and Carter Tutti.
These artists have been able to create something more than a single genre, but a real movement that has crept into Society, and not only in a musical way.