10 Essential Electro-Industrial Releases From the Millennium’s Edge
Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle may have flipped the “on” switch, but industrial music’s machinery really didn’t kick into gear until it discovered its humanity. Electronic body music, typically abbreviated to the letters EBM, drew as much from the noisy experiments of those English art brutalists as they did the German synthesizer servants in DAF and Kraftwerk. Groups like Belgium’s Front 242 and Great Britain’s Nitzer Ebb made unconventional anthems out of 1980s keyboards and unusual vocal approaches.
Stateside, the EBM sound prospered with the Chicago-based Wax Trax! Records, which not only imported and distributed the European acts in America but also put out music from like-minded domestic artists. Paul Barker and Al Jourgensen donned pseudonyms like Acid Horse and PTP for the label while their best-known act Ministry plugged away in the majors.
As the EBM era’s breakout superstars eased into legacy status or dissolved into breakups and hiatuses around the mid-1990s, they inadvertently ceded the genre to guitar heroes. Following the success of their major label endeavor Psalm 69, Barker and Jourgensen had moved Ministry into the heavy metal arena by 1996’s Filth Pig, providing both a complement and an alternative to the leading lights of industrial rock, Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails. Clones, copycats, and even a few scene vets amplified this new style, some of which managed to successfully time their peaks with the rise of nu-metal.
While Orgy and Static-X charted at Billboard, the industrial underground carried on both the traditions and spirit of EBM, making increasingly danceable material by appropriating from clubbier styles like techno and trance. German imprint Zoth Ommog had been active since the late 1980s, dispensing albums from Armageddon Dildos and Consolidated, among others. The tastemaking label served as the European home to a number of acts that would prove key to this electro-industrial movement that straddled the millennium. In the U.S., Wax Trax!’s power waned as the Philadelphia-area’s Metropolis Records surged, thanks in no small part to its signing and distributing albums originating from both sides of the proverbial pond.
Other labels like Ant-Zen, Bloodline, and Dependent would also participate actively in these ultimately short-lived electro-industrial years that straddled either side of the millennium. While certainly not a comprehensive or definitive list, the following 10 albums represent a range that honored the EBM that came before while serving the needs of its nightlife patrons. (Once you’ve whet your interest with the following, you can also check out some more recent EBM artists here.)
https://daily.bandcamp.com/lists/electro-industrial-millennium-list
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