It is an incredible honor when someone thinks one's thoughts and/or ideas are worthy of distribution in any manner. For that, I thank the creators of Noisewire.org for inviting me to write this. Also to be clear, they have given me free reign over the content and I greatly value their trust. The concept of The Mechanized Resistance Chronicles [TMRC] is to provide a broad approach to exploring the industrial genre from the inside. Since 1985, I have been hyper-focused on promoting, creating, performing, and DJing industrial music. Most importantly to me, I have been an enthusiast of the compositional freedoms the genre enables that go far beyond anything guitar rock-based chord structures will allow. Punk destroyed old notions of music composition; playing it faster, louder, noisier, crunchier, and slower than ever before. We changed what crowd engagement for a live show was by bringing pogoing, skanking, moshing, stage diving, and crowd surfing into being. However, that movement was still based on a rock and roll framework and was still presented from a rock and roll perspective. The industrial genre's bashing of the sonic wall redefined what music, musical composition, instrumentation, and musical performance were. Period. We also took industrial away from the jock/dickhead-infested mosh pit vibe of the mid-1980s punk scene, making dancing and grooving the proper mode of engagement. Anyone who experienced industrial events between the early 1980s and 1988 clearly saw that.

To break this out further, around 1990, our community expanded with an influx of a large audience from the alternative music world. While being interested in eclecticism, they also brought in very traditional compositional ideas of what a "band" is to the genre. It was at that point where bands that never played with the traditional configuration of a drummer and guitar/bass player were told that having a "full band" on stage was required to properly engage and capture the attention of this burgeoning audience. Many mainstream entertainment industry sycophants with eclectic tastes pushed many bands with an interest in touring and such to write less noisy and more "structured" songs. Having founded the industrial band Abstinence in 1985, which was my second life in the music industry after the signed hardcore punk band Public Disturbance I was in broke up in 1984/1985, I intimately saw many of the regional industrial bands make stylistic shifts from their originating vibes that brought them attention to take the devil's bargain of striving for underground rockstar-dome. In a heartfelt admission on his FB page, my long-time comrade Jared Louche of Chemlab painfully articulated the problems that bargain wrought. Basically, every band that took it found themselves broken up before the early 2000s. The industry pressures of touring and compositional forecasting to try to write the next "industrial hit" [that throws compositional originality out of the window] took their toll, morphing once compositionally adventurous bands into purveyors of very predictable industrial dance rock songs designed for mass consumption. My foundational genres of funk, activist soul, progressive rock, new wave/punk, hip hop, and metal took my interests far outside of the mainstream entertainment industry's undying focus on "pop stars" and its lust for and of celebrity. Having lived through the hackneyed attempts to mainstream punk rock, and having seen hip hop completely mainstreamed, I fully knew what to avoid, which is why my band is the only one that is still standing over 40 years later, having never ceased production of music since our founding. That is not a boast. It is a saddening reality because I lament what they, and our scene, would have been had they followed their originating paths. Also, this isn't an old problem. Even now, my sonic colleagues who attempt to break the various molds are given the same industry warnings of originality equaling empty dancefloors and bored bartenders who aren't making any money, only now there is a much smaller audience pool than in the 1990s when we inhabited multiple megaclubs on a weekly basis… primarily with regional DJs and bands.

It is important for you to know that I am 100% not a person who finds themselves to be nostalgic. Often people who are my age [61 as I type this (May 11, 1964)] are seen as people who need to hear the same music we listened to in our developing years whenever we go out. For my own tastes, I have no interest in trying to relive my developing years, even though my developing years were concurrent with the developing years of the genres I produce. On the other hand, I am nostalgic for, and will always seek, adventurous art, artforms, and events that resist mainstream tropes and are devoid of pop culture attitudes. This gets us into something that many seem to actively ignore. Or, maybe it's an Orwellian reality of "History was erased. The erasure was forgotten. The lie became truth." Whatever the reason, there has been a silence about the mainstream elements that have been pushed for profit motive as being part of the industrial movement. To be perfectly clear on how I define "Industrial" as a genre, I go back to why it is called "industrial." The genre got its name from Throbbing Gristle naming their label, "Industrial Records" in 1976. In the early 2000s, I had a multi-day conversation with Genesis P. Orridge [Throbbing Gristle co-founder] about the founding and legacies of industrial music and culture. He/They told me that it almost was called "Factory Records" as a nod to Andy Warhol, but they saw that as too obvious. So, we could be discussing the 50th anniversary of "Factory music." A basic reality check. Gen also pointed out that industrial was designed to be a thorn in the side of the mainstream world, and was supposed to resist being absorbed into cultureless "culture-fluid" pop culture. I have witnessed many negative elements be supported in this community as it has lost its subcultural origins. For the sake of having public places to exhibit, vibes that create welcoming safe-havens, and friendly homes for our tribe versus traversing minefields of competitive emotions behind smile-cracked faces, these are things that have to be addressed.

Resisting pop culture means much more than just wearing the garments related to a notion of cultural identification. The new wave/punk rock subculture that all this derived from was originally a safespace for those of us who had no interest in the ideas and/or output of the mainstream hit machines. For instance, although there is a ton of music that I loved/dug from the Motown hit machine, even giving respect to why it may have been needed, I found huge problems with how it dealt with those artists and how its founders saw the revolutionary components of US culture in general, and the Black community in particular. People also must know that the music culture that preceded ours was prog rock [aka progressive rock]. That was the music that broke with the mainstream music industry's hit machine sound, vibe, and compositional structures of the 1960s. Bands that ranged from Pink Floyd and Black Sabbath, to the Grateful Dead and Frank Zappa, to Funkadelic and Emerson Lake & Palmer all came up through that culture. George Clinton said, "Free your mind and your ass will follow." It was prog rock that brought about that freedom by drastically expanding beyond the compositional structures, sonics, and ideas that were acceptable by the mainstream hitmakers in the mid-1960s. [FYI - The same mainstream industry dictates basically remain in place to this day.] It also brought about different cultural ideas of how we should/could live. That is where the clean water, natural foods, clean air, and even product safety movements got a ton of support through lyrical and artistic productions. Prog rock was/is the soundtrack of "hippy culture," which is the culture that brought different ideas of sexuality, gender fluidity, enhanced ethnic fluidity, and overall social awareness into the American zeitgeist along with the growing disgust for the xenophobic conservative American culture that supported the Vietnam War, ethnic & gender segregation, and social stratification. This is why those of us that experienced first-generation new wave/punk rock culture had a lot of crossover with prog rock, and we took on and emphasized much of its subcultural social focus, whether aware or not.

Please notice my focus on industrial's cultural and social roots, and not its fashion or scene evolution. It has been the collective hyper-focus on fashion instead of culture over the years that has allowed the negative elements that have oozed into our culture and gained acceptance. Although I have been focusing on the compositional, performative output issues, as well as the audience expectation issues of our culture, the in-fighting, along with the acceptance of xenophobes, predators, and those who are best categorized as "assholes," has kept me happily as an inside-outsider, while being furious about the things I have seen people endure. Over the decades, I have been behind the scenes having deep conversations with people that had, or at least thought they had, nowhere else to turn without suffering some form of detrimental consequence. The fact that anyone would or could suffer a negative consequence for speaking up against known horrid behavior is fucked up, is an embarrassment to our culture and who we are as people, and has to come to an immediate halt. Producers threatening other producers about shows, DJs undercutting each other, and the aforementioned accepted "fuckery," are the elements that serve as functionaries that destroy the adventurous safespace vibe our culture was built on and intended to be. Having retired from producing weekly/monthly events in 1997, I have stood outside of it all watching people fight over crumbs. If people simply grasped the reality that there is no such thing as a "living wage" in this industry, they could and should see each other as collaborators in a sonic cultural movement versus competitors in a dog-eat-dog marketplace of the entertainment industry. Even performers in the biggest "industrial" bands require secondary ways of supporting themselves, and most DJs today are paid less for providing the soundtrack to (y)our local haunts than we did over 30 years ago. To have seen people threaten each other over the crumbs of a false notion of status or whatever is to witness the circular firing squad of our culture. The vision for TMRC is to serve as a functionary for assisting in the disarming of the firing squad.

So, now you have a cultural roadmap into the underpinning of where we are collectively going with this as we evolve here together. We are a small subculture, which means we have the ability to make the needed changes. Before we can purge the [t]rumps of the world, we have to start with those people and things in our own communities that require/demand/hope for positive change. I have eternal faith in the power of a small group of dedicated people to make positive change of whatever kind… because that is how sonic and social change has been executed in our society for the entirety of documented history. As Fannie Lou Hamer said, "There is one thing you have got to learn about our movement. Three people are better than no people." Maggie Kuhn said, "Leave safety behind. Put your body on the line. Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind--even if your voice shakes. When you least expect it, someone may actually listen to what you have to say. Well-aimed slingshots can topple giants." "If it is correct, as I believe it is, that a fundamental element of human nature is the need for creative work or creative inquiry, for free creation without the arbitrary limiting effects of coercive institutions, then of course it will follow that a decent society should maximize the possibilities for this fundamental human characteristic to be realized." Noam Chomsky And my primary guiding historical quotes are Ella Baker's "I have always thought that what is needed is the development of people who are interested not in being leaders as much as in developing leadership in others," and "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." Buckminster Fuller

I attribute my sense of empowerment to the millions and millions who have stated over the span of human existence an emphatic version of "Fuck this, no more. It is time I/we do something about this!" That is the fervently adventurous energy that Industrial Records, hence our genre, was founded on. From listening to so many who proclaim they want positive change, I would encourage those of us who love industrial as an artform and culture to return to [and/or bolster] our focus on revolutionary sonics, thought, culture, and behavior. Future generations will, and must, hold us all accountable for what we do with our collective time in the driver's seat.

Let's do this

Peaceness and Sledgehammers,

dh