Early Industrial

What it is

Sheffield in 1975 had a lot of abandoned steel and two men with a tape recorder. Cabaret Voltaire were splicing shortwave radio into loops in an attic. In London, Throbbing Gristle had built their own effects box and started a label with the word industrial in the name, and the word stuck to everyone else by accident. What connects the early records is a refusal of the drum kit. Percussion comes from metal being struck, from a Roland CR-78 running a preset nobody would choose on purpose, from a quarter-inch loop of a factory floor. Test Dept and Einstuerzende Neubauten took the idea to its literal end and played girders, drills and shopping trolleys. The rhythm is a pulse rather than a groove. It very rarely resolves on beat four, and a lot of the time it was not played to a click at all.

What it sounds like

Ferrous and dry. The low end is a struck oil drum or a detuned synth thump rather than a drum machine kick, and there is no sub underneath it. Above that, metal: sheet, pipe, spring, chain, brake drum, all recorded close on cheap dynamic microphones that are already clipping before anyone touches a fader. Tape is everywhere, so the whole thing wows slightly and the top rolls off around 8kHz whether you asked for it or not. There are no hi-hats. Where a hat would sit there is a handful of gravel, a burst of shortwave, or the room. Voices are treated until they stop being voices.

Key elements

• Struck metal instead of hatsThe top end is objects, not cymbals. A sheet of steel, a length of scaffold pipe, a spring reverb tank hit with a stick. Pitch lands wherever the object lands, so nothing here is in a key.
• A pulse, not a backbeatBeat 1 and beat 3 carry the kick, and 2 and 4 get whatever piece of metal is nearest. Nobody in 1978 was thinking about where a snare drum belongs, because there was no snare drum.
• Tape loopsA splice of speech, machinery or radio running at a length that does not divide into the bar, so the loop and the pulse drift apart and back together over a minute or two.
• The CR-78 and the GristleizerA preset rhythm box and a home-built filter and tremolo unit. Both are audible on the records because neither was chosen for tone; they were what was in the room.
• Room instead of reverbThe space is a real one, usually a bad one. A stairwell, a garage, a rehearsal room with a microphone across it, printed into the recording and impossible to remove later.

How to get them

• Find the metalRecord a radiator, a filing cabinet and a scaffold clamp on a phone at close range. Layer three of them at slightly different pitches, gate at 120ms, and do not reach for a hi-hat sample to help.
• Build the low endA sine at 55Hz with a 300ms decay, layered under a recording of something large being hit, then run both into a preamp until the transient softens. High-pass at 35Hz and leave it mono.
• Print to tapeBounce the loop to cassette or a tape emulation with the input hot by four or five decibels, then bring it back in. The wow, the compression and the lost top are the sound.
• Loop against the barTake a spoken sample of about three and a half seconds and let it run free against a two bar drum loop. Do not stretch it. The phasing between the two lengths is the arrangement.
• Resist the gridNudge two or three of the metal hits five to fifteen milliseconds off the line by hand. Quantised scrap metal sounds like a sample pack; a struck object never lands twice in the same place.

Reference points

Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, SPK, Test Dept, Einstuerzende Neubauten, Z'EV, Clock DVA, and the Industrial Records catalogue. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.