Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music

Edited by Elizabeth Potter and Jason Whittaker


Collected edition: deadline for proposals, 28 February, 2020

Following its appearance as part of the post punk scene in the late 1990s, industrial music was very much concerned with emerging critical engagement with configurations of the body, whether through such forms as applications of different technologies, electronic body music (EBM), fashion or involvement with what would become known as posthumanism and transhumanism. The first group to use the phrase “industrial music” to describe their work, Throbbing Gristle, built upon earlier performance art techniques developed as part of the art collective COUM Transmissions. Meanwhile, developments in digital technologies influenced both the formation of industrial music and conceptions of its relations with the body, as seen in  Shinya Tsukamoto’s 1989 film Tetsuo: The Iron Man, the ambient industrial music of groups such as Skinny Puppy, Frontline Assembly or Front 242, or the posthumanist visions of artists such as Stellarc and Genesis P. Orridge. After finding mainstream success in the late 90s and early 2000s via groups such as Nine Inch Nails and Ministry, industrial music appeared to enter a lull, a state of affairs that continued for over a decade until its metamorphosis into related genres such as industrial metal (Rob Zombie, 3TEETH), hardcore-influenced industrial (Youth Code), multigenre experimentation (Death Grips), dance music (Chrome Corpse), analog minimalism (Sally Dige), and queer noise (dreamcrusher).


Recent years have seen a series of books essentially concerned with the history of industrial music as a historical phenomenon, usually concentrating on individual groups such as Simon Ford’s The Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle (2003) and Alexei Monroe’s Interrogation Machine: Laibach and the NSK (2005). Since the revival of interest in industrial music, more widely thematic titles such as Surhone’s and Timpledon’s Neofolk (2010) and Karen Collins’ A Bang, A Whimper and A Beat (2012) have begun to consider wider cultural implications of the genre. 


This proposed title will be a collected edition in the series Pop Music, Culture and Identity, edited by S. Clark, T. Connolly and J. Whittaker and published by Palgrave (https://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14537). Despite assumptions as to the transience of various forms of pop music, as a cultural medium this has proved to be an enduring art form that has become extremely important from the mid-twentieth century onwards in terms of defining identity. The series as a whole, currently comprising some 24 titles, is dedicated to exploring the impacts of popular music on cultural formations and gives a particular emphasis to interdisciplinary approaches that go beyond traditional musicology. Unique to this series from Palgrave, we encourage the written experience of an informed fanbase alongside academic methodologies.


Possible themes for this collection include (but are not limited to) the following:




Abstracts of up to 300 words along with a short biographical note (50 words in the same Word document) should be sent to Elizabeth Potter ([log in to unmask]) and Jason Whittaker ([log in to unmask]) by 28 February 2020.




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