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Originally Posted by sarramkrop
a lot of it sounds dated and mysanthropic.
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I guess if you don't know the underlying inspiration for the 'industrial' movment in Europe in the late 70's and early 80's then you could interpret the genre as a whole as misanthropic.
But if you look at it's origins in the disassembly of heavy industry and manufacturing in the UK and beyond at the time (steel works, mining, hundreds of thousands put out of work. etc) and the breaking of the trade unions at the same time, you would probably see it more as a movement borne of protest at the death of traditional industries.
Test Dept raised money for the families of miners that had been put out of work and brought the workers struggle in Poland to the notice of a whole new audience with tracks like 'Gdansk'.
To be fair, they did turn to utter shite when they tried to jump on the dance bandwagon in the late eighties and early ninetie.
Metgumbnerbone's 'Ligeliahorn' was a requiem for traditional heavy industry in the North East of England in the early 80's, and was actually recorded in the abandoned factories along the river Tyne using the equipment left behind and the actual buildings as instruments.
I suppose because it reflects the time in which it was created then it probably does sound 'dated', but I view the early works by TG, EN, Test Dept and Cabaret Voltaire as 'historical' rather than 'dated' documents
Of course, some of the early industrial acts came at the genre from an entirely artistic angle. TG and Einsturzende Neubauten always put me in mind of the Dadaists and Futurists of the 30's and the situationist movement of the late 60's and 70's.
The one exception in my opinion was Mufti who always looked like he would have been more at home with Test Dept than EN.
I think that some of the more recent 'Industrial' artists can come over as misanthropic, but I've never really thought of NiN, Ministry and all the other IDM bands as 'industrial anyway.