Digital Resistances - Digital Culture - page 156

one of the first 'Post-Punk' movements, known later as 'Industrial
Rock'. Among the early exponents of this genre was Throbbing
Gristle, the band that emerged out of the art collective Coum
Transmissions, which had gained notoriety with their show at

the ICA, 'Prostitution'. Throbbing Gristle's musical strategies owed
more to the pioneering work of John Cage than to conventional pop
music and involved the use of both conventional instruments and
custom-made electronic devices to produce barrages of sound. In
1978

1976

Throbbing Gristle started their own record company, Industrial
Records, in order to release their own records and those of like-
minded artists. The name of their company, and that of their head-
quarters in Hackney, The Death Factory, signalled their interest in
producing 'industrial music for industrial people'. As Simon Ford
points out in his history of Throbbing Gristle/Coum Transmissions,
they were making this industrial music at exactly the moment
when Britain was ceasing to be a leading industrial nation, and was
becoming instead a post-industrial economy. 53
Throbbing Gristle's industrial interests were also evident in other
bands such as Cabaret Voltaire, Joy Division and The Human
League, who all also employed electronic means for making music.
This produced a style of music with a distinctive machine aesthetic,
like that found, for example, in the collaborations between David
Bowie and Brian Eno, in particular Low and Heroes , in which more-
or-less conventional pop songs are juxtaposed with electronic mood
pieces. Heroes , the most artistically successful of these collabora-
tions, was recorded in Germany, and deliberately evoked a Germanic
aura through songs such as 'V Schneider'. Imagery from the Nazi

era and the Second World War was often employed by those involved
with Punk and Post-Punk music. The early Punks in particularly
had engaged in provocative gestures, such as wearing Nazi uniforms.
At one level this could be read simply as a, rather clumsy, attempt to
épater les bourgeois , using one of the few remaining effective taboos.
This provoked a backlash, which was channelled into effective action

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