Front Line Assembly and their new 2021 album as an occasion to commemorate industrial and its meaning

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At the beginning of 2021, Front Line Assembly pleased us with the new album "Mechanical Soul". For the luminaries of electro-industrial, writing this album in the Year of Self-Isolation was not difficult - they already knew how to work remotely, between Canada, the USA and Austria, compiling beats and samples into what is called the pretentious term "industrial".

Industrial is complex music with a complex history. By and large, this is not even music, but a complex of multimedia projects that carry a pathos semantic load, the elements of which are not only sound (that's right - not “music”, but “sound”), but also video clips, stage actions, symbols, provocative texts and certainly the author's ideology. Do not entertain the consumer like pop (although this, in the end, is all music), do not inspire him to some social poses, like rock (including metal), do not influence the structure of behavior, like electronic music (from ambient to all kinds of dancers), namely to create a certain mood, a specific sensual attitude to the surrounding reality. Therefore, industrial music, which flashed in the 1980s and 90s and now almost died out, was initially incredibly eclectic. Complex symphonic structures, pop danceability, electric guitar rumble, unnatural sound effects (recorded in factories or in an urban environment - hence the name) - everything is connected into a single sensual space. The main thing in industrial is to reveal the modern social environment as non-natural, extra-natural, anti-natural, and, as a result, inhuman and anti-human. Culture, breaking away from nature, turns into its opposite. A way of life that is far removed from naturalness turns into anti-life. A person turns into self-similarity, a simulacrum, a fantastic golem living in an environment of plastic, reinforced concrete, information and noise. All values and norms of behavior have long lost their original meaning - to adapt to the natural and social environment, to adapt and survive. Today, man is something different and even the opposite of what he was when civilization arose. This nature of the post-, anti-, pseudo-human with its new coordinate system, with a radically transformed system of values is the space that explores (and forms?) Industrial.

Industrial's roots are hard to trace. On the one hand, this is a rock movement in its degeneration: all post-punk, new wave, kraut, even synthpop. On the other - electronics, from the mind-blowing experiments of Stockhausen to the gloomy outsider of Detroit techno. The main thing is the creation of fundamentally synthetic, unnatural music (for a synthetic posthuman). Industrialists did not hesitate to turn music from a spontaneous sound flow into a calculated combination of sounds and rhythms. And almost always hard and aggressive - on the very edge of the listener's endurance (not to mention the unbearable nightmare of Japanese noisemakers). Industrialists tried to overcome what music as such is built on - the dialectical contradiction of harmony and rhythm. Now the pure mood is the goal of the sound. Therefore, instead of recording the guitar in the studio and processing it on multi-story equalizers, the industrialists dissected the recorded guitar sound into its constituent elements and used them like piano keys. Well, what did they do with computer sound, bringing it to the likeness of robotic speech, the battle of machines! bass of shamans, recitative muttering of alien cyborgs.

No one else has been able to outdo the visual range of industrialists - especially the stage performances. Compared to turning your guts out on stage (Skinny Puppy), setting your colleagues on fire and pseudo-copulating with them (Rammstein), genuinely satanic rituals (Coil), bordering on pornography (Mushroomhead), the antics of Zappa or Alice Cooper are just a kindergarten matinee. . Not just to shock, but to change consciousness - that's what's important here! As for the clips... I've never seen anything more terrible and at the same time more thoughtful than clips from ohGr (ex-Skinny Puppy).

From the very beginning, industrial was divided into two main, not clearly defined directions: rock and electronic. The prominent representatives of the first for the mass consumer are Ministry (one of the founders), Rammstein, Marilyn Manson, Rob Zombie, the second - Genesis P-Orridge (recently deceased according to Cthulhu), Coil, Skinny Puppy, Haujobb, Aghast View, Laibach. Others are known for their maneuvering in the middle: Einstürzende Neubauten, Nine Inch Nails, Die Krupps, KMFDM. The activities of the Austro-Canadian-American project Front Line Assembly belong to this intermediate category.

The project was created by Bill Lieb, who left Skinny Puppy in the late 1980s in search of a more capacious and mass-oriented sound. FLA immediately formed its own sonic face - rooted in electronic rhythmic sound with all sorts of newfangled and "classic" effects, from shoegaze to IDM and EBM. Sampled guitars are carefully added to this, and most importantly - roaring rock drums in plenty. Vigorous and complex compositions are obtained, full of polyrhythms, noises, various drops, ups and downs. Front Line Assembly are a bit like the more popular (and poppy) KMFDM, but they don't have the over-the-top danceability of those. Instead, it is a complex musical structure that illustrates the fundamental computer literacy of the musicians. In general, this is a vicious line, in my opinion - it allows you to create in the silence of the night, fenced off with headphones and strong coffee from this sinful world, endless releases of the same type, in which the same effects are molded into various combinations of rhythmic old-school sound, flavored with periodic injections of metal drive and branded grinding vocals. The melody is close to zero, the rhythm is tiring, and the flow (in the spirit of the raves of the 90s) is generally annoying. That is why industrial music has degenerated in our time, giving way to the dvive field to all sorts of “new waves” of metal and revived synthpop, and the rhythmic field to more media, loud and creatively fruitless DJs.

This is exactly the fate of the Front Line Assembly ensemble - fruitful, but terribly the same type. The regular production of the same sound product was broken by them only once - with the release of the stunning album "Echogenetic" (2013), which successfully experimented with the integration of newfangled chips from dubstep, fuchebass, glitch and synthpop into industrial. The album turned out to be inspired and focused on a wider audience than the aging system administrators of the village administrations, faithful to their institutional predilections.

But the current album "Mechanical Soul" is different. On the one hand, it is quite old-fashioned, on the other hand, it looks very defiant against the background of any “neosoul”, “neo-r'n'b”, “artpop”, “inditronics” that make up the current music industry. Now, perhaps, the surprised millennials will once again begin to busily “reinvent” industrial – but, as always, in more tedious, compassionate and unprincipled forms. "Mechanical Soul" is not only one of the next albums for loyal fans. This is an excellent excursion into the history of industrial (both as an atmospheric-experimental musical direction, and as a misanthropic ideology, and as an infantile-escapist party). But "adjusted for modernity": all the same, current technologies, musical fashions and social transformations leave their imprints on the sound, not allowing it to close into naked retro. The existence of such music today is a challenge question from the 2000s: “Have you survived? What did you come to, posthumans? Have you built a fair society of reasonable consumption and environmental protection? .. "