Industrial

Industrial music crystallized in 1976, but its DNA reaches back to 1913. That year, Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo published The Art of Noises, demanding music that reflected “the sounds of a modern industrial society.” Jean Cocteau's Parade at Paris's Chatelet Theatre in 1917 deployed dynamos, Morse code machines, sirens, and typewriters as instruments. Arseny Avraamov conducted his Symphony of Factory Sirens in Baku in 1922, scoring for navy ship sirens, cannons, and machine guns. Arthur Honegger's Pacific 231 (1923) mimicked a steam locomotive in motion. These weren't just experiments. They were prophecies.

By the early 1970s, those prophecies came true in England's post-industrial wreckage. Hull, a fishing port bombed to rubble in the Second World War and rebuilt ugly and cheap, wasn't the obvious birthplace for revolutionary music. “The people in Hull are pretty uncompromising,” Cosey Fanni Tutti told Bandcamp Daily. “They know what they like, and if they don't like you, you'll soon find out. You've got to stand your ground there. I absolutely love the belligerence of the people there—that can come in handy as a strength of mine.”