ELECTRO-INDUSTRIAL
I started writing electro-industrial music a while ago. Most of it was either lost or trashed, but I kept writing and creating it because much of what I’ve experienced in this lifetime sounds the way this genre sounds: dystopic, dissonant, and haunting.
Each album was an idea of a concept, whether it be a story, or a mere idea. Crafting each album came with writing, and numbering, a list of titles for songs I wanted to write for each one. It’s sometimes a lengthy process, other times not, depending on the idea and where I know it’s going, where I want it to go, or if I’m clueless.
Think of each album as a movie soundtrack. There are no vocals, just noise, hopefully noise that gets under the skin in the way I hope my horror stories do. As my horror stories also do, many of my ‘soundtracks’ ask questions that only this type of art can answer. Yes, it’s more journalistic, but not as journalistic as my poetry.
It’s an idea. It’s a concept. It’s the way I believe my world is shaped through the use of sound, and that hearing it could mold my reality into what I believe my reality is. It’s about hope through the sound of dystopia, and healing through the sound of dissonance.
It’s a layering of sounds that don’t necessarily go together, and the fact that sometimes they’re not supposed to.
When I was a kid, I used to dream of grabbing my guitar and my piano and my lyrics and making rock music. As I grew up, that dream was still a dream, but there was no way to make it a reality. Instead, I turned to my computer and said to myself, ‘Hm… I want to make music. How can I do what I want to do and still be able to do it?’
Electro-Industrial was my answer. You can grab whatever music app you enjoy, or can afford, and fool around with loops until you figure out how to change them, update them in your own way, or use the musical typing keyboard thing to create your own loops. It works because it was all I could do to create what I wanted. My music might not use my electric guitar, my piano, or my drumming capabilities, it might not use my lyrics or singing voice, but it still exists and it’s still my music.
Besides, when I look at my favorite music artists, like Android Lust and Angelspit, I can hear where I’m inspired. I can hear where my sound comes from when I listen to Aesthetic Perfection or Creature Feature. These might be projects that all use vocals, but as someone with no way to record vocals, the making of noise using loops, and distorting those loops, whether I created them or not, allows me to learn how to make my music the way I want to make it.
This way of music creation might not be what I dreamed of, but it’s actually better in a way. If I had grabbed my guitar, piano, drums, and voice, writing studio project after studio project, I probably wouldn’t have found the likes of God Mod or Hedvig Mollestad Trio or Mogwai, three projects who are known for doing more dystopic ‘ambient’ music — ambient because they tend not to have lyrics or words. God Mod, out of those three, is the most Electro-Industrial.
This way of music creation might not be what I dreamed of doing, but it fits more with who I am because it’s a sound that, much like my horror stories, is the best at getting under the skin. I want to make sounds that have people’s skin crawling, yet they need to hear more because it’s different enough to need to know the ending to.
Maybe someday I’ll make it to a recording studio, but, right now, this is who I am, and I love it.
