Fight Your Own War: Power Electronics and Noise Culture

By Jennifer Wallis

Power electronics is a genre of industrial or noise music that utilises feedback and synthesizers to produce an intense, loud, challenging sound. To match this sonic excess, power electronics also relies heavily upon extreme thematic and visual content whether in lyrics, album art, or live performance. The result is a violent, ecstatic, and potentially consciousness-altering spectacle, and a genre that often invites strong reactions from both listeners and critics. FIGHT YOUR OWN WAR is the first English-language book primarily devoted to power electronics. Written by artists, fans, and critics from around the world, its essays and reviews explore the current state of the genre, from early development through to live performance, listener experience, artist motivation, gender and subcultures such as Japanoise. In considering this spectacle of noise, how far can we simply label power electronics as a genre of shock tactics or of transgression for transgression's sake?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Headpress
• Release date: Sep 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781909394414

Book preview

truth…

INTRODUCTION

Jennifer Wallis

W ho the hell needs a book about power electronics? That was a question I was asked more than once while putting together the volume you now hold in your hands: who needed a book-length account of an apparently niche music scene when you could access countless blog posts and YouTube videos online? The idea that print has been made redundant by the internet is — as many contributors to this book emphasise — grossly simplistic, but there were other reasons for doing this besides the desire to produce a tangible physical thing. First and foremost, I’m a fan of power electronics. There’s nothing I find more calming than coming home to listen to a particularly nasty bit of Steel Hook Prostheses or Navicon Torture Technologies, or blocking out the noise of the office and the din of public transport with my own, harsher, noise.

A second reason, though, was that although power electronics is extensively documented in zine and web format, no book currently exists in the English language that deals with the genre. In consequence, accounts of it by many music writers and academics tend not to delve beyond surface appearances, or to actively seek the input of artists. Hence, the widespread view of power electronics as a group of (mostly male) socially unaware, jackbooted fascists with an unhealthy interest in death, murder, and sexual sadism. Of course a few of these do exist, in the same way that there are a few Marilyn Manson fans who take their MTV-friendly fascistic chic rather more seriously than most, but generalisation seems particularly rife when it comes to power electronics and its associated scenes. In The Lyre of Orpheus (2014), Christopher Partridge notes that the sense of ‘evil’ surrounding early industrial bands like Throbbing Gristle was imagined as a kind of polluting influence, tainting any other people or institutions with which the artists were involved, and the same is often true today in relation to power electronics and its fans.¹ Yet existing publications dealing with noise or power electronics rarely include the voices of artists or fans themselves. Does this matter? Do you need — as one friend challenged me — to speak to every actor and director to write about film? Considering that what power electronics is ‘about’ has been the preoccupation of so many writers and music journalists — Are they all just over-grown teenagers acting out to shock people, or should we be taking all that right-wing imagery and talk of butchering whores rather more seriously? — then I think it is important that those artist and fan perspectives are given broader coverage.

Of course, we can’t say that power electronics hasn’t brought this on itself. Marco Deplano, of Italian project Wertham, is critical of artists ‘who attempt to provoke extreme reactions by using dangerous topics and then … complain about negative reactions’.² The genre has made a career out of being as aggressive, disruptive, and confrontational as possible. At the same time it has made a virtue of its distraction tactics. This was evident from the earliest days of power electronics as soon as Whitehouse chose to name themselves after crusader against media ‘filth’ Mary Whitehouse (and a top-shelf magazine of the same name, itself a cheeky anti-tribute to poor old Mary). This refusal to present a clear line of argument, and the alignment of oneself with those you disagree with, clearly frustrates commentators who struggle to handle the genre’s ‘apparent glorification of anti-social behavior, pathology and the nihilistic fringe elements within post-industrial society’.³ One of the few academics writing excellent, informed, accounts of power electronics in recent years, Andrew Whelan, has noted that being offended seems to be the ‘default position’ when discussing the genre, and that many writers on power electronics ‘(mis)take aesthetics for politics, and politics for analysis’.⁴ The absurdist element of some noise and the adoption of personas — wearing masks, for example — immediately complicate the idea that if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck. Noise artist and owner of Swedish label Segerhuva, Tommy Carlsson, astutely observes that proclaiming the noise scene to be a cliché — obsessed with misogyny, violence etc. — has itself become a cliché.⁵ Certainly projects like Blackhouse — rhythmic industrial sound with a Christian message — give the lie to the idea that it’s all gratuitous sex and death.

It’s perhaps the ambiguousness of power electronics that is most threatening to its detractors. Whether your projected stance is ironic, deadly serious, or done for comedic effect, listeners are in the privileged position of being able to make of it what they will. This works both ways: you can dismiss the screaming wrath and dark aesthetics as nothing more than a vulgar burlesque, or take it at face value (or, like many fans, stand somewhere in between). However, as some of the chapters in this book suggest, it’s doubtful that power electronics poses the grave threat that critics often credit it with. ‘Transgression’ is not a permanent state, but a moment: a boundary is transgressed. Just as noise stops being ‘noise’ (i.e. unwanted) for some listeners,⁶ what is initially labelled as ‘transgression’ ceases to be so when it is repeatedly employed over a long period. Noise and power electronics also relies heavily on popular culture to inform its transgressions. It might be viewed as being somewhat obsessed with the mainstream, as one author suggested to me during the construction of this book, but in pursuing that ‘obsession’ power electronics secures a space for itself that ensures its exclusivity. No one is going to hear Iron Fist of the Sun or Deathpile in a shopping mall or a coffee shop, and thank god for that.

This book, then, collects together writings and reviews from a number of fans, critics, and artists themselves. The aim isn’t to present some grand theory about power electronics, to define it, or provide an answer to what it’s ‘doing’. It’s to bring together several voices to provide recent histories of the genre and snapshots of how people see it now, both positively and negatively. The definition of power electronics is broad, hence the recognition also of ‘noise’.⁷ While some readers will disagree with the inclusion of noise acts like The Bongoleeros, or the ‘Japanoise’ of Incapacitants, they appear here in reflection of the fact that many of us will listen to these other subgenres alongside power electronics, that they may share bills with power electronics artists, and that many artists themselves will cross these boundaries in their work.

The design of the book intentionally echoes that of zines, but unlike many traditional zines there is no united front or political position.⁸ The reader can dip in and out of the book as they wish, reading the chapters in any order. Part I: Scenes presents perspectives on the development of power electronics in the UK, Finland, Australia, and America from those who were — and are — there. Part II: Experience and Performance focuses on power electronics and noise as a live event, from pubs in the north of England to Japanese Live Houses. This section also considers what noise does for the performer and the listener, in terms of effects on the body, psychological release, and even spiritual experience. Throughout Parts I and II, most chapters are paired with a relevant review, and I recommend reading both together. Part III: Readings addresses some of the more contentious points surrounding power electronics: the difficulty of decoding its conflicting messages, its thematic and visual preoccupations, and its comedic potential.

As with any book dealing with music, there are gaps. As a snapshot rather than an encyclopedia, it has been impossible to cover everything and certain labels, acts, and individuals are conspicuous by their absence. The Grey Wolves are less prominent than they should be and artists like Mauthausen Orchestra and Le Syndicat are absent, as are recent key players such as Danish label Posh Isolation or UK-based Unrest Productions. Gaya Donadio, responsible for putting on a large number of gigs in and around London, has been a key figure in the scene — her efforts could easily fill a companion chapter to that by d foist on the Leeds Termite Club. Power electronics is a continually growing field (some view this in a critical light, with the ability to make and distribute music leading to a ridiculous amount of sometimes sub-standard material), and there are some recent arrivals to the scene worthy of special mention: the neatly-crafted fierceness of Am Not, for example, or American tape-based label Fieldwork.

There are no clear answers here as to what power electronics ‘is’ or what it stands for, and neither should there be. The book does not speak for the genre as a whole, but for those individual voices that are contained within it. Power electronics is, to me, less a ‘collective’ than a group of people using noise to articulate their own, often very personal, ideas and agendas. Some of the writers would, I’m sure, disagree with each other. Whilst I recognise the humour of some power electronics as articulated in Spencer Grady’s damning, hilarious, and wonderfully written account of power electronics as comedy, the strong misogynistic current that Sonia Dietrich describes in her piece is more alien to me — a disjuncture that serves to highlight the varied personal experiences and readings of power electronics. I’m fairly comfortable with power electronics’ controversies and contradictions, if not entirely uncritical of them. How far would ‘power electronics’ still be ‘power electronics’ if it was somehow sanitised and homogenised? It’s supposed to be challenging. Noise has been described by more than one author as both everything and nothing: it can carry excessive meaning or no meaning at all. It allows both the artist and the listener — paraphrasing Genocide Organ — to ‘Go your own way. Fight your own war.’

NOTES

1 Christopher Partridge, The Lyre of Orpheus: Popular Music, the Sacred, and the Profane (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), p.83.

2 ‘Wertham’, Noise Receptor Journal , 3 (2015), pages unnumbered.

3 Thomas Bey William Bailey, Micro-Bionic: Radical Electronic Music and Sound Art in the 21 st Century (London: Creation Books, 2009), p.31.

4 Andrew Whelan, ‘Power Electronics and Conventionally Transgressive Assembly Work’, in Scott Wilson (ed.), Music at the Extremes: Essays on Sounds Outside the Mainstream (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2015), p.63, p.67. Among these few academics I include Paul Hegarty, whose Noise/Music: A History (2007) should be read by everyone with even a passing interest in the genre.

5 ‘Treriksröset/Tommy Carlsson’, interview by Mikko Aspa, trans. Andrew MacIntosh, Special Interests , 6 (2011), p.7.

6 Paul Hegarty, ‘Brace and embrace: Masochism in noise performance’, in Marie Thompson and Ian Biddle (eds), Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p.133.

7 Paul Hegarty’s definition of power electronics: ‘initially (c.1980), it applies [ sic ] to music based on synths, electronic machinery, often with use of effects and samples, and connected to ‘extreme’ events, characters, obsessions.’ Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History (London: Continuum, 2007), p.121.

8 Some took the harking back to pre-digital days a little too seriously. This book would have included a piece by one of the members of Smell & Quim, were it not for the fact that he posted the sole — handwritten — copy of his chapter to me, which was promptly lost in the post.

THE GENESIS OF POWER ELECTRONICS IN THE UK

Philip Taylor

The shock of the new. Since the beginning of the twentieth century art has reflected radical changes in individual perspectives of the world we live in. Various movements have embodied the views of the few who have railed against the times and looked to the future, who have been perceived as both innovators and enfants terribles . There is a clear interconnection between the history of modern art and contemporaneous music and sound. The genesis and development of power electronics perfectly embodies this in terms of sound creation, ideas, and performance. Sometimes this is transparent, at other points latent.

Futurism, the brainchild of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, was the first European avant-garde movement, its manifesto being published in 1909. The name of the movement defined its raison d’être as one of industrial and technological progress. It encapsulated a range of art forms, but in Futurist music we have the origins of experimental music and in Luigi Russolo’s Art of Noises (1913) the forerunner of sound manipulation. Russolo effectively proposes a musical revolution: ‘Today music, as it becomes continually more complicated, strives to amalgamate the most dissonant, strange and harsh sounds. In this way we come ever closer to noise-sound.’¹

In England a year later Wyndham Lewis founded the Vorticist Group, with the aesthetic rationale, ‘The New Vortex plunges to the heart of the Present — we produce a New Living Abstraction’. The group was a true expression of the modern, intended to promote the dynamic modern world. There were two issues of a magazine, Blast, published in 1914 and 1915, with the first containing long lists of things to be ‘blessed’ or ‘blasted’. The group wanted to destroy everything that stood in its way of representing the new, the modern:

It was the only bona fide, manifesto-waving modern art movement to have originated in these islands. Vorticism united artists and writers in a headily arrogant amalgam of jagged angles, primitive forms and polemical phrasemaking that booted aside the genteel experiments of the Bloomsbury group and gave Britain an honoured place on the Modernist stage.²

Some have argued that both Futurism and Vorticism pre-figure fascism. This takes on particular resonance when we come to consider UK power electronics of the 1980s, and we have to reference these antecedents in order to appreciate and fully comprehend the creation and development of the power electronics genre. The Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, for example, founded in 1916, included various manifestations of Dadaism, both of art and performance. It was a revolution in art that offered a different vision of the world. Its provocative stance was a fundamental influence on future manifestations of modern art — one thinks particularly of its anti-art philosophy and its inception of sound poetry. The other pre-WWII phenomenon worthy of note is The Theatre of Cruelty, the vision of Antonin Artaud. He formulated his concept between 1931 and 1936, his avowed aim to shock the audiences’ senses by means of violent and confrontational images, piercing sound, and bright stage lights. In using violent and terrifying actions and images, Artaud desired to challenge the way people perceived the world.

For me, it was the activities in the art world of the 1960s that had the most profound influence on the UK power electronics scene of the 1980s. Performance Art or Body Art, which included Fluxus and Viennese Actionism, was perhaps the most thought provoking, exciting, and visceral of all twentieth-century art forms. It was a direct challenge to the senses, and concurrently compelled a direct examination of the human condition. It engendered social and political content in an artistic form. It continued those performance aspects of Futurism and Dadaism, but in much more provocative ways. The art was what the artist created via the medium of their own body when an action or series of actions were performed. Audiences could expect to be challenged and provoked, the ‘art’ often proving an unpleasant or uncomfortable experience.

The Fluxus Group, founded in 1960 by George Maciunas, aimed ‘to promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art’.³ Its activities mainly consisted of performances and organised events. The participants existed outside organised art and in consequence had a great impact on expanding the nature of art and what art was. This was the revolution that Maciunas sought to achieve.

Similarly, Wiener Aktionismus, or Viennese Actionism, spanned the years 1960 to 1971; its principal participants were Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Its deliberately shocking performances were intended to highlight the endemic violence of humanity. They wanted to trigger a reaction from the audience. Their actions, usually filmed and photographed, involved such things as self-mutilation, dead animals, blood, organs, public defecation, and masturbation, posing the question: What was taboo? In 1962 Muehl said that: ‘The aesthetics of the dung heap are the moral means against conformism, materialism and stupidity.’⁴ He also stated that he sought to confound the spectator.

THE MONSTER IS CREATED

Art’s progress can be likened to an army of artists marching on a broad front together, against art’s eternal opposition — our continuing capacity to be insensitive, ignorant, narrow-mindedly materialistic, defeatist and joyless. Its avant-garde is at the extreme right-hand end of its line (or to the left, depending on your politics) darting out to irritate the opposition as the massed ranks of art slowly move forward.⁵

The late 1970s, and the following decade, was a bleak period in British social history. This was the era of Conservative rule under Margaret Thatcher, whose politics espoused divide and rule. There was a concerted effort to destroy the unions, write people off, sacrifice communities, and inflict austerity on the population. Add to this the AIDs epidemic and the video nasties witch-hunt, and all in all the period was one of bleakness and vitriol.

Whitehouse were formed in 1980 by William Bennett, their name derived from the David Sullivan softcore magazine and the surname of Christian crusader against ‘filth’ in the media, Mary Whitehouse — a juxtaposition that suggests to me there was always a black comedic edge to power electronics. In the liner notes to Cream of the Second Coming (Susan Lawly, 1990), Bennett describes the formation of the group:

While I was playing guitar up on stage with Essential Logic as an 18-year-old back in 1978, I often phantasised [sic] about creating a sound that could bludgeon an audience into submission.

At that time Essential Logic toured with Daniel Miller and Robert Rental with whom I became friends. Daniel inspired and helped me to do it while Robert sold me an uncontrollably vicious beast of a synthesiser which subsequently became the heart of the Whitehouse sound.

It took two albums of experimentation before the purest sound of power electronics would be defined by Erector…

The monster had been created — a living entity with a volition and direction of its own. On stage the sound was an extremely violent aural celebration.

The term ‘power electronics’ was first used on the sleeve notes to Whitehouse release Psychopathia Sexualis (Come Organisation, 1982), although in passing and not as a purposeful definition of a new genre of electronic sound. But it was new, and ‘power electronics’ seemed very appropriate for this brutist, confrontational, ugly, innovative sound.

What is this sound? Bennett employed the EDP Wasp synthesiser to create a noise of ear-splittingly high frequencies and combined this with indecipherable screamed vocal tirades (although the vocals became decipherable by the time of ninth studio album Great White Death in 1985). The overall feeling was one of extreme violence and total aggression, reflected in the concentration on serial killers and transgressive human practices, and use of startling imagery. The stark black and white presentation of each album enhanced the challenging nature of the content. It grabbed your attention whilst the sound enveloped you with a cacophonous grip.

The group comprised various members throughout its lifetime and most of Bennett’s collaborators pursued their own musical explorations after (or before) their involvement in the group — Steven Stapleton, Glenn Michael Wallis, John Murphy, Kevin Tomkins, Philip Best, Stefan Jaworzyn and Andrew McKenzie being some of the most notable British artists. Some contributed to the releases, others to the Live Actions — one of Whitehouse’s most notorious collaborators was writer Peter Sotos, who performed with the band in the 1980s. Whitehouse performed their first Live Action in 1982 at the Whisky-A-Go-Go in London (the majority of UK shows were in London in the 1980s, with the exception of two, one in Birmingham, the other in Newcastle). It was in the live context that the Whitehouse phenomenon was fully realised. The audience was there to witness a true performance, to be overwhelmed by violent sounds and provocative acts. The band was controversial from the start, eliciting complaints about their publicity, and there were frequent violent interludes at the shows (I didn’t witness them live until the 1990s but without fail there would be bottles flying through the air).

BUILDING A NETWORK

Whitehouse weren’t the only ones operating in this area in the eighties. Prior to his involvement with Whitehouse the teenaged Philip Best was making music as Consumer Electronics; had created his own label, Iphar, which released his own work together with some extreme electronic compilations and other bands on cassette; collaborated with Gary Mundy of Ramleh as Male Rape Group for the Iphar/Broken Flag release On To 83, and published five issues of a magazine, Intolerance. Cassettes and print magazines were crucial to the development of power electronics in the 1980s. The cassette was cheap to buy, light and small: very portable and a perfect way for musicians to deliver their work to the public by mail. It encouraged a do-it-yourself movement, rejecting corporate labels. Musicians could trade their work and individuals set up their own truly independent labels (such as Snatch Tapes, Artaman, Sterile, Third Mind, and Mindscan).

Contemporaneous to this the use of the copy machine became widespread, fostering the fanzine culture begun by the earlier punk movement. Bennett’s Come Org had been set up prior to the formation of Whitehouse as a radical libertarian collective, with a house magazine lasting for twenty issues, the Kata, which served as a forum for ideas, images, reviews, and information. Amongst the magazines available in the 1980s were Flow Motion, Interchange, Control, Tone Death, Grok, and Adventures in Reality. The greatest advantage of such publications was the dissemination of information: they were a gold mine for contact details, so a person could order and start up correspondence with the label or artist they desired. Networking by mail and word of mouth was a fact of life. If you wanted to know more you had to make the effort.

One of the acts most closely associated with Come Org was Sutcliffe Jugend, formed by Kevin Tomkins in 1982. Sutcliffe Jugend had three cassette releases on Come Org, which included the infamous We Spit On Their Graves (1982), spread across ten cassettes, each dedicated to a different victim of Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe. Sutcliffe Jugend are commonly regarded as the most vicious sounding of the power electronics units and theirs is a truly unrelentingly nasty sensory attack.

Ramleh (the name of the prison where Adolf Eichmann was executed and also a battle in the Crusades) were formed by Gary Mundy in 1982 shortly after Mundy had witnessed the first Whitehouse Live Action. At the same time he began his label Broken Flag (from a song title by Patti Smith), which predominantly released cassettes. Among these was Mark Durgan’s Putrefier, begun in 1986, which had its first cassette release on Broken Flag in 1987. (Durgan commenced his own label, Birthbiter Records, which featured the early work of Anthony Di Franco as Ethnic Acid and Matthew Bower as Pure.) Mundy also published label magazines starting with KKK (King, Krown and Kountry — six issues). There followed Farben (two issues) and Even When It Makes No Sense (two issues). All contained a mixture of texts, articles, collages, and statements.

This melding of music and manifesto could be seen elsewhere too, most clearly in The New Blockaders (Philip and Richard Rupenus), who did not perform power electronics but were deeply influential for future noise artists. Unlike many of the bands mentioned in this piece, The New Blockaders were from Newcastle and not the south of England (my own personal vantage point on the unfolding scene being the West Midlands). The New Blockaders issued a manifesto in 1982:

Blockade is resistance… It is our duty to blockade and induce others to blockade… Anti-music, anti-art, anti-books, anti-films, anti-communications… We will make anti-statements about anything and everything… We will make a point of being pointless… It is time for change… We are The Modern Alchemists… The obscure progression of regression shall be halted by us, The New Blockaders… This is the future! This is now! Move over you museum relics! … Avaunt! Avaunt! Avaunt! The Church of The Absurd marches on! … We are the adverts that mean nothing, we are the speakers who say nothing, we are the fighters who do not fight, we are the creators who destroy.⁶

They were standalone figures, nihilists through sound, hooded arbiters, anti-art artists, touched by the art of the Futurists and Dadaists.

A KICK IN THE TEETH

Power electronics was something new and necessary in bleak times for both music and society. Deliberately provocative, confrontational and controversial, it could produce violent emotional reactions, positive and negative, but above all it made people think. The Ramleh sound, for example, was raw, abrasive, headache-inducing noise with indecipherable vocals — more primal and more chaotic than Whitehouse, but no less powerful. In a postal interview with me carried out for Grim Humour magazine in 1991/1992, Mundy was instructive about the aims and intent of Ramleh, and I think these can be applied to the era more broadly:

I just wanted to give music a kick in the teeth … I saw no united front … although we shared the same audience … we were interested in fear and terror and used the things that disturbed us to influence the mood of the listener … we enjoyed getting up people’s noses and found it amusing to be accused of things which were simply untrue … there was certainly no movement of any kind … the kind of organisations we were accused of supporting would certainly never tolerate the kind of people we really are…⁷

In the West Midlands Mike Dando’s Con-Dom (Control-Domination) became active in 1983, with his first Live Assault taking place the same year in Wolverhampton. Con-Dom was different to other power electronics performers, both in terms of subject matter and live experience. His focus was much more social commentary-oriented and his performances incredibly physical, often involving direct contact with his audience:

Confrontation is the chosen method of education. Con-Dom generates brutality, pain, fear, hate (the instruments of control), so that the existence of the forces of control may be acutely felt, experienced and recognised. The aim is to provoke resentment/confusion/ambivalence, to upset and challenge conditioned expectation, to shatter preconceptions. … Con-Dom is neither music nor art, film or theatre. It is all of these things. It is none of them… Con-Dom is a multi-media operation. Visual and performance elements are key pieces of the overall Con-Dom jigsaw, alongside the sound component. The total experience is only possible in a live setting… The idea of ‘musical sound’ taken to its ultimate extreme — pure noise; the idea of an extreme, pure vehicle for ‘extreme’ pure ideas… Con-Dom will always have violent sound at its core.⁸

Such confrontational performances generated controversy as the subject matter — racial politics, for example — and the way in which it was delivered led to accusations of bigotry. Slipshod opinions were rife, as critics concentrated on surface appearances rather than truly engaging with the topics at hand and taking time to think things over. Convenient labels were attached to the genre based on existing prejudices and an unwillingness to take on board difficult and challenging subjects, a task made more difficult for many people due to their inability to respond to what was regarded as non-music.

Closely linked to Con-Dom through releases (particularly those via Justin K. Broadrick’s Post Mortem Recordings label) and live performances, The Grey Wolves were also subject to equally trite and lazy labelling. The Grey Wolves (the name of a Turkish nationalist organisation) were formed by Dave Padbury and Trevor Ward in 1985. Apart from producing music and running a cassette label, they also created The Cultural Terrorist Manifesto, which stated:

Cultural terrorism, an attitude, a state of mind — not a set of values to be dogmatically followed. Cultural terrorism is a celebration of the power of the individual… Our aim is to pollute the minds of the public, to sow the seeds of insanity into society. Our victims are of all ages … cultural terrorism is in the business of providing a reality attack… The cultural terrorist’s weapons are anything that enables him to inflict his views upon others… We are little concerned how violent, how perverted, how degenerate, how much our material appeals to the very lowest of emotions… We believe nothing is impossible, there is no god, there is no morality so we manipulate our environment to its fullest extent… The cultural terrorist is involved in an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhuman world… No subject should be taboo… Gladly we take part in the information/disinformation war in a fearless way… Always the fight against those who would control our minds and our bodies.⁹

The music and ideas were diametrically linked and again controversy ensued — controversy entirely in keeping with power electronics’ professed aims. Power electronics is a deliberately violent sound form, its intention to attack the senses in order to stimulate a response. Some of the most intense music ever created.

NOTES

1 Available online at http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/noises.html

2 Mark Hudson, ‘The Vorticists: Manifesto for