Seth Price
Industrial Fist
(free103point9 AD 13 CD)
Reviewed by Neil Strauss
03.01.04, The New York Times

With scores of obscure post-punk reissues flooding stores, it seems likely that its successors — industrial, new beat, electronic beat music — will be swept up next in the march of nostalgia and archival interest. Seth Price's compilation Industrial Fist (free103point9) paves the way with a mix of hard-clanging electro-funk from the mid-1980's (most of it from the Wax Trax and Nettwerk labels). The music of Front 242, the Revolting Cocks, Controlled Bleeding and Skinny Puppy pounds with venom, assuming its rightful place in white-person dance history as the chronological bridge between post-punk and techno.

Like Mr. Price's other compilations — one of new jack swing, one of video-game music — Industrial Fist is short on liner notes, song titles and explanatory information but long on musical intelligence. It's available at www.free103point9.org.




Seth Price
Industrial Fist
Reviewed by David Stubbs
May, 2004, The Wire

Industrial Fist 1983-87 (Dispatch Series 013 CD) is released by free103point9, a non-profit making media arts organisation especially interested in artists who “explore ideas around transmission as a medium for creative expression”. While one ponders what kind of creative expression would involve non- transmission and narrows the eyes at the high arthouse varnish applied to what is essentially a mixtape-style segue of 80s Industrial Techno groups, Industrial Fist is nonetheless highly listenable.

Remixer Seth Price visits here a once potent 80s genre of electronic music – included here are reworkings of Front 242, Frontline Assembly, Ministry, Skinny Puppy and Revolting Cocks, among others. These groups were highly divergent – Revolting Cocks reveled in moral squalor but as “Union Carbide” (remixed here), a brutalist paean to the 1984 Bhopal disaster indicates, there was a political component to their luridness. Canada’s Skinny Puppy were adamant anti- vivisectionist and their music was almost an act of sonic empathy for the anguish of wretched creatures tortured with electrodes in labs. Price, however, takes the common elements of these Industrialists – martial, gravel-scrunching rhythms and a Gothically foreboding air – and assembles a musical beast of his own from the cyberflesh and metal beats. Industrial Fist makes for an intriguing reminder of the former state of electronica. Back in the 80s, electronic music still carried with it the suggested threat of imminent totalitarianism and annihilation, which many still feared the future had in store. Today’s laptopia is relatively benign and at ease with itself and the world by comparison. Moreover, much as in The Terminator movies, Industrial Goth is an equivalent to Arnie’s original T-800 model, stocky and initially invincible-seeming but superseded by a more liquid, morphing, upgraded version in subsequent decades. Still, the old school retains something lacking in the new.

(DS)



Seth Price
Industrial Fist
Reviewed by Charles Van de Kree
04.04, Aural Innovations

The 80s certainly produced its share of egregious music, but it also gave us a few innovative artists whose influence is only now being felt in genres as far apart as black metal, trip hop and space rock. Seth Price’s belated compilation — aptly titled Industrial Fist — encapsulates some of the seminal groups who blazed fiery paths through the murk and monotony of the post-punk new wave landscape. And Industrial Fist certainly packs a lethal punch, especially considering the impressive names anthologized here, including Skinny Puppy, Ministry, Front 242, Frontline Assembly, and Controlled Bleeding. There are no liner notes, song title listings or any information at all to celebrate the not insignificant accomplishments of the artists included in this 50 minute encomium to the 80s killing floor that today has given way, sadly, to a host of insipid DJs and samplists. On the other hand, such artful anonymity seems entirely appropriate for groups who championed the marriage of man and machine and the eventual dissolution of the individual as a viable instrument for the expression of musical data. If such skeletal packaging is an annoyance to some, it’s probably the only complaint you’ll have about this brisk and brusque collection of industrial electro-dance fistfuck anthems. Everything is here that you’d expect: the malevolent guitar-meets-machine rock of Ministry; the merciless electrorhythmic venom of Skinny Puppy; and the menacing sequencer-driven futurism of Front Line Assembly. More than just a molten blast from the past, Industrial Fist is a prescient reminder that we’re still living — and dying — in the furnace of the post-industrial revolution.