Ingram tears into Industrial Culture. Cos K-Punk are revisiting Whitehouse.

In a sense he is covering similar ground to that trodden on at uncarved.org:

Rants on Peter Sotos and The Church of Satan, plus reviews of Esoterra and Compulsion.

Industrial Culture is a fond part of my past, but it’s impossible to remain uncritical of it. Many of the points Matt raises are bang on, but I can’t feel that he is approaching it as an outsider and therefore tarring everyone with a big sticky black brush.

So for example it’s obviously fine to say that he has never got into any of the music, because in many cases the whole point was the mythology behind the music anyway. The fetishisn of owning rare records and knowing that a certain LP was recorded down a haunted mineshaft in siberia or whatever.

It’s also correct to be critical of the unrelenting bleakness of it all. Like a lot of people I’ve always seen this as a very superficial take on Throbbing Gristle, the godfathers. It’s true to say that TG were bleak and looked into stuff like murder, mayhem and so on, but they were much more than that. Similarly, their music cannot be dismissed as being distortion and shouting.

But those that followed often picked up on some of the very linear and one dimensional aspects of what TG were doing. Whitehouse are probably the best and most successful example of this.

That said, the value of Whitehouse lies in their extremity – as representing a pole of sheer over the top hatred and ugliness (an all out attack on liberal values). But that doesn’t mean you have to listen to it more than once, or even spend very much time thinking about it.

More later.