The Great Industrial Wheel

Two things are in collusion/collision. Ear Bitten has been reissued as a 2 LP set (including material from the Side 2 cassette). There is also word of a live music festival to take place mid next year with all the industrial bands you thought had died of old age. I’m not getting into details yet in case the whole thing gets canned. It’s 2024 and the Great Wheel is turning again.

What is happening?

The Dark Entries label has been keen on the first LP for some years and I have run out of excuses, threats and quibbles to thwart them. I’m not comfortable with the idea but it is going to happen sometime so that may as well be before I am senile. Ear Bitten comes into the world again.

The gig is a launch for a museum founded by the man behind Vinyl On Demand. He too has pressed various mutants of Ear Bitten over the years, but a museum is definitely a step up in historical worth. From what I know, none of the ‘Industrial’ heavy metal rock acts are included. Allow me a bit of snark – they took ‘industrial’ (a form of 70s folk music) and muscled it into something opposite. Well, now it gets taken back. I think.

Why does it matter?

There’s an opportunity to meet other musicians and thrash out the facts, cut the bullshit and make it the voice of people who were there at the time. I don’t know all these people, or haven’t seen them in a long time. Maybe there’s a dialogue that could be part of the museum’s collection. Or just playing live in the one event will start some friendships.

Of course the term ‘industrial’ is up for debate. I strongly associate it with the mid 70’s Midlands in the UK. I don’t see myself as ‘industrial’ but will just let other people have their say in where it starts and stops. I think we are included because of the Australian Inner City scene – which needs acknowledgement.

What to do?

We stopped playing live because it had run out of blood. I had prided myself on how hard we worked on each concert – new videos, new orchestration – only to be slagged off for being as stale as Kraftwerk. It was then interesting to make some live video broadcasts that included material we’d never been able to reproduce before stem separation and AI tools.

Now is the chance to revisit the very earliest material. There was a bit in the video broadcasts, but could we do Ear Bitten? Well, not without a wall of tape recorders – or some of the new boxes – the AKAI MPC, the Roland SP404 et al. They could be our tape recorders. It was once too late to make that noise, and then it was too early to make that noise … but now we can make that noise.

I think.