I invented industrial music, with Xavier, in 1998, when we recorded "Towers, Open Fire", entirely improvised, on a bored afternoon, with two children's keyboards connected to a primitive mixing desk that allowed to lower the pitch of the sound, which gave it a very metallic sound. I had copied at the very beginning of the tape a passage from Burroughs, read by himself, that I had recorded on the radio:
"Pilot K9, you are cut off — back. Back. Back before the whole fucking shit house goes up — Return to base immediately — Ride music beam back to base — Stay out of that time flak — All pilots ride Pan pipes back to base"
The cover that Xavier designed afterwards (or was it me? it doesn't matter) was a collage, and all our later demos under the name of Fervex were to use a rather similar formula: messy keyboard noise, some silly lyrics, more or less humorous, referring to totalitarianism, and covers showing collages that used media figures (Kate Moss), to the world of technology and work (workers on an assembly line), to popular resistance (I don't remember what revolt in South America)... The titles of the songs referred to computers, nuclear war, surveillance. In short, all the Burroughsian and industrial mythology a la Throbbing Gristle was there, even though I had never heard of them or of industrial music in my life. It was a total coincidence.
In the same way, still with Fervex, by pushing my sound experimentation a bit far, by recording parasites on an empty radio frequency, by getting a high and strident sound from my little keyboard connected to the mixing desk, by whispering sinister things into the microphone, I almost made Whitehouse. So I am also the inventor, in 1998, of the Power Electronics.
And of course, Xavier and I invented what is now called Dungeon Synth.
Our first pieces in this style date back to 1994, 1995 – we were still in high school. Xavier recorded with a primitive sequencer and a Soundblaster, on his father's Windows 3.1, some medievalist pieces in General MIDI. As for me, I had rented keyboards with which I had recorded tracks of the same type, repetitive, minimalist, dark; in both cases it was a primitive, broke, teenage version of Dead Can Dance of which we were fans, and very influenced by video game music. We had never heard of Mortiis, Wongraven or Summoning at that point. And when Metallian magazine allowed us to discover all these bands, they made us crazy with excitement; not because we discovered something radically new, but because these bands were realizing our fantasies, they were proving to us that what we had imagined all alone, in the depths of our small provincial town, also existed outside of us, that we were not entirely alone.
So Xavier and I invented, all by ourselves, in our teenage bedrooms, a good part of the musical styles that we would listen to in the following years.
I say this knowing that it is an absurd claim, laughable, and I am joking in a way; and at the same time I say it quite seriously. These musical genres exist from all eternity, in the sky of ideas. We discovered them by ourselves, without knowing that others had preceded us. We didn't jump on any bandwagon; our own experiments coincided with the history of music around us.
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The consequence of all this, which I really realize, literally decades later, is that I don't need any outside influence, musically speaking. As for Xavier, he knows absolutely nothing about the current scene (or current scenes in general, for that matter) and he is right to have no curiosity about them.
We don't need any outside influence. We don't need to be part of any scene.
On the contrary, we need to free ourselves more and more from the stylistic and thematic conventions that mark the musical environments we have known in our lives, whatever they may be.
The themes, the texts, the images that accompany our music must become ever more personal, ever more "idiotic". As if we were exactly alone in the world.
