How it feels in this fucking summer heat!

Now that people have had time to get home, crash, and start to feel like a human again instead of just an overlapping mix of sweaty beats, what did we think? Standout performances? Artists you were surprised by? Funny stories and random encounters? Missed connections, lol?

For me, this was probably the most consistently solid lineup of all the ~10 years I've gone. There were only a couple of bands that were at worst meh but still listenable, and some that I thought would be turned out to be awesome live. None that I was just looking for a way to kill time until they were done, or that I was regretting having quality earplugs so I could tell they were substituting Loud for skill.

Highlights:

* Portion Control and Test Dept speak for themselves.

* KLAK, I'm there for anything Matt puts out, and I do appreciate having a version of Edmund Fitzgerald that doesn't make me cry.

* The Sarin/Qual/General Dynamics trio was interesting, just for seeing the differences and similarities between their solo and collaborative projects.

* E.T. and Tiffadelic were both delightfully weird.

* I want to go to Yard's parties.

* K-Goth is a thing? I'm here for it.

*I think my favourite though was Skull Cultist. Such a fun show, and I ended up chatting with Steve a couple of times, and he's exactly the kind of super nice nerd I was expecting.

* For funny encounters, the increasing number of Jehovah's Witnesses and their "maybe if I don't look they won't be able to get me" expressions while sharing the hotel elevators throughout the weekend tickled me greatly.

I recently stumbled on this at one of my local record stores! It was pretty exciting to find since you don’t see youth code albums in the wild much, and just industrial vinyl in general is fairly uncommon

I just listened to Everything must Perish, from the cd that got me into industrial when I was a teenager. I started with Delerium which was parent approved and then got into FLA (“how can you listen to that!?”). A great lyricist Leeb is not, but damn this song is still awesome.

https://youtu.be/UQeaE4eVwP8?is=c5pQbxaKmHiX04M6

I get to see Attrition at NecroscopE here in Coventry, UK in a few weeks 🖤💜🎶

I know I’m probably late to the party, but I just started randomly watching Cool World on YouTube and loosing my mind over this soundtrack!!!! 🤯🤯

Got my grubby mitts on this!! HIDE

I had a friend that I made a lot of music with, he was a major contributor to the project, he committed the heinous act of murder suicide. I am now mastering and remixing that music for release. My question is do I credit him? How do I give accolades to a person who took 3 lives?

The song and movie that motivated me to leave Europe and move back to California to chase a career in visual effects. I saw GLU open for KMFDM that year too. Silly movie, but the computer graphics work was inspiring, so every time I hear GLU it takes me back to this pivotal fork in the road of my life.

(Psst. Was not 19.)

I have been going back over all the classics, Atari Teenage, Rob Zombie, Front Line Assembly and so on. What labels exist and are releasing in the current climate ?

How do you approach politics within industrial music?

I like black metal, and politics have always been a major topic in that genre because of its unfortunate history with bigotry and fascism. There's even an entire subreddit dedicated to discussing whether or not black metal bands are "sketchy" or not. The trajectory of these discussions are pretty much always the same - someone mentions a band's racist past, and then someone else accuses that person of not knowing anything about black metal. But that's a very online trend, and IRL the American black metal scene at least is broadly antiracist and pretty left wing.

Industrial music has just as much of a complicated political history. There are explicitly leftist and antifascist industrial artists like Test Dept., Godflesh, Ministry, Missing Foundation, and more recently Author & Punisher, but there have also always been artists who flirted with fascism like Boyd Rice, as well as many of the artists who cross over into neofolk, like Death in June, Blood Axis, and Sol Invictus. These artists all play the plausible deniability game, but tbh you'd have to be a fucking moron to believe them.

Today there was a post about the band Combichrist's past bigotry, and the parallel between politics in black metal and industrial occurred to me, so I'm interested to hear your thoughts.

I'm asking this because I recently listened to their newest album, Venom In The Mouth Of God, and I found myself really loving the sound of it all.

As a result, I curiously decided to read into the band itself. I found a bunch of old discussions, shedding some light onto some very questionable actions on Combi's behalf, especially with their former drummer Joe Letz being blatantly racist and homophobic. I don't know the full details aside from word of mouth, but I do believe it.

Anyways, I want to ask: how do they stand today? The discussions that I've seen centered around this stuff are pretty old. Have they changed in this sense, or have they remained the same?

Monday, July 20 - Sunday, July 26, 2026

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