industrial music

Encyclopedia

industrial music

dissonant electronic music that arose in the late 1970s in response to punk rock. Coined by British postpunk experimentalists Throbbing Gristle, the term industrial simultaneously evoked the genre's bleak, dystopian worldview and its harsh, assaultive sound ("muzak for the death factories," as Throbbing Gristle put it). Believing that punk's revolution could be realized only by severing its roots in traditional rock, industrial bands deployed noise, electronics, hypnotic machine rhythms, and tape loops. Instead of rallying youth behind political slogans, industrial artists preferred to "decondition" the individual listener by confronting taboos. Key literary influences were J.G. Ballard's anatomies of aberrant sexuality and the paranoid visions and "cut-up" collage techniques of William S. Burroughs

Learn more about industrial music with a free trial on Britannica.com.

Encyclopedia Britannica, 2008. Encyclopedia Britannica Online.
Cite This Source
Explore Dictionary.com
Previous Definition: industrial misconduct
Next Definition: industrial park
Words Near: industrial music
More from Thesaurus.com
Synonyms and Antonyms for industrial music
More from Reference.com
Search for articles containing industrial music
00:10
Industrial music is always a great word to know.
So is interrobang. Does it mean:
a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question.
a screen or mat covered with a dark material for shielding a camera lens from excess light or glare.
Dictionary.com Word FAQs

Dictionary.com presents 366 FAQs, incorporating some of the frequently asked questions from the past with newer queries.

Copyright © 2013 Dictionary.com, LLC. All rights reserved.
  • Please Login or Sign Up to use the Recent Searches feature
FAVORITES
RECENT