It’s the seventh episode of We Have a Technical, and our first interview! In this episode we speak to Alex Reed, author of the awesome Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music and of the band Seeming who will be gracing the I Die: You Die stage at next year’s Festival Kinetik! It’s a hella deep episode with lots to consider, and if you haven’t purchased the book yet (and really, if you have an inteterest in industrial it should be a no-brainer) it’ll hopefully inspire you to do so. Download directly from right here, subscribe via iTunes or stream from the widget below!

Annotations:
00:00: As with every week, our theme music is “Black Cross (Dead When I Found Her Remix)” by ∆AIMON, available from Artoffact records.
01:34: ThouShaltNot released a boat-load of cross-genre albums in the oughts. Early in their blogging careers, Bruce and Alex used their lounge cover of “Headhunter” as a rhetorical football.
02:12: Industrial peeps have been groaning over the “what is industrial?” question since time immemorial.
03:50: Check Alex’s CV for more of his work, including a forthcoming book on They Might Be Giants’ Flood which we failed to mention. We were young and foolish then; we feel old and foolish now.
04:07: Lena, Jennifer and Richard A. Peterson. “Classification as Culture: Types and Trajectories of Music Genres.” American Sociological Review. Vol. 73 (5): 697-718.
05:13: We endorse checking Twenty Jazz Funk Greats, Wreckers Of Civilisation, England’s Hidden Reverse, and Industrial Culture Handbook.
06:42: Bruce bought Industrial Evolution: Through The Eighties With Cabaret Voltaire for a friend but has never read it.
08:30: We should really write some more stuff about Spartak.
11:32: Thomas Leer merits your attention.
12:29: “Is It Industrial?“, a discussion which will not be replacing “Will It Float?” any time soon in broader circles of discourse.
13:07: If you’re unfamiliar, you really should be looking into classic techno act Cybotron.
13:48: “Where be your gibes now, Anything Box?”
23:55: Bruce tends to ramble when he gets onto N. Katherine Hayles and Julia Kristeva territory.
26:12: Oh, brown note. So much has been hypothesized, but so few have experienced your robust, earthy tone.
27:58: There was a rumor for many years that the cover of Tyranny For You was a drowning swimmer. Not so, as explained in this interview.
28:16: Jürgen Engler: OG Iron Man.
28:29: Merleau-Ponty was asking “isn’t it funny how your body works” years before Douglas McCarthy.
30:26: We remember trading VHS tapes and CD-Rs via snail mail to see the “Worlock” video. No such pains for today’s generation of Puppy fans.
34:40: “Show us how you do it here, Brussels!”

41:29: Daniel B is a smart cat.
51:18: Would Adorno have dug à;GRUMH…? You be the judge!
55:02: Fektion Fekler’s first album is pretty dope. Another Pendragon Records classic.
55:24: The MMT-8 is a charming sequencer, primitive by today’s standards but still pretty awesome at what it does.
64:51: *Front Line Assembly, not 242. Apologies to Gary Levermore of Third Mind.
65:21: Seeming’s debut album Madness & Extinction will be released in 2014 by Artoffact records.
70:02: Hell of Drowned World feels on the Seeming record, folks.
73:06: Catch up with Snog via Alex’s review of the recent Babes In Consumerland.
74:39: Our sincere apologies also for the audio drop-out repetition! Alex was very tired when he comped this together.
Thanks for listening! If you enjoy the show, give us a rating on iTunes or drop us a note at contact@idieyoudie.com!