Industrial music at this point is all-too-often looped electronic beats and sampled generic guitar riffs; the bands are fronted by failed metal singers or girls who look like they got lost at a rave. They perform in darkened rooms filled with acrid smoke while disinterested bartenders sell overpriced, syrupy concoctions with names like Vampire Tears to people who watched The Crow way too many times.
This isn’t to say that it’s all bad, but it ignores the fact that when the pioneers were merging progressive rock with electronic noise, it was genuinely interesting and a little dangerous. You can say the same thing about a lot of genres such as punk or even rock music as a whole, but it seems that few people recall how confrontational the early groups were. Even the names were shocking: Throbbing Gristle! Nurse with Wound! Einstürzende Neubauten!
Kris Lapke remembers. He has come to prominence instilling that sense of foreboding producing the likes of Prurient, whose compositions are so bleak that black metallers thought they were the target audience, as well as the dark, ambient drone of Haxan Cloak.
He revived the Alberich moniker for the first full-length release since 2011’s Psychology of Love. Quantized Angel is a throwback to the formative years of industrial music. It’s updated for modern times by sticking to digital and more traditional musical instruments—he’s not banging on cans or breaking wine bottles on old car radiators, the kind of stuff that gave the genre its name originally—but the result is avant garde, minimalistic, and genuinely disconcerting.
There are some pretty moments—the shimmering waves of synths that myopically flow for the entire three minutes of “No Reference to the Absence of Allegory” stands out—but the majority of the record sounds more at home on a dystopian landscape than a dance hall. “Upper Mountains” is waves of sound that get more ominous as the track goes along; “Escape” is a staccato nightmare of percussive minimalism; the title track is what dub might sound like in an alternate universe where there is no light.
“Unity House” comes closest to what might be deemed danceable, if one can dance to pummeling static while distorted, conspiratorial whispers assault the senses. “Chilsong Chamber” scratches like an old hip-hop producer and seems genuinely bouncy. But those are the exceptions.
The album closes with “Radio Op.” It lasts ten-and-a-half minutes, over a quarter of Quantized Angel’s entire length. It seems to fulfill Lapke’s desire to merge the calm and the clamor into a movement that seems like modern classical music, which would go back even further to the first music ever to be deemed industrial, Shostakovich’s second symphony from 1927.
Shostakovich would go on to call that symphony “completely unsatisfactory” and write off this experimentation as “erroneous striving after originality.” It’s a safe bet that Lapke will never look at Quantized Angel with such disdain, even if you can’t really dance to it.
