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Industrial Soundtrack for the Urban Decay | Dir. Amélie Ravalec & Travis Collins
“It is a result of our life experiences, of the sounds that you hear that express how you feel”, Cosey Fanni Tutti of Throbbing Gristle, a formative group in the growth of the Industrial music movement explains.
The compressed trailer for this film of 52 minutes, directed by Amélie Ravalec and Travis Collins promises to span the length of breadth of Industrial music, claiming its origins of discontentment arising in 1914, through to Dadaism in Switzerland, The Beat Generation, all the way to the 21st Century to popular culture through the soundtrack of unforgettable films, such as Sin City.
“Industrial music came from that DIY ethos”, as does the aesthetic of this documentary with scene after scene relentlessly slammed into one another, with not always crystal clear sound bites from interviewees, and harsh colour contrasts.
Industrial Soundtrack for the Urban Decay provides an overview of the circumstances that gave rise to this music movement, labour intensive factory and steel works in the northern English cities, and influential literature including J.G.Ballard’s Crash. So sweeping is this overview that the likes of David Bowie (who is featured through archive performance footage for all of two seconds), is seen but not discussed, nor Human League, nor other greats, though Velvet Underground are name dropped but not extrapolated upon.
This is not an informative documentary - but rather a frenzied, schizophrenic overload of self affirming opinions from a small corner of the movement in which all interviewees, Boyd Rice of Non, Click Click and Cabaret Voltaire agree with one another, almost word for word.
Amélie Ravalec and Travis Collins rely on the predetermined chronology of history to build a story rather than painting a picture. “Is there a way to make music that reflects our surroundings?” Of course, but this is not the way to explain its origins.
