from the LP Half Machine Lip Moves, Siren Records, 1979While Throbbing Gristle may generally be regarded as the whole genesis of industrial music, seeing things that black & white oversimplifies the matter entirely, in my opinion anyways; yes, Gristle brought extreme white noise into our lives, but industrial music has never just been about dissonant clattering, and one could make a substantial argument that San Francisco project Chrome actually had more direct musical impact upon later industrial bands than anyone else in the first wave. For all intensive purposes, Chrome consisted of the core duo Damon Edge (handling the “vocals”, synthesizers, and other programmed effects) and Helios Creed (slaying of guitars), and the music they created remains some of the most cosmically fucked up shit my ears have ever had the luxury of becoming acquainted with, at once experimental & yet inviting; above all the skronk, Edge & Creed’s influences are clear: Pere Ubu, The Stooges, Hendrix, Hawkwind, krautrock and punk rock in general. That being said, when it all gets mixed together and you throw in some trippy overdubs culled from random television broadcasts, Chrome’s tunes are indeed their own breed and they have aged considerably better than most of their avant-garde peers.
