The Contemporary Journal against the injustices of industrial capitalism. Then the idea came to try and complicate and question the narrative around the genre of The Ensemble of industrial music, beginning with a rather the Senses and problematic quote from Genesis P-Orridge: the Ensemble of And then there’s the joke we often used to make in interviews about churning out the Social our records like motorcars – that sense of industrial. And … up till then the music had been kind of based on the blues and Louis Henderson slavery, and we thought it was time to update it to at least Victorian times – you know, the Industrial Revolution. Rock ’n’ roll had been somewhere away in the sugarcane fields of the West Indies and the cotton fields of America, so we thought it was time to try and update it somewhat, towards the world as it now…[2] The ensemble cuts harmony; and ‘the rhythm of the iron system’ I take issue with this statement as it attempts to is broken as the beat goes on by the tone circumnavigate the direct relation of plantation of the DRUM.[1] slavery to the Industrial Revolution. There would have been no Industrial Revolution without plantation slavery in the Americas, and This work is based upon listening to industrial furthermore plantation slavery was itself a form and post-industrial landscapes and the music of industrial capitalism that brought together that was made and danced to in these places. human bodies and machines as forced labour Situated within the geological and within the machine of the plantation itself – technological soundscapes of heavy industries hence the Blues, Jazz, and Reggae, for in and around the cities of Bochum, example, are forms of industrial music if we Birmingham and Manchester, for example, the start to expand our understanding of the genre project searches for echoes and reverberations in this sense. Updating music to Victorian times from other parts of Europe, the United States did not mean that Throbbing Gristle[3] could and the Caribbean that are connected through move music away from the cotton field into the history, music and industrial capitalism. factory, as the factory was forever indebted to Initially, I tried to imagine a deep underground the forced unpaid labour of enslaved people in coal seam connecting the coalfields of the Ruhr plantations producing raw materials. Victorian all the way to the North of England, along Britain was formed through the afterlife of which sonic vibrations from the rhythms and slavery.[4] Queen Victoria’s reign began only shouts of music could transport mutual four years after the Slavery Abolition Act of histories of union movements and strikes back 1833 and the £20 million compensation that and forth between the two areas. I was British tax payers had to pay to slave owners interested in music that had intervened in fights (and all people with investments in slavery) for

The Contemporary Journal The Ensemble of the Senses and the Ensemble of the [1/7] Sonic Continuum Social - Louis Henderson ‘loss of business’. Much of this money was beginning in 1978 – the year of The Winter of invested back into British industry, culture, Discontent, a period of strikes by public sector education and health, and the debt was not paid trade unions within British industry, and also off until 2015. We are still living within the the year before Margaret Thatcher came into afterlife of slavery in the United Kingdom, power as Prime Minister. We will then move albeit in very different ways for different through different sonic spaces until 1990, the people. year Thatcher went out of power and the euphoric intensification of the British rave For the purposes of this essay, I would like to scene after the Second Summer of Love of push the thinking and use of the aesthetic 1988–89. As such this essay plots its route experience of industrial capitalism (and the through the Thatcher years from the winter to labour that it entails) into an approach quite the summer, and we will be listening for echoes different from that of the genre of industrial of resistance to the neoliberal regime of music. Rather than focus on how music Thatcher’s government (specifically in relation seemingly imitates the sounds and spaces of to the problems of industrial capitalism) present (post)industry, I am more interested in listening within British musical production in that to the ways music has been (and can be) made to period. offer liberation to the violent spatio-temporal restrictions imposed on the human body It is 1978, and we are in the city of Birmingham, through industrial capitalism. For example, in the neighbourhood of Handsworth to be listening to how polyrhythmic vocal phrasing in precise. In the cemetery at Handsworth Park the Motown records of Marvin Gaye gave a you can find the graves of the three so-called completely different ‘erotics of time’[5] as a fathers of the Industrial Revolution: James political gesture that broke with the temporal Watt, Matthew Boulton and William Murdoch. ordering of the Fordist production line, or how Birmingham is the second most populous city in migrant workers from the Caribbean forged a the UK after London, and was a centre for new social space in Britain through dance Industry from the 18th century on, with coal nights and sound systems in industrial cities mines, coking, iron foundries, glass factories, such as Leeds and Birmingham, and then how brickworks and steel mills. Handsworth is a the nightclub offers an out-of-work-hours neighbourhood with a long history of migration moment of utopia in which the gesture is to from previous British colonies such as Ireland, ‘Heal Yourself and Move.’ India and different parts of the Caribbean and Africa. It is important to note that migration to Listen: Theo Parrish, Heal Yourself and Move Birmingham (along with other parts of the UK) (1998) increased greatly after the Second World War, with citizens from the Commonwealth invited I would like to stress however that this focus is to work to rebuild the country and its economy not just on how music has been used as release through factory work, and also work in state- from the hardships of labour, but also as run services like the NHS and public transport. resistance to industrial capitalism and the systems it sets in place to entrap people within Birmingham is also one of the birthplaces of repetitive cycles through history. British heavy metal music, and this goes hand in hand with industry, as the members of the Watch: The Factory Scene from Charlie Birmingham metal band Black Sabbath were Chaplin, Modern Times (1936) indeed steel factory workers. Yet, how many We will situate ourselves in England now, people know that the Midlands was one of the

The Contemporary Journal The Ensemble of the Senses and the Ensemble of the [2/7] Sonic Continuum Social - Louis Henderson epicentres of British reggae production?[6] How difficulties as low-paid workers within British many people have heard of the reggae band factories. It is a film that re-tells the story of Steel Pulse? Perhaps some, but not as many as I British industrial capitalism, creating a kind of would hope. Steel Pulse were a British reggae echo from the past that reminds us of the band of second-generation immigrants from relation of British industry to plantation Jamaica who formed their band in the slavery. The voice-over in the film reminds us; Birmingham neighbourhood of Handsworth. ‘there are no stories in the riots, only the ghosts Their name invokes a relationship to steel of other stories.’ factories and the pulse of the factory work that eventuated the pulse of the reggae beat in the The opening shot of Handsworth Songs is an ‘Blues’ parties that filled Birmingham working- audiovisual sample from the film The Colony class neighbourhoods in the 1970s and 80s. made by Philip Donnellan in 1964 about the Black working class of Birmingham. The image Listen: Steel Pulse, Handsworth Revolution is of a Caribbean bus driver, Victor Williams, at (1978) the Science Museum in Birmingham; he is pondering over the huge iron wheels of a [7] In 1986 The Black Audio Film Collective factory machine spinning round and round made a film called Handsworth Songs, an essay powered by a steam engine. The image opens film that, as Kodwo Eshun and I have the film, reappears in the middle and then again suggested, uses post-production techniques of a few minutes before the end, and as such can dub reggae and post-punk, such as remixing, perhaps be ‘…read as a symbol of the eternal sampling and echo, as a way to look into the return of the past in the future; the expropriated period of civil unrest in the UK during the years labour of the guard’s slave ancestors, of Margaret Thatcher from 1981 to 1985. The transferred into the dead labour stored up in the film focuses on riots in Handsworth, as well as machine itself. But also, as the narrator Tottenham and Brixton, that were happening confirms, in the movement by which “the living largely in response to new powers given to the transform the dead into partners in struggle”.’[8] Police by Margaret Thatcher’s government, particularly the informally titled ‘sus’ laws that Watch: The Black Audio Film Collective, allowed Police to stop and search people on Handsworth Songs (1986) ‘reasonable suspicion’ that they had committed an offence. I think that Handsworth Songs is a film with a particular relationship to death; it feels as if the The introduction of the sus laws led to outrage film is haunted by the afterlife of slavery. We within certain communities in the UK as they see archival film of chains being made for ships assisted racist profiling that targeted Black, in Birmingham factories and we see people Asian, and Minority Ethnic people by a largely arriving on the Empire Windrush from Jamaica white police force. The laws were also used as a to Tilbury docks, yet slavery is never actually way to check people’s immigration status, a announced in name. Instead, it is present in the violent form of surveillance that brought forth film as a traumatic history that is constantly racist ideas about ‘Britishness’ and the right to spiralled back into the present. It seems to be a live in a country. Handsworth Songs draws sublayer in the unconscious of the film, connections between the riots and the history of repressed and unresolved, echoing through into migration from ex-British colonies after the present day Britain even as I watch the film in Second World War, the police/state racism and 2020. These thoughts about echo as a method oppression that these people faced – and the for understanding how history returns are

The Contemporary Journal The Ensemble of the Senses and the Ensemble of the [3/7] Sonic Continuum Social - Louis Henderson indebted to the work of Louis Chude-Sokei, is often considered, by some, as the unofficial who brought my attention to the use of echo in national anthem of the UK, invoked in a flurry the work of Édouard Glissant, especially of patriotic pride at events such as The Last ‘…what Glissant means when he describes Night of the Proms[12] or the London Olympics “echoes” in the magnificent Poetics of Relation in 2012. Yet, Blake certainly never intended his (1997) as a form of “spiral retelling”.’[9] poem to be used to celebrate British nationalism, but more as a lament for This idea of an echo as spiral interests me ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ that had greatly as I believe it presents the possibility for been drastically changed through industrial breaking out of the circular trap of certain capitalism. This is suggested by the beautiful historical narratives. The spiral is a form of line ‘…these dark Satanic Mills’ that refers to repetition that never quite completes a full turn steam-powered flour mills first built in the UK back to exactly the same point, and in doing so at the end of the 18th century, designed by the it manages to move forwards; it is more Birmingham engineer Matthew Boulton. At the evolution than revolution. The wheels in a end of the poem Blake quotes from the bible: factory, which serve no other purpose than ‘Would to God that all the Lord’s people were producing commodities at the expense of the Prophets’, and so perhaps it can be interpreted life of the workers making them, constantly as a poem in a form of prophecy, a protest turn and return even 100 years later. poem that prophesies a time over and beyond Handsworth Songs, in creating an echo of industrial capitalism. Adrian Sherwood and Donnellan’s The Colony, spirals those wheels Mark Stewart bring the poem back into a form out of their fittings through a ‘detour’ that of protest and away from its nationalist brings the narrative back ‘“…to the point of appropriation by British conservatives. In a entanglement”, a return to something very clever and highly contemporary gesture, [10] permanently unsettled.’ Which is, I believe, they did this through the sound of dub, a music the entanglement of industry and plantation that came from Jamaica to the UK in the 1970s slavery, and how it created the Britain they and that continues to infuse and inform British were filming in flames, in 1985. music to this very day. Using techniques of echo and delay, this dub version spins the A song that features prominently in the film narrative of Blake’s poem and Parry’s invites further thinking about these echoes and Jerusalem into a different sonic space that spirals of return: Jerusalem by Mark Stewart breaks with any conservative ideals of and the Maffia, produced by Adrian Sherwood nationalism. in 1982, the year after the first major riots in Handsworth and also Brixton (London), Now we shall move to the West of the British Chapeltown (Leeds), and Toxteth (Liverpool). Isles, over to Wales. Here we will listen to the British industrial group Test Department, Listen: Mark Stewart and The Maffia, specifically two songs from a 1984 album made Jerusalem (1982) in collaboration with the South Wales Striking Miners Choir, called Shoulder to Shoulder. Test What you have just heard is a dubbing, a Department came together in 1981, in the midst versioning, an echoing and spiral re-telling of of Thatcher’s de-industrial demise of the UK. In one of the most famous poems from England, their own words, the group’s formation ‘…in William Blake’s protest poem: ‘And did those [11] the decaying docklands of South London, was feet in Ancient time’. This poem was also an urgent reaction to the materialistic drift and versioned into a hymn in 1916 by the English reactionary conservatism of the prevailing composer Sir Hubert Parry, called Jerusalem. It

The Contemporary Journal The Ensemble of the Senses and the Ensemble of the [4/7] Sonic Continuum Social - Louis Henderson musical and political culture.’ Test Department brought together by Test Department through rejected the conventional and developed a style post-production in the mixing studio. Perhaps that reflected the decay of their surroundings, we could even listen to this song as an industrial scavenging the unregenerated wastelands for dubbing of the choir by Test Department, raw materials, and transforming found complete with clangs and clashes of the industrial items into designed, sculptural recuperated metals of de-industrialisation. instruments.’[13] Shoulder to Shoulder was an Interestingly again, a British group has turned intervention into the 1984–85 miners’ strike; a to the dub techniques of studio manipulated large-scale industrial action against the echo and delay as a way to create a form of Conservative government’s closure of collieries music-as-protest against Thatcher’s across the nation, which itself was part of a government and the violence of its capitalist Thatcher-led plan to weaken labour unions and projects. to open the way for globalised capitalism, free markets and free trade agreements. It was also Maybe echo is a technique that encourages part of Thatcher’s general project of solidarity? In his book The Sound of Culture: disintegration of the British working class and a Diaspora and Black Technopoetics, Louis form of class revenge, but that’s another story Chude-Sokei reminds us of Leo Marx’s idea for another time. that ‘…in The Machine in the Garden, echo is also a metaphor of reciprocity’,[14] and also how The choir was made up of 90 striking miners echo was for Glissant an emblem of cross- that had come together from different villages cultural diversity. Chude-Sokei continues and in South Wales and from three different male develops an idea of how echo can create a type voice choirs; Crynant, Glyneath and Onllwyn – of resonance between things that creates a and they all shared political ideals of socialism. feedback of exchange, mutation and affinity Initially they went to London to meet people that ‘…operate as echoic repetitions of affective and generate support for their cause, and ended responses, but do so through correspondences up singing in a concert with Test Department. and affinities, [Wilson] Harris’s “depths of They then decided to record an album together, mutuality” or “unfathomable kinships”.’ I find a featuring songs developed individually and profound beauty in these words, as much as I collaboratively. All profits from the album went find perhaps in the 90-person-strong striking to support the miners’ movement and the album miners choir from Wales meeting with Test was never reissued. The album therefore can be Department to create an album in defiance of understood as serving deeply important Thatcher’s closures of the collieries. The echo political purposes; to publicise and popularise in their song, from the valleys of Wales to the the struggle, but also to provide economic destroyed post-industrial spaces of South means to continue the industrial action. London, reveals their deep mutuality and the strength of their kinship. Listen: Test Department & South Wales Striking Miners’ Choir, Shockwork (1984) Moving forwards with this idea – echo as creating cross-cultural kinships – and to the Listen: Test Department & South Wales Striking year 1990 in Leeds, a large industrial town in Miners’ Choir, Comrades (1986) the north of England. The song is called Pressure Dub and was produced by a young What we hear in the second song Comrades, is a musician known under the alias Ability ii form of sonic solidarity woven together (David Duncan). It hails from a subgenre of through the spectral web of echo and delay. techno called ‘bleep ’n’ bass’ – a particularly The quite distinct approaches to music are

The Contemporary Journal The Ensemble of the Senses and the Ensemble of the [5/7] Sonic Continuum Social - Louis Henderson British versioning of techno and house from echoes received from across the Atlantic, both from the USA and the Caribbean; from Detroit The ensemble of the senses and the and Kingston. The song is in fact a great ensemble of the social is a collaborative homage to the after-hours, unofficial reggae research project initiated in 2018 as a sound system parties called ‘Blues Nights’ that commission for Urbane Kunste Ruhr were extremely popular in various cities in the made in collaboration with the artist UK with large Jamaican populations, such as João Polido entitled Composition (2019) Bristol, Sheffield and Birmingham. The song and installed in the de-commissioned displays an affective mutuality discovered at Opel car factory in Bochum. The work these Blues nights, recorded and expressed would not have been possible without through the time capsules of dub plates from the invitation of Britta Peters and the Jamaica, and eventually seeping back out again invaluable help of Jana Kerima. This text through the deep bassy echo that fills the was initially written for an event in 2019 spectral space of Pressure Dub. at The Institute for Endotic Research, in Berlin, thanks to an invitation from Laure In a 2017 interview Ability ii describes his de Selys and Arjuna Neuman. Later it experiences of the late 1980s: ‘You’d go there was used for a talk I gave after a and you’d hear different things, almost all of screening of The Black Audio Film which would have really heavy bass’, Duncan Collective’s Handsworth Songs (1986) at enthuses. ‘At one point I had my studio in the the Endstation Kino in Bochum, basement of the place I was living in, so I could organised by Christina Danick for come straight back from the Blues and get into Urbane Kunste Ruhr. Some of the ideas the studio. I’d bang through track after track have been developed through informal that way, such was the inspiration from what I’d conversations with Louis Chude-Sokei, heard at the Blues.’[15] Pressure Dub was released Jasmina Metwaly and also Kodwo in 1990, the year that ended Margaret Eshun, with whom I co-organised a Thatcher’s political mandate, and the year in screening of Handsworth Songs which the beginnings of the somewhat utopian followed by a conversation on the idea of and euphoric era of rave culture in the UK took black industrialism in the work of The hold [you can’t spell Leeds without LSD and a Black Audio Film Collective. This event couple of Es!]. Raves took place within old also took place at the Institute for factories and warehouses and were situated at Endotic Research, at the invitation of the peripheries of British life at the time, within Benjamin Busch and Lorenzo Sandoval, the centre of the underground, within the break eventuating in the publishing of an from the ‘rhythm of the iron system’ ruled by earlier iteration of this text for The the disastrous policies of the Iron Lady. Endotic Reader No.1. The author would Whilst the record spins and the grooves in the like to thank all the above for their vinyl move the needle forwards, I would like to involvement. suggest the possibility of the reconstituted echo or spiral retelling as ‘…a prophetic vision of the [16] past’. Cite this piece as: Henderson, Louis. ‘The Ensemble of the Senses Listen: Ability ii, Pressure Dub (1990) and the Ensemble of the Social’. The Contemporary Journal 3 (May 01, 2020).

The Contemporary Journal The Ensemble of the Senses and the Ensemble of the [6/7] Sonic Continuum Social - Louis Henderson [https://thecontemporaryjournal.org/strands/soni www.lux.org.uk/artist/black-audio-film-collective c-continuum/the-ensemble-of-the-senses-and- [8] the-ensemble-of-the-social]. Josephine Berry Slater, ‘Black Grammatology’, Mute [1] Magazine, 18 April 2007. www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/black-grammatology Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota [9] Press, 2003), 230. Louis Chude-Sokei, ‘Blackness and Becoming: Édouard [2] Glissant’s Retour’, The Black Scholar 48, no.4 (2018): 44.

Genesis P-Orridge quoted in Vivian Vale and Andrea [10] Juno, Industrial Culture Handbook, 6/7 (San Francisco: Re- Search Publications 1991), 9. Chude-Sokei, ‘Blackness and Becoming: Édouard Glissant’s Retour’, 44. Author’s emphasis. [3] [11] Throbbing Gristle was an English music and visual arts group formed in 1975 in Kingston upon Hull by Genesis P- William Blake, the English poet, painter, and printmaker, Milton: A Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter Christopherson, and wrote this poem as the preface to his epic work Poem in Two Books, Chris Carter. They are widely regarded as pioneers of 1804. industrial music. [12] [4] The Proms, or the BBC Proms, founded in 1895, are an This term, borrowed from the work of Saidiya Hartman, is eight-week summer season of daily orchestral classical used as a way to delineate the enduring presence of the music concerts performed at the Royal Albert Hall in racialised violence of plantation slavery within the social, central London. economic, juridical and cultural structuring of the present. [13] [5] N.A., ‘History’, Test Department. Moten, In the Break, 225. www.testdept.org.uk/history

[6] [14]

The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and For more information, listen to the compilation albums Louis Chude-Sokei, Black Symbol presents The Complete Handsworth Black Technopoetics (Middletown: Wesleyan University Explosion and The Midlands Roots Explosion vol 1 & 2. Both Press, 2015), 169. are available from www.reggaearchiverecords.bandcamp.com [15]

Matt Aniis, ‘Drop The Pressure: An Interview with ‘Ability [7] II’’, Innate, 18 February 2017. ‘Inaugurated in 1982 and dissolved in 1998, the seven- www.inn8.net/interview-with-abilty-ii-drop-the-pressure/ person Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC) is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential artist groups [16] to emerge from Britain in recent years. John Akomfrah, Édouard Glissant, Monsieur Toussaint: Version Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, Reece Auguiste, Trevor Scénique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1961), 9. Excerpt Mathison, David Lawson and Edward George produced translated by the author. award-winning film, photography, slide tape, video, installation, posters and interventions, much of which has never been exhibited in Britain’.

The Contemporary Journal The Ensemble of the Senses and the Ensemble of the [7/7] Sonic Continuum Social - Louis Henderson