Second-wave industrial bands took the genre beyond music into political collectives

Evidence

Test Dept were always more than a musical group. They are better understood as a popular modernist collective that had the production of sound at its centre, but which also made visuals, projections and films. Test Dept were formed in London in 1981 by Jonathan Toby Burdon, Graham Cunnington, Angus Farquhar, Paul Hines and Paul Jamrozy. They began as a second-wave industrial act, following on from a first wave led by Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire. With their use of found metal objects and their performances in spaces of labour and logistics (disused factories, transport hubs), Test Dept offered what seemed, on the face of it, to be a very literal take on the “industrial”. Via their involvement in a number of UK struggles — including the miners’ strike (1984–85) and the anti-Poll Tax movement (1988–91) — Test Dept also became intensely invested in the politics of the industrial and the post-industrial. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1360

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader work on music, affect, and political collectives; and to Fisher’s own capitalist realism concept invoked in 1362. — connects to: Industrial music engineered political affect as a counterweight to propaganda — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1361