Author & Punisher - Women & Children (Seventh Rule)
It can be easy to forget that industrial music was once a menacing creative force. It's difficult to pinpoint the decisive moment that the style changed from something deconstructed and negationist on a scale that popular music had not to that point experienced (witness British conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn's assessment of pre-Throbbing Gristle collective COUM Transmissions as “wreckers of civilisation” - an unintentional endorsement if ever there was one) into cultural shorthand for a mix of bad metal guitars and bad techno drum machines. While blame could be placed on the Ministrys and Skinny Puppys of the world, pinpointing the instigator of this rapid mission creep is less important than acknowledging that, at some point in the mid- to late-1980s, it largely went to shit, turning transgressive experimentalism into the sort of teen angst that's eminently easy to capitalize on. This isn't to say there weren't residual successes – one could call to mind Test Dept. backing miners' choirs, Crash Worship's elevation of bacchanalian revelry to an art form, or Godflesh showing the world that drum machines can sound brutal – but for every one group holding true to some fringe concept or approach, there were a hundred trying to be the next Filter, dumbing it down and softening it up in pursuit of the sold out stadium.
But if the rule hasn't changed, neither have the exceptions--one of the most notable of which has come from Author & Punishor, the solo project of one Tristan Shone. Author & Punisher is still in touch with the dystopian deconstructionist current acting as a common denominator for all the best industrial music. With the aid of a hand-built enclosure constructed of weird quasi-cybernetic sound producing devices (a set up calling to mind the influence of everybody from Luigi Russolo to William Gibson), Shone has released a steady succession of unsettling sturm und drang pounding. His mechanical assemblages (calling them “instruments” almost seems like a misnomer, one that renders the objects far more conventional than they actually are) lend the project something of a holistic multimedia approach, in that any of these sounds could have been produced using conventional instumentation, but would have lacked the same imposing qualities. This isn't to suggest that the visual presentation is the prime object at hand; only that, like Einstürzende Neubauten and their jackhammers, the live element is as much an important facet of the music as the recordings are.
Sonically, Women & Children acts as a fairly sharp detour towards more accessible sounds than previous Author & Punisher releases. While the emphasis still rests with throbbing mechanical soundscapes, melodic vocals and standard instrumentation are incorporated at times, though even this does little to temper the music's sinister qualities. While songs like “Tame As A Lion” or “Pain Myself” may be at least partly based on crooned vocals and piano, each comes off more as a sort of Satanic cabaret soundtrack than any sort of softening of the general approach. By the same token, the eerie vocals that emerge from the nigh-beatless drone haze of “Miles From Home” may lack the sort of force possessed by the album's bulk, but are no less unsettling for it. However, despite these variations, the small tweaks that add nuance when none might have been expected, the album is still Author & Punisher to the core--that same figure locked into machinery, arms and legs pumping in rhythm like the foreman of some factory existing only to create the sound of industry rather than its physical products. Author & Punisher dials up a brand of futurism that would sound thoroughly apocalyptic except that, by presupposing any sort of future at all, it remains at least slightly more optimistic than a prediction of certain doom.
Some of the comparisons that Author & Punisher elicit are valid enough that albums like Women & Children could hardly be considered unprecedented (it's hard to ignore its similarity to a good chunk of Justin Broadrick's output). Though industrial music at its best can be extremely selective regarding what sort of direct influences it will claim, this project's reverence towards some of the style's more soundly realized work, in conjunction with a bracing aggression and compelling means of production, render it some of the most relevant and vital work the genre has produced in a very long time. This is work that can move towards accessibility without embracing cliché, and can build outwards from genre tropes without betraying a distinct core aesthetic.