cyberinsekt

It was never going to be easy to turn William Burroughs' Naked Lunch into a film; to his credit David Cronenburg did no such thing. His film was a fevered, paranoid journey based loosely on Burroughs' life and fiction. It gathered a mixed critical reception. While I'm very fond of it, I will admit that it has its strengths and its weaknesses.

One of those strengths is the score, written by Howard Shore and the great Ornette Coleman. Here's the marvellous title theme: Shore's uneasy string arrangements are overlaid with Coleman's saxophone glossolalia. It's an unlikely pairing, but overall a very successful one. Offhand, I can't think of a more unsettling original soundtrack.

Howard Shore & Ornette Coleman - Naked Lunch

If you're a fan of industrial music, then chances are you are very cool. Certainly too cool to listen to tedious old space rock. Any why would you, anyway? The two genres are about as similar as chalk and a slightly different kind of chalk.

This is not an opinion that seems to be terribly widespread. Not yet, anyway. But there do seem to be a bunch of inconvenient facts that seem to support it. Take Einstürzende Neubauten: their earliest recordings show a fondness for the sheets of Risset tones that had proved to be a staple sound of bands such as Hawkwind.

Another example would the be San Franciscan due Chrome, now considered to be one of the progenitors of the US industrial/noise rock scene. Here they are with a track from their 1979 album Half Machine Lip Moves, and what do we find? Well, Zombie Warfare begins as a sort of Kraut/trance metal boogie, filled with science fiction themes. In other words, it's an awful lot like that band. The one that begins with H. The one whose name we don't mention again.

I'm not saying that Bob Calvert et al invented industrial music. I'm certainly not saying that Chrome were simply copyists, either. They were a band that really pushed the envelope, and Zombie Warfare is one of the best examples of that. It's just that some of the sounds and effects of a musical movement that identified itself as more art than rock had already been done earlier, with different motives and for an entirely different audience. Is there a chain of influence? That's not a question I feel qualified to answer. But the similarities exist, and a musical history that ignores this does nobody any favours.

Chrome - Zombie Warfare