Industrial People

JG Ballard is dead at 78. I think it's fair to say that if there's a single author who was a literary influence on more of the artists in my record collection than any other, Ballard would be it. The range of artists who've been inspired by Ballard is tremendous: Joy Division, Brian Eno, huge swaths of the early punk and new wave landscapes. I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to suggest that without Ballard, industrial music as we understand it might never have coalesced. His themes - technology, sex, architecture, psychology - became those of musicians whose opted neither to flee from nor gleefully embrace the emergence of electronic music within the pop world, but instead to engage in a dialectic with it: Throbbing Gristle, Fad Gadget, Orchestral Manouevres In The Dark. We do not wage war against the machine, nor do we ignore it as it seeps into our aesthetics and subtly shifts our expectations. We study it and its history and through it our own as we observe the changes it enacts in us and we in it.

Ballard was as good a navigator as we could've hoped for of the multiplicity of our futures, those we've inherited and those we've forged. Pick up a copy of "High Rise" or "Concret Jungle", put your TG24 boxset on loop and reflect on what we've lost, kiddies. We'll never see his likes again.

Marissa Nadler

So I know that our posts at DIJ have slacked off in the past couple months, and for that I'm sorry. Without wanting to speak for Alex or Trish, my time of late's been consumed by thesis work, bitching about the bullshit Galactica finale, listening to Carcass, Charles Stross novels, finally giving Lost a shot, and thesis procrastination. But I've also been going to loads of shows.

I'd like to offer not a full review of Marissa Nadler's show at the Media Club last night so much as a brief yet ringing endorsement of her current tour and entire body of work. If Leonard Cohen, Mazzy Star or the short stories of Flannery O'Connor have ever accompanied you and your favourite bottle through a lonely night of quiet reflection on topics like lovers and death, then you should've already been augmenting such revels with any of Marissa's three previous albums (debut "Ballads of Living And Dying" being my harrowing favourite). If not, new album "Little Hells" serves as a great showcase for why Nadler's light years ahead of her supposed peers in the contemporary singer songwriter sweepstakes (Seriously, Joanna Newsom? What is wrong with you people?), and shows her becoming much more proficient with full-band instrumentation.

Speaking of bands, the way Nadler's rearranged her sparser material to suit her touring group is simply ace. Shoegazy gauze augments the plaintive keen of songs like "Heart Paper Lover" without overpowering them, and at the forefront of the live experience remains Nadler's voice. I think I might've dropped the book I was reading the first time I heard it a few years ago. The voice of a woman who knows that this bender will be her last. The voice of the dead woman you wronged beckoning from just outside your window. The voice which dragged you out of your home in the night to ramble along the hills with a bottle of whiskey and try to remember and forget at the same time.

With that slightly purple description out of the way, I humbly implore you to pick up "Little Hells" and to see if Nadler's bringing her songs and her voice to your neck of the woods.

Marissa Nadler, "Rosary"