And was Jerusalem builded here among these dark Satanic Mills?William Blake, Milton
Every objection ever raised to industrial black metal comes down to the drum machine, and the objection has the argument backwards. A black metal band spends its whole career trying to sound like something that is not a person: colder than a person, more repetitive than a person, indifferent in a way no drummer with a family and a day job can sustain for forty minutes. Then a machine that does all of that without effort turns up, and the genre calls it a betrayal. The bands in this branch simply took the genre at its word.
What they built is the most conditional part of the family. It works when the machine is the point and fails when the machine is a shortcut, and the gap between those two outcomes is wider here than anywhere else in black metal.
Where the machine came from
The equipment argument was settled outside the genre, in Birmingham, before most of the second wave had a demo out. Godflesh recorded Streetcleaner across three sessions between May and August 1989 in Birmingham and Derby, with an Alesis HR-16 providing every drum on the record, and Earache released it on 13 November 1989. Justin Broadrick has said plainly that he started with the machine because he was not a good drummer. What he found was that a programmed pattern at a slow tempo, under a bass distorted past the point of pitch, produces a weight no human arm produces, because the machine does not breathe and does not tire and does not push at the moment a person would push. That record is behind almost everything described below.
The relevant point for black metal is not the sound of the drum machine but what it does to the writing. A drummer negotiates. A drummer speeds up in the fast part, and every band in the genre has built its identity partly out of that flaw. Take it away and the riff has nothing to lean against, so the guitar has to become the source of the movement, and the arrangement fills with sequenced parts, samples and noise because there is room and nothing else to put in it. That is why these records sound so different from each other. Once the drummer is gone, the constraints that made second wave black metal a recognisable format are gone with him.
A drummer negotiates. A drummer speeds up in the fast part, and half the genre's identity is built out of that flaw.
The first of them
The band that got there first and paid for it in obscurity were Mysticum, formed at Asker in 1992 under a different name, using computer controlled drums from the beginning rather than as a later idea. Jan Axel Blomberg passed briefly through the line-up without ever recording. Their debut, In the Streams of Inferno, did not appear until 1 October 1996, by which point the scene around them had moved on and the record landed as a curiosity rather than as the founding document it was. They then went quiet for the better part of two decades before returning with Planet Satan in 2014 and a live album out of the Roadburn festival in 2018. Everybody in this branch acknowledges them and almost nobody bought them at the time.
1999, and the second wave goes electric
The turn came at the end of the decade and it came from inside. Dødheimsgard, formed in Oslo in 1994 by Vicotnik, Aldrahn and Gylve Nagell, had made two conventional records, Kronet til Konge on Malicious in 1995 and Monumental Possession in 1996, before 666 International in 1999 threw the format out entirely for something jagged, sequenced and deliberately unpleasant to sit through in one go. They shortened the name to DHG in 2000 and have kept going in the same direction as far as Black Medium Current in 2023.
The same year, The Kovenant made the loudest version of the same move. A symphonic band out of Hamar since 1993, forced to alter their spelling in 1999 after a legal dispute with a Swedish act of the same name, they followed Nexus Polaris with Animatronic and arrived on the cover in something close to science fiction costume, with the sound rebuilt around European electronic body music. Purists have never forgiven it. As a piece of nerve it is hard to beat.
Outside the north
Switzerland got there before the Norwegians, from a different angle. Samael recorded Passage at Woodhouse in Hagen with Waldemar Sorychta and Century Media released it on 19 August 1996, with Xy playing keyboards, synthesiser and both live and programmed drums, the tempo pulled down to a heavy walk and the satanic material replaced by cosmic material. It went to 84 on the German album chart and moved the band out of the underground for good. In Italy, Aborym came out of Taranto around 1993 under Malfeitor Fabban and made Kali Yuga Bizarre in 1999 and With No Human Intervention in 2003, records built on samples and electronic drums, with Attila Csihar of Mayhem singing on the first of them and then joining outright.
A drum machine keeps time the way a conveyor keeps time. It never tires, it never rushes the fast part, and it is not frightened of anything the guitar is about to do.
Eirik Solvang, KaosMetal
France added the least obvious contribution. Blut aus Nord use machines and processing not to make the music sound mechanical but to make it sound wrong, with guitars detuned and treated until the intervals stop resolving, and the results sit closer to musique concrete than to anything with a beat. It is the furthest this branch has travelled from a rhythm section, and it demonstrates the same thing the rest of the branch does: once the drummer is a file, everything else in the arrangement becomes negotiable too.
| Band | Album | Year | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| Godflesh | Streetcleaner | 1989 | Earache |
| Samael | Passage | 1996 | Century Media |
| Mysticum | In the Streams of Inferno | 1996 | Full Moon Productions |
| Dødheimsgard | 666 International | 1999 | Moonfog |
| The Kovenant | Animatronic | 1999 | Nuclear Blast |
| Aborym | With No Human Intervention | 2003 | Code666 |
What it is worth
The branch has never produced a large audience and it never will, because it removes the two things that make black metal legible to newcomers: the human error and the fixed format. What it produces instead is the small number of records in the genre that could not have been made in any other decade, and a permanent argument about what the music was ever for. It is the least sentimental corner of the chapter this belongs to.
The failures are easy to spot and there are many of them. A programmed kick under an ordinary riff is not industrial black metal, it is a band without a drummer, and a sample of a factory laid over the top does not fix it. The records above earn the label because the machine determines the writing rather than replacing a player. Directly opposite this, in temperament and in equipment, sits the branch that reached for lutes and recorders instead of sequencers, and that is medieval and Folk Black Metal.
