By 1988, when Missing Foundation’s sophomore album 1933 Your House Is Mine was released, industrial music was approaching a crossroads. Leaving aside the weirdo experimentalism of artists like Current 93, Nurse with Wound, and Coil, its most visible proponents were groups making dance music for goth kids (not necessarily a bad thing), and Ministry’s Land of Rape and Honey was about to initiate the next seismic shift into straight-up heavy metal. Set against this backdrop, MF feels like something of an anachronism, a regression to industrial’s formative years spent straining radical politics, musique concrète, and performance art through a punk rock sieve.
It would be a stretch to describe 1933 as a “refined effort” compared to MF’s debut, but amid the fragmentary bursts of noise heard on tracks like “Kingsland 61” and “1933,” one could find tracks that more-or-less coalesce into structures that feel more conventionally song-oriented. “Burn Trees” is probably the most recognizably industrial-sounding track on the album, driven by an austere, endlessly repeated guitar figure and over which is laid a reptilian sample of front-man Peter Missing rasping the song’s title. Semi-title track “Your House Is Mine” lurches to its feet from a series of false starts and becomes an ominous funeral march to the beat of metal-on-metal percussion. Hell, “Jameel’s Turmoil” actually features an honest-to-goodness groove.
Of course, much of the conversation surrounding Missing Foundation has focused on their chaotic stage shows (they were accused of starting a riot in Tompkins Square in 1988), their unique iconography (the upturned martini glass graffitied onto buildings all along the lower east side) — in short, anything but their music. One could be tempted to believe that the apocrypha surrounding the group is more interesting than their output, but I would contend that this only speaks to both how successfully the group fused sound, visuals, and performance into an indivisible whole, and how supremely at home they were in New York of the 1980s. As Sam McPheeters of Men’s Recovery Project (among others) points out, Missing Foundation embodied a spirit completely in tune with their time and place. MF were fixtures of the lower east side squatters movement, and their post-apocalyptic sound — cobbled together from trash, primitive samplers, and whatever partially working instruments they could get their hands on — sounded right at home in a city that still contained neighborhoods that looked like they belonged in a third-world nation.
For that reason, 1933 is perhaps the group’s most emblematic work. The title is a reference to the fall of the Weimar Republic, which came into being in Germany at the end of the First World War and gave way to the rise of the Third Reich. It was a disorganized, ineffectual body, ill-equipped to deal with the near-insurmountable challenges facing its country: skyrocketing inflation caused by demands for war reparations, spiraling unemployment resulting from the Great Depression, and shattered morale and social unrest in the wake of Germany’s defeat. Looking back 25 years later, this analogy seems more than a little over-the-top, yet at the same time, it’s eerie how well this album resonates with our current political climate. “Your House Is Mine” may have been written as a screed against gentrification, but it could just as easily have soundtracked the wave of foreclosures that accompanied the housing collapse of 2008. “Invasion of Your Privacy” is more meaningful than ever following last year’s revelations about the NSA and PRISM, and songs about ecological disaster like “Burn Trees” are, unfortunately, unlikely to ever become less topical.
As we’ve previously indicated, New York in the late 80s was a hell of a good place to live if you liked your rock noisy. But even amid such formidable acts as Cop Shoot Cop, (a soon to be huge) White Zombie, and Swans, Missing Foundation took the art of confrontational musical performance to a level that was difficult to match. Yet, 25 years later, their music, which once represented the ultimate in nihilism and urban alienation, seems strangely hopeful, a desperate howl against capitalist excess from a more idealistic age.
