Putting aside the machine/human merging theories, one intuitive explanation for our embrace of the early 80s era of electronic impressionism is that many musicians making electronic music these days emerged out of that womb and are retreating into nostalgia as their third decade approaches (or disappears).
But for a compilation of their 80s electronica that is musically fuzzy around the edges, Pink Industry’s New Naked Technology deals with pain rather than some sort of womblike pleasure. You don’t have to listen to many of the lyrics to figure out that this is an S&M album from the point of view of the masochist. It makes me wonder if our nostalgia for this era is a little misguided. Are our musical memories as self-centred as all children’s are? We want to know that everything was ‘Okay’ when we were brought into the world; so 80s electronic music is often wrapped in a veil of mystic sentimentality.
That makes it difficult to truly measure the worth of the 80s output of Pink Industry. Part of me finds it easy to get lost in the seven veils of synths, but I also wonder if I’m reveling in a sound that I only understand through the lens of nostalgia. Rather than vibing on the seediness as Nite Jewel might do, this really is seedy. The murky keyboards and industrial beats are not present because we liked the sound of them, but because Pink Industry seemed to be advertising themselves as frequenters of ugly decadent goth scenes.
Then along comes a song like “What I Wouldn’t Give”, a bleak, yet comforting mantra painted in obscured woodwind sounds and other textures pleasing to the this-wave/that-wave inclined ear. “That’s more like it,” you think, lulled by its similarity to the sophisticated nostalgia of today. The presence of these familiar signifiers of detachment and chill makes Jayne Casey’s awkwardly expressed anguish fade into the amniotic, soothing background.
Pink Industry was a big departure in sound from Jayne Casey’s earlier punkier bands – Pink Military and Big in Japan — and the decision to make a veiled, shapeless sort of music speaks volumes. At the heart of the album is a sense of the disintegration of the will – the dissolution of personality that occurs when we place ourselves in someone else’s power, or succumb to addiction. It’s also one of those 80s albums that seemed to be made for the velvety speakers of the future, optimistically looking to technology to enhance the intimacy between the listener and musician. So it ends up being another one of those not brilliant, but oddly compelling albums that our past underground scenes have left us for posterity. But whatever Casey is intimately confessing about those heady nights, it’s much more like the zitty, grainy 80s of the past than the pleasant soft-focus 80s of the present.
