Assimilate Quotes

“Traditional rock music favors a working-class body with callused hands and a whisky-rough voice, and by denying this particular brand of physicality the body of electronic music was easily heard as lazy, weak, undisciplined, and effete. The criticism in the 1980s and 1990s that electronic musicians were fake or talentless, then, is a response to a perceived threat against a specific bodily identity as encoded in sound—an identity within a narrow range of class, gender, sexual orientation, and race. As”
― S. Alexander Reed, Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music

“The reason for this extended look at Covenant’s song is that it typifies a postmillennial approach to the sublime in industrial music. The sublime exposes the limits of one’s perception by markedly exceeding them. Classically, the human response to the sublime is a blend of awe and terror. The discussion here isn’t whether listening to this music actually produces sublime experiences; such encounters likely depend more on the listener than on the music. Instead, the point here is that the sublime as a topic is an important one to industrial music; as an act of revealing heretofore unknown limits by exceeding them, we might understand it as dérive, or even as shock, and certainly as part of the industrial legacy.”
― S. Alexander Reed, Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music

“Müller’s poem concerns an old street musician who, as a wraith of the beleaguered narrator’s bleak future, forever plays the same tune alone at the edge of a village, undying in an unchanging winter. In the context of Müller and Schubert’s full cycle, “Der Leiermann” occupies the crushing moment at which death itself is revealed to be an insufficient escape from the narrator’s terrible disillusionment, and where he instead resigns to fade into a numb, undreaming circularity. Both Schubert’s and Covenant’s settings of the poem are appropriately spare in their melody, but the harmony, rhythm, and timbral palette in Covenant’s recording mismatches the stagnation in the text awkwardly.”
― S. Alexander Reed, Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music