I haven’t forgotten, dear listeners + readers (= leaders) that I owe you a podcast.
The last epic edition left me drained. So while I’m recharging those batteries, here’s a supplement to the previous podcast.
You may remember that I mentioned the band Convulse (later Flux, then Fluxx) whose track Skindustry I regard as a lost classic of Australian industrial/EBM.
Well, by kind permission of Richard Fox, here it is:
Skindustry (mp3 128kbps, 5.46MB)
Play it loud! And try to imagine how cool it sounded on an overdriven PA in a dark Sydney club in the mid 90s.
Skindustry is from the Flux demo cassette Spawn from 1995. Flux had a unique sound. Using lo-fi 8 bit tracker software, one could compare them to Bloody Fist, but whereas the Newcastle & Epping scenes were inspired by hardcore/gabber techno, Flux seemed closer to the EBM sound of, say, Nitzer Ebb.
Flux went on to appear on a few compilation CDs (including a couple that I was on, Aphelion One and Dis-locations) but the long awaited debut album (on Zonar) was never completed. I’m hoping to publish some of Richard’s unreleased recordings as mp3s on Alias Frequencies. In my ideal world, Flux, and other Zonar acts such as Mute Freak and Size would have inspired a whole global scene of dark & weird beats (related to but different from what became breakcore) but that wasn’t to be. I might talk more about that in a future podcast…