Power Electronics
Industrial · 1983 · also known as Power Noise Vocal, Heavy Electronics
The fully embraced extremity of noise: feedback, treated screams, hostile frequencies, and deliberately unbearable subject matter. Whitehouse named the genre in 1982, and the scene has remained a restricted circle ever since, caught between theatrical transgression and radical sound art. Nobody dances to this, they endure it, and its place here is as a boundary marker, the furthest point from the rest of the industrial family.
15 reference tracks
- Ramleh: Product Of Fear (1983)
- Genocide Organ: Mind Control (1995)
- Whitehouse: Cruise (2001)
- Whitehouse: Wriggle Like a Fucking Eel (2003)
- Prurient: Military Road (2006)
- Pharmakon: Self-Regulating System (2019)
- Pharmakon: Spit It Out (2019)
- Forced Entry: Forced Entry (2024)
- Forced Entry: Window Shopper (2024)
- Genocide Organ: Klaus Barbie
- Whitehouse: Why You Never Became a Dancer
- Whitehouse: A Cunt Like You
- Genocide Organ: A Peculiar Crusade
- Pharmakon: Ache
- Genocide Organ: Disobey Ends
At a glance
- First appeared: around 1983
- Machines: Pédale de distorsion, Console de mixage, Oscillateur de laboratoire, Microphone
- The sound: Feedback et no-input mixing, Oscillateurs poussés, Voix hurlées saturées, Pédales de distorsion en chaîne
- Labels: Broken Flag, Cold Spring, Hospital Productions, Come Organisation, Tesco, Tesco Organisation
- Key artists: Whitehouse, Genocide Organ, Prurient, The Grey Wolves
Producing Power Electronics
There is no tempo. Power electronics plays in free time, with no grid and no regular pulse, refusing even the machine pulse of the industrial music it descends from, the only real measure is duration, blocks of noise running 2 to 15 minutes. Turn off the metronome, work with the snap grid disabled, and think in seconds rather than bars, if a pulse does appear it should come from a low-frequency square oscillator chopping a drone at 2 or 8 Hz, not a drum machine. There is no drum kit: rhythmic events come from a square LFO gating a drone, feedback oscillating in bursts, or a voice screaming in salvos, a fast auto-pan at full amount gets close to the genre's mechanical pulse.
The full production course, in French: tempo, drums, bass, sounds, arrangement, mix, plugins and machines, and a step by step start.
Frequently asked
What is Power Electronics?
The fully embraced extremity of noise: feedback, treated screams, hostile frequencies, and deliberately unbearable subject matter. Whitehouse named the genre in 1982, and the scene has remained a restricted circle ever since, caught between theatrical transgression and radical sound art. Nobody…
Who are the key Power Electronics artists?
Whitehouse, Genocide Organ, Prurient, The Grey Wolves.
In the same family
- Industrial
- EBM
- New Beat
- Electro-Industrial
- Dark Electro
- Aggrotech
- Futurepop
- Techno Body Music
- Coldwave
- Darkwave
- Neue Deutsche Haerte
- Rhythmic Noise
Listen to Power Electronics in the atlas · Cette page en français
