Here, I share with you the music I've come across that has a certain quality to it, rare and elusive. The kind of music that moves you so deeply in a way that you can't understand or describe. The lyrics or music or video may make no sense to your brain, but it does to your soul. It's beautifully cathartic and inspiring.
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Artist: Ice Ages
Song: From Grey To...
Ice Ages captures a rare, dark beauty, a beauty which in my opinion is the essence of industrial music.
It comes as no surprise that Ice Ages comes from Germany which played a big role in the industrial revolution. Industrial music captures the bleak cold of factory life, quite possibly the polar opposite of living in and with nature, through mechanical-sounding bangs and clangs and buzzes and hisses and reverb, and through its dark, existential themes. The light seems far away and the mind is left to run wild with the possibilities that may lurk in the darkness. Where else would your mind wander in such a situation?
I've been a fan of Ice Ages since before I worked a factory job, having discovered it through Summoning, which is a wonderful Tolkien-metal band composed of Ice Ages' Michael Gregor (Silenius) and Richard Lederer (Protector) of Ice Ages. At the time, I was working fast food, which really isn't that different from a factory job, and now, after working for six months in a factory, I can appreciate the music even more.
Every day, I slept for 4-5 hours, and every night it was 12 hours of monotonous, slow, dull physical work which you can never fully lose yourself in because you're always on edge, tasked with sporadic bursts of quick thinking and quick motion whenever the machines mess something up. Everything is constantly moving. The intermittent chaos helps the time pass more quickly, but the possibility of your line going down at any moment doesn't help you relax while you're doing your normal work.
Twelve hours, always alert, always moving, even on your breaks which are just enough time to use the restroom, eat a snack, refill your water, and relax for a couple of minutes before getting back up again. You're constantly surrounded by machines clanging and hissing, intercom messages, forklifts, and the grey of concrete and metal interspersed with some yellow markings. It's a dreary place to be, and it's easy for the mind to follow the same path.
Twelve hours of boredom, physical exertion, and just wanting to go home and sleep. The working environment, and especially the 3-day (but sometimes 2 or 4 days) weekends, is luxury compared to the reality of the industrial revolution in the early 20th century, and even sweatshops in third-world countries today, yet it's still taxing both physically and mentally. Higher-ups are always wanting to move more product, more quickly, and that stress falls onto the laborers. It's a high-pressure job, often dull and sometimes very fast-paced, and it gives you way too much time to think because there's nothing else to do; the work is the most boring thing imaginable.
If you're familiar with such an environment, I think you'll find the music of Ice Ages deeply familiar, maybe even nostalgic, in spite of the fact that the memories it invokes are not pleasant memories. It simply takes you to another world, a distant yet immediate reality. It's the kind of music that is cathartic not because it is pleasant, but because it reflects the pains that inspired it, pains that we've endured, and having that pain transformed into music releases it like no other.
Thank you so much for reading! If you like what you see and hear, please consider upvoting and resteeming; it helps a lot! Thank you for your support on my previous posts! It really means a lot to know that you all appreciate my writing.
Stay tuned for more soul-touching music in a week or two!