Every week, Time Travel conjures the ghosts of techno-futures past with selections from the dustiest corners of the WWW.
Manufacture represents one of the earliest examples of EBM (not EDM, “but electric body music”) bubbling up Stateside in the mid-80s, and although they only ever released two albums, what they did produce stands up against any European release from the time.
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Then a student at Boston’s Museum School, video artist Brian Bothwell heard a song by Perry Geyer on local radio and offered to make a video for it. The two got along and Manufacture was born. A cassette of experimental compositions found its way onto the airwaves of college radio stations around Boston and caught on quickly. Manufacture began to perform at various venues around town in front of a video projection screen showing videos they created from old experimental films, military footage, propaganda films, and anything else they could get their hands on that shocked eyeballs. Boston rock music critics didn’t know what to make of it. Were they a political band or performance art? Were they performing music, noise, or anti-music? The band’s reputation and shows grew in size leading to a friendship with Belgian band Front 242 who lauded them as “the best American band”, and to national shows opening for Ministry and Psychic TV.
But how did these Americans get exposed to the emerging German and Belgian sound? A family friend of Perry’s happened to be the owner of imports-oriented Metro Records in Great Neck, Long Island. Working in the shop at the age of 16, Perry had the rare opportunity to collect the bizarre alternative dance records coming out of Europe.
The origins of the music video for Manufacture’s “As the End Draws Near” began after the band signed to Nettwerk. Brian and Perry were recording the song in a studio in Vancouver, BC. The band had befriended a future Nettwerk recording star, Sarah McLachlan, who visited the studio frequently and often sat in on recording sessions. The boys had just finished recording the track and jokingly asked Sarah if she would be willing to lay down some vocals. She sang an impressive rough track and 24 hours later, returned with a finished set of lyrics which were then recorded and over dubbed. The song is a beautiful addition to their debut album, Terrorvision, and a poetic counterpart to the harder industrial dance oriented tracks on the release.
Manufacture envisioned the music video for “As the End Draws Near” to be an apocalyptic glimpse of an industrial world barely surviving after a nuclear strike. Surrounded by militaristic scenes of decay, McLachlan would be seen as a survivor reminiscing alone in an industrial post-nuclear world that had been completely destroyed by warfare. Nettwerk liked the concept but rejected the idea that she appear in the music video. Indeed, the fledgling label didn’t have the budget to fly her from Vancouver to Boston to film. Instead, the band hired a clutch of models and local art school hotties to lip synch small parts of the lyrics. The band collected a vast array of stamped, rusted, scrap sheet metal which they fashioned into a large animated moving set. A fellow friend and technician had devised a clever system of pulleys, cables and motors to make various aspects of the set rotate and move in sync to the music in front of the camera and around the band. The concept was a machine-like “living set” based inside a world of urban industrial decay. In some shots Manufacture can be seen performing live at one of their sold-out performances atManray, a legendary nightclub in Cambridge, MA that was New England’s epicenter of underground club culture from the mid-80s until 2005.
So what happened to these American innovators after two outstanding releases? Truth is the dudes eventually decided the whole industrial band thing was silly and it was time to get real jobs. Brian Bothwell went on to direct and edit music videos in addition to other post-production work in television. Perry Geyer eventually took over The Cars’ Newbury St. studio Synchro Sound, and operates it as CyberSound Studios to this day.
