Zwaremachine’s Be a Light: Love of Industrial

Breaking a 7 year hiatus, Zwaremachine is back with their new album Be A Light. Churning out dark ebm/industrial music reminiscent of early Nine Inch Nails and Skinny Puppy, the album is 7 tracks of old school industrial goodness with 14 tracks of remixes.

Managing to avoid the more Noise focused form of industrial going on right now, Zwaremachine sounds like classic industrial with heavy synth use and the always lovable drum machine. The sound is clean (no basement recording here), but with dirty droning vocals over the sound of the synths like an alien computer whispering you asleep. The themes range from assimilation, to revolution, to cybercrime to expanding your own mind which will all feel like home to our readers.

With such a classic sound, however, the main drawback is that there is nothing new to it. If you love the industrial that has come before you’ll love this, but don’t expect to many new ideas or sounds from this. Be A Light should definitely be part of your collection of music you can can dance/look moody/hack the planet to.

Special mention has to be made about the album art as well, having been done by the incredible Paul Gerrard, who is best known as a designer of monsters and flesh-infused technology for several forms of media. I highly recommend checking out his portfolio, with special mention to his Videodrome remake concept and Hellraider: Origins short.

Whoa hold on, we ain’t done. Included in the album is 14 more tracks of various remixes of the 7 original tunes. Seriously, for 10 American bucks this album is huge. The remixes rip their old school sounding tracks into the modern dance scene with violent synths, some synth wave sounding tracks, and even a little noise industrial thrown in for good measure (my favorite track being the noisy Person To Person (TIMMYtheTAPEWORMP@PonPCP Remix). The creators have essentially touched on almost every type of industrial music in one album with masterful remixing and possessing a fellow music nerds love of beepbooping machinery. They may not be bringing anything new and revolutionary to the genre, but Zwaremachine clearly loves what they do and shows nothing but respect to industrial music. Show them some love by checking out their Bandcamp and current live shows.