The album tends to follow Silver Apples in the psyche-rock sense of melody; however, the lyrics are a firm divergence. It’s difficult to view this as just another 1967 cast-off when on “Program Me” Haack asserts, “I am new / program me,” a chilling or hopeful idea depending on how you choose to interpret it. “War” is interpreted as a joyous carnival celebration, Salvation Army band lung-farts squirting everywhere. “Song of the Death Machine” is like that joint the drunk, poor animals always sing in Disney movies. Except this is a chorus of drunk robots. Haack turns the work of the Silver Apples inward, getting more existential and darker in tone, and that’s why Haack sits at the conception of industrial music: he’s bringing the halcyon sixties down to the very personal and very cold reality of the seventies. And in that insular wash of self-created and performed symphonies Haack is constantly drawing the metallic and the childlike together, offering cartoonish perceptions of different ideas -- exactly the exaggerated portraits that industrial music would depend upon. The album follows an arc where Lucifer becomes a sympathetic character in a way that strips him of any evil, but Haack himself also fears he has been cast from heaven; Haack refers to his response as “techmotion.” It’s that simplistic grasp of technology to express emotion that makes this album so forward and unnerving, and places it so squarely in the trajectory of electronic music. Plus, dude used to show this stuff off on Mr. Rogers when that show was still black and white. And plus, while I was getting ready for this column I discovered it was released for the first time ever on CD like just last week.

The title should give a pretty clear idea of the trajectory of this album. Much of the album plays elegiac, intoned moments against krautrock-like rhythms, stopping brimming activity mid-sentence to replace it with cold shoulders and condensation dripping from held aloft cups. The relationship to industrial music is again indirect; Garson plays with sound in ways that hints at industrial ideas (the use of the Moog for noise effects as much as melody, the uncomfortable pitch bends, the ricocheting blurps in the background) while at the same time heading in the general direction of that ambience. Some tracks get more of the way there, like “Evil Eye,” which sounds like a Nurse With Wound primer, and “Voices of the Dead (The Medium),” which pairs whiny, portamentoed Moog harmonies with thudding percussive accents. And, to be sure, this album isn’t particularly scary, but play the intro to “Black Mass” loud enough and you’ll get similar vibes to Heresie. Even if the song turns out to sound like an Edison Twins incidental. But despite that, given that Garson was limited by early Moog technology as to how dark he could get in replicating host desecration, Black Mass is still pretty chilling in its own way.

Suicide is an intersection as well, caught where the motorik of Hawkwind and the oscillations of Silver Apples meet, with a dollop of krautrock on top of a healthy serving of inchoate punk attitude. And probably some Modern Lovers. But ultimately the album also solidified the place of electronics in rock music by mimicking the movements of analogue instruments in the most robotic way possible. Vega crimps his vocals overtop of Rev’s soundscapes; tracks like “Rocket USA” and “Cheree” are what people mean when they suggest Xiu Xiu sounds industrial. On “Girl” Rev employs a ludicrous pre-programmed bossa nova Casio patch; on “Che” he sprays hiccupping delay everywhere to bring down the horror. The album’s centerpiece, “Frankie Teardrop,” is a mass of pulsing synths that anticipate industrial music explicitly, right down to the minimalist approach to shifts and sighs in the music. Most explicit about the band’s embrace of working class politics and the despair of the late seventies, “Frankie Teardrop” mimics rock and roll to the point where it becomes nothing but a mess of gas valves and mechanical cranking. As Vega disintegrates overtop, man is absorbed into machine, and Rev subtley shifts some delay settings until the thing fades away. This might be the only industrial song explicitly about the people who worked there.

The compositions featured on this album are split evenly between Hosono and keyboard player Shuka Nishihara; all six tracks are sluiced through a wasp’s layer of manipulation ending up on the other side like towering boards of circuitry. This industrial glaze permeates the album, setting the work of Wendy Carlos and Morton Subotnik comfortably next to Ravi Shankar. As everything crunches and curls into new kinds of calculus, the loose and unpopulated narrative (think a generic Bollywood film) is pushed forth with an intensity produced by the drive of all musicians involved (including several of Hosono’s future Yellow Magic Orchestra mates) to sound entirely different. This album is technically more in line with electronic composition than industrial music, but it’s hard not to hear the machines groaning all over every inch of it.

20 Jazz Funk Greats basically takes all the innovations of the albums that precede it on this list and chops it up to a Neu!-style lope. Often that lope is panned, while Pere Ubu squalls circle in either channel, and various voices speak randomly in the corners. Led by Genesis P-Orridge, the group was more than simply about music: the band featured film and performance artists in Cosey Fanni Tutti and Chris Carter and early sample-tech junkie and future member of Psychic TV and Coil Peter Christopherson. While the live shows are infamous, this album -- said by purists to be their “most accessible,” which in this case actually means “most coherent and developed and therefore best” -- is an example of the band at top form, attacking dance forms in a context of disco and parodying the very idea of pleasure in music. Or, rather, pleasure is presented here as so run-of-the-mill and mechanic that it’s impossible to get excited about it in the first place. And it’s funny, because there are grooves all over this shit, but they’re trapped inside rusty cages that squeak with every head bob, and that’s pretty impressive too: Throbbing Gristle may be the only band in history who have been able to make a wicked dance record that’s pretty much impossible to dance to. On the other hand, every sunglasses-at-night singalong that rocks your eighties retro party owes quiet allegiance to the tone Throbbing Gristle created here: it’s dance music, not for robots, but for every little dark, humdrum neurosis you’ll eventually end up having.

The original album, only four tracks long, captured a sense of dread by fissuring all kinds of field recordings together. But what’s interesting, I think, is that so much verbiage is devoted to explaining what’s different here that very little tries to find links and touchstones for those who may not want to take a dive after hearing all the hoopla. For starters, it’s impossible not to hear the Varése-inspired percussion of the title track, a glorious turn on the Weill/Brecht approach to absurd horror that is only slightly diminished by a confusing juxtaposition of a title that suggests a change in a woman and a soundtrack that features samples of a young girl discussing blood with her mother. It’s not quite clear what Stapleton’s point is in delving into the horror of menstruuation, although in the context of industrial themes the material realities of sexuality are embraced as much as the spectre of death. I tend to read the track as a play on the hidden realities of female sexuality, and certainly the aristocratic inflection of the maternal voice suggest this is more about criticism of the way young girls are supposed to hide their periods than it is a horror-trope filled indulgence in burgeoning sexuality.

“I Cannot Feel You as the Dogs Are Laughing and I Am Blind” starts the album with a barrage of metallic crunching undercut by sinister drones low in the mix. Again, Stapleton is drawing on minimalist ideas, replacing clarinets with gears. As the track progresses the soundscape shifts to present random voices and dripping fragments, creating a hollow cave from which the rest of the album springs. “The Schmürz (Unsullied by Suckling)” continues industrial music’s fascination with fascism, sucking all the wind out of what sounds like a rally chant and using the results to give scant momentum to an array of bells and industrial noise. The longest track on the album, Stapleton actually constructs a sonic narrative out of a whole slew of samples, including what sounds like a telenova, a bored scholar delivering a lecture, some guitar feedback, a hymnal, some elevator jazz, polka, and a vast array of percussive elements. But it’s the way that Stapleton bridges those elements together, looking back to the prog of Battiato or anticipating the out of John Zorn. Yeah, this album is scary, but it’s also absolutely gorgeous.

The relative obscurity of Horse Rotorvator is frustrating to its fans; there are plenty of great tracks here, though their success might be mitigated by their inculcated oddities (or, less charitably to naysayers, the fact that they’re way gayer than kindred spirits Joy Division). But the album packs its punches in beautiful packages: the gorgeous stringwork of “Ostia (The Death of Pasolini),” the They Might Be Giants-ish turns of “Slur,” the dense meld of opera and groaning samples of “Who By Fire,” the military pomposity of “The Golden Section,” the driving industrial proper of “Penetralia,” or the military band foolery of “Herald.” The album ends with an almost five minute track called “The First Five Minutes After Death” which is an incredibly joyous route of pristine melodies undercut with tense percussion right until it peters out at the end (like, when you reach the light there’s nothing). It’s a scary and depressing thought, of course, but Coil were never about providing happy endings.