Nothing’s shocking

Art historian Nicolas Ballet’s Shock Factory is a book seemingly at odds with its subject, industrial music, at every possible level. This 500-plus-page tome is the very model of professional scholarship. It is the work of years of research, with interviews going as far back as 2014. It weaves in citations across the disciplines: music journalism, art criticism, literature, literary history, and philosophy. It presents a trove of archival material: intentionally ungrammatical manifestos, obscene collages, confounding film stills, cut-up texts, and some truly agonizing recorded material. It is a thorough, refined exploration of a most dissonant art, by which music, as movement founder Genesis P-Orridge put it, “is degenerating marvelously into noise.” With a patience that is nothing short of superhuman, Ballet brings coherence and