Twenty years ago this past February marked the inception of one of the most enduring and influential industrial outfits, a band that evolved and changed as much as the genre itself: KMFDM.

The band, with its much-disputed acronymic moniker, standing for Kein Mitleid Für Die Mehrheit (English translation: No Pity for the Majority), is headed by Hamburg-born Sascha Konietzko, who co-founded the group with German painter Udo Stürm, and has been its only consistent member throughout its existence.

"It was purely performance art," states Konietzko from his L.A. headquarters, in reference to the origins of KMFDM. "There were no thoughts about ever performing or becoming a band, or anything. Somehow, through fate and luck, it transformed itself into a band, and I was fortunate enough to find some really good musicians right at the get-go. Somehow it all sort of changed and became a recording band with releases and touring, and everything set in. At the time, we were all in our early ’20s, poking around and seeing what was fun to do and what was a perspective to kind of develop."

KMFDM began with strong ties to the German industrial tradition of music making, which were as much visual as auditory spectacles, the musicians creating sounds from homemade instruments that often included metal objects and equipment. "Industrial music was all about using things as instruments that are not necessarily classified as such," Konietzko clarifies. "So, from machines to kitchen sounds, or the banging of metallic sheets or the breaking up of concrete as in the case of [Einsturzende] Neubaten and whatnot." However, KMFDM, always grounded more in an electronic sensibility, directed their sound more toward the heavier dance aesthetic.

"Electronic music has a bit of a tradition in German culture, whether it’s Karlhein Stockhausen, who throughout the 20th Century was very busy coming up with the craziest compositions and experimental, atonal music. All that kind of stuff is part of the greater German music culture," notes Konietzko. "Plus, I think that the most important aspect is that electronic music is almost the only kind of music that is rock ’n’ roll-free. It doesn’t have R&B influence. It doesn’t have twangy guitars. It doesn’t have this whole sort of warm and sexual undertones. [It is] cold, sterile music, in a way, that is more robotic and sci-fi oriented than sexuality and hotness . . . ." Yet ironically, a great deal of electronica motivates people to manifest emotion and sensation through physical movement.

"I guess the brigades in the forefront of electronic music research, they kind of found the drum machine and synthesizer and those became instruments that prevailed then in the next stage that was electronically-enhanced disco dance music. That kind of shaped, really basically, the way that we’re listening to music nowadays," Konietzko posits. "It’s a sort of blend of the organic and guitar-y and the sort of machine-y drums and bits. I mean, industrial, the terminology ‘industrial music,’ in the American culture is a whole different one than in the European culture. Music purists would never even dream of calling KMFDM or Ministry or anything like that ‘industrial,’ because it does not follow the strict guidelines of what is industrial."

Nevertheless, the band pioneered a great deal of what characterizes the modern
industrial sound: hard, fast, processed beats, layered with synthesized melodies and accentual samples, with the occasional incorporation of distorted instrumentation like electric guitar or bass. Supported by the Chicago-based label Wax Trax!, KMFDM produced a prolific number of albums, in addition to a number of side projects, as well as remixing the work of contemporaries like Front 242 and Sister Machine Gun. Among their more notable releases are included UAIOE (1989); Naive (1990), considered by many to be their best work, subsequently withdrawn due to sampling copyright issues; Angst (1993); Nihil (1995); and XTORT (1996). Around the same time that Wax Trax! collapsed, KMFDM disbanded with the album Adios in 1999, only to reunite in 2002 with the Attak on Metropolis Records and now their most recent LP, WWIII (Sanctuary), released November of 2003. The diversity of the band’s work has had, until recently, something to do with its constantly-changing cast of characters.

"The idea was always, with a changing line-up it never gets boring. After the Sturm and Drang tour, we found that some status quo had manifested itself in the meantime that really didn’t make it all that necessary for more line-up changes, it was all of a sudden quite desirable to stay in the same formation and explore a little further and probe a little deeper, and see what else we could come up with," Konietzko explains. "So the latest album, WWIII, was, contrarily to all previous KMFDM albums, really done in a band setting, as a band, with the conventional ways of recording that people would have done in the old days. Instead of going all out with the electronic elements, we started recording drum kits, guitars, basses, and had a lot of fun and a lot of experience gained through the process.

"Attak was a real jump-in-the-water kind of experiment. I approached previous members of KMFDM about the possibility of a reunion, and I was met with pretty mixed reactions. Some people – Raymond [Watts], Lucia [Cifarelli], Tim Skold – were all over it. En Esch, Günter [Schultz] [two of KMFDM’s most significant former collaborators – ed.], and others were more like . . . ‘leave it buried as it is.’ So we had to really try out things and see how it would work in this new combination, in this new constellation. Basically use the MDFMK set-up, plus Raymond, plus a few guest musicians – Bill Rieflin, Julian Hodgson, and whatnot. It led us through a period of everything, from musical experimentation to soul-searching, to also falling back on some of the more formulaic elements of KMFDM. As you can imagine, when you’re absent for a couple years, there’s some sort of pressure building up. With WWIII, that element didn’t seem to be around at all any more, it was a very relaxed, playful atmosphere in which we recorded."

Lucia Cifarelli is KMFDM’s current female member, who transitioned into the group after working with Konietzko and Tim Skold on a one-album project called MDFMK during KMFDM’s three-year hiatus. Cifarelli, who also pursues a solo career, is the latest addition to a legacy of strong female singers, such as Dorona Alberti and Cheryl Wilson, that KMFDM has consistently pulled on board.

"KMFDM wasn’t really precisely formed, it’s kind of formed itself. And the initial idea behind it was a totally international – you know, whatever gender, whatever beliefs – kind of thing," muses Konietzko. "So we had this sort of female/male kind of mixed element ongoing from the very beginning. As far as my view on the role of women in industrial music, I don’t think it’s very relevant. Industrial music’s such a sort of narrow-minded little community, it doesn’t really matter. Women definitely have their place, of course, in all fields of life, so also in industrial music . . . .

"Lucia was the singer for a band called Drill that was very admired by us in the late ’90s. I approached her management through my management at one time to see if there was any collaboration possible between the two bands, and we got to do a remix for one of her songs. A few years later, Tim Skold and I, after the breakup of KMFDM . . . were thinking we sort of needed to look around and find a female vocalist for our MDFMK project. Lucia was listed on this wish list of collaborators. We approached her, and she had just a moment of time to spare for us, kind of then joined the project because we get along well, apparently she liked the stuff that we were doing."

One of the most exciting aspects of KMFDM’s rejoining was the readmission of Raymond Watts to the band. "Raymond just showed up one day in 1982, or maybe ’83, in this sort of dingy little watering hole that everyone in Hamburg frequented. He was introduced as some music guy from England who had played bass with Psychic TV and whatnot. He was joining forces with a couple of guys from the Hamburg music scene, and they rented a little studio in this air raid shelter left over from World War II. So we just all kind of convened there and hung out, did drugs, and recorded music."

Watts, a powerful lyricist and musician, worked with KMFDM during its formative years, contributing most notably on Nihil, but had drifted off to orchestrate his own ongoing industrial project, Pig, which released its latest album, Genuine American Monster (Metropolis) in 2002. The two bands maintained a relationship through remixing each other’s work before Watts agreed to become an official member of KMFDM with Attak. Currently, Konietzko, Watts, and Cifarelli comprise the band’s songwriting base. KMFDM’s lyrics have always been known for their intuitive wordplay, which allows for the embedding of political and social messages in a witty, intellectual manner. The songs may achieve this by cutting through cliche or propaganda, such as in "Drug Against War" off Angst, featuring media samples from the first Bush regime, or by examining a word in a new light, like "Preach/Pervert" on Attak. "[W]e’re all pretty literate people and have read all our lives and are pretty well-read. I guess that sort of contributes to a climate in one’s head that lends itself to irony and intelligent remarks," Konietzko remarks. Another trait running throughout the lyrics are the repetition of the band’s personal catchphrases, often imbued with revolutionary undertones.

"I guess the repetitive element is something that has to do with conceptual continuity, sort of a thing that, for example, Frank Zappa widely mused on. If you start building a wealth of work, like a work of art or music, there’s definitely references that reoccur. That’s pretty much the same with most artists, I think, with everyone’s work from William Burroughs to Roy Lichtenstein. It’s a cross-genre kind of thing. It serves as a little reminder: ‘Hey, this is us shouting around here.’ And the name-checking thing, that’s kind of like a nod to old-school rap. I mean, we started in the mid-’80s, and we learned from the early-’80s kind of rap music thing that it’s always a good thing to check your own name. Because on the dance floor you don’t always run up to the d.j. and ask, ‘Who’s that playing right now?’"

The incorporation of old-school rap elements into industrial music is indicative not only of Konietzko’s investigation into a vast array of musical possibilities, but also his enduring sense of humor, which creeps into each album through more improvisational or experimental tracks. "On every record, there’s a bit of something that’s sort of done in that spirit," says Konietzko. "Whether it be the drum bits on the intro of the song "Intro" on the latest album [WWIII] or the song "Sleep" on Attak, or "The Problem" on the album Angst. There’s always like the odd man out track." One of the best examples of this is the hidden track at the end of XTORT, a narrative of a perverse fairytale set to dreamy piano riffs and industrial sound effects.

"[T]hat was a contribution of another long-time collaborator, Jr. Blackmail, a Dutch artist as well – a painter. He has always had a fondness for very strange spoken word kind of stuff with his own dirty fantasies [as inspiration]. So he was basically sitting in the studio during part of the recording of XTORT, and he writing as we were mixing and recording, and I said to him, ‘What are you writing, man?’ He read it to us, and we said, ‘That needs to be put to some sort of strange music or background noise.’. . . . [I]t was more like kids at play than a serious recording. We just rolled all kinds of screws and loose bits . . . over the floor and Günter [Schultz] was hammering on the piano, it was just crazy stuff."

With KMFDM now in a concrete formation – Konietzko handling synthesizer, percussion, sampling, and vocals; Watts on guitar and vocals; Lucia lending vocals; Jules Hodgson and Steve White on guitars; Bill Rieflin on bass; and Andy Selway on drums – the band continues to get its hands dirty in all types of arenas. "We just released this latest album, we just did a tour, we went in the studio for awhile and produced the entire game-level music for the new Spiderman 2 videogame – which shows KMFDM once again from a whole different angle," notes Konietzko. "This kind of stuff sounds more, like, reminiscent of the electronic KMFDM rather than this sort of heavy, hard late KMFDM. Right now we’re doing a bit of a production for a band here from the Northwest, and we’re looking basically at going back out on tour sometime in the spring, summer." Confirmed gigs for 2004 in Europe include Russia, Germany, and the UK, with possibilities in Belgium and France, as well as Australia, Japan, and South America. Not only has KMFDM persevered through the ups, downs, and transformations of the industrial movement, they have helped to keep industrial music alive and progressive, to which the band’s new sound and membership pay testimony "[T]hat was already tried and tested and found true on a pretty grueling tour," Konietzko reflects. "And if that kind of thing doesn’t weld people together, then what does?"

Caroline Saffer is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Baltimore City Paper and Charleston City Paper. She may be reached at poetess13@hotmail.com