![]() ![]() To celebrate its longevity, the label is putting on a 20th-anniversary party, dubbed “Silence Suxx,” at Public Assembly on Saturday featuring a wide swathe of acts from throughout the label’s history. Industrial Strength has continued to operate for 20 years now, with a recent emphasis on sample packs-premade sounds for producers to build their own tracks with. Not to mention the first release on sub-label IST, featuring a young Frenchman named Thomas Bangalter, and credited to one “Draft Ponk.” (More on this below.) Other classics include Dee’s Brooklyn confrere Rob Gee, with “Gabber Up Your Ass” (1994), and Australian trio Nasenbluten’s 100% No Soul Guaranteed (1995)-followed in 1997, naturally, by Not as Good as 100% No Soul Guaranteed. Dee made several of them under pseudonyms: English Muffin’s “The Blood of an English Muffin,” Fuckin Hostile’s “Fuckin Hostile” (both 1993), and DJ Skinhead’s “Extreme Terror” (1994), the latter of which longtime Voice readers may recall as the closing track from the paper’s 9/11 benefit compilation, Wish You Were Here: Love Songs for New York (2002). Industrial Strength’s ’90s catalog is like a roll call of the period’s degraded greats, blisteringly hard and frequently goofy. That year, Dee began his own label, Industrial Strength Records, with an epochal 12-inch pairing tracks from two of Dutch producer Marc Acardipane’s arsenal of pseudonyms: Mescalinum United’s “We Have Arrived,” backed with the Mover’s “Frontal Sickness.” Through the rest of the decade, Industrial Strength defined the gabber techno sound in the U.S.: metal for ’90s kids into bass bins and glow sticks as well as shredding guitars, blackout nihilism, and splatter-movie humor. ![]() By 1991, Dee was feeling restless, as he pushed his music and DJing into harder, faster, more brutal realms. The two of them were instrumental in bringing British rave to Brooklyn at the end of the ’80s. Born Leonard Didesiderio in 1968, Lenny Dee got his start in the music business as a teenager, working in the studio with Nile Rodgers and Arthur Baker while making his own dance 12-inches, most famously in tandem with Frankie Bones.
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