Published by Alessandro Violante on September 30, 2026
Back in the days when industrial music was born and it still wasn’t codified in the way it is today will all its subgenres, listening to the music of Throbbing Gristle, Einsturzende Neubauten or Test Dept., you could feel how these bands also recorded the processual aspect of their music and their attempts to find their sound, that same feeling you can find by experiencing all those artworks, whether records or any other form of artwork conceived everytime a new medium was studied to discover its artistic possibilities.
That same processual characteristic can be found still today in Teste releases, especially in their new 12” Erased From Memory, released on 29th May by KR3 Records, including music composed between 2023 and 2026 and dedicated to the 30th anniversary of Teste and to the memory of Juan Mendez, who conceived the release visual concept, the new brand identity, the cover artwork and the fanzine layout included in the release. Teste’s story began in the very early nineties as a project of David Foster (now better known for his projects HUREN and O/H together with Rich Oddie of Orphx) and of Himadri Ghosh and Thomas S. Browning but now, since the release of the 12” The Box Man on Phase Fatale label BITE in 2018, the lineup of the project consists of David Foster and Martin Maischein (also known as Goner). Between their 2018 12” and this new release, Teste released the monumental Graphic Depictions on tape and 2×12” on L.I.E.S. Records in 2020.
Only focusing on the records released with the current lineup, Teste can be considered one of the best examples of those projects constantly experimenting the possibilities of the industrial sounds. As a consequence of the neverending sonic research identity of the project, all their releases are very different from each other and explore different sonic directions.
If The Box Man had a 4/4 beat “in the background” for their sonic studies and Graphic Depictions, aptly titled, depicted fragments of their research, ranging from pure noise and/or cinematographic tracks to raw beat-driven constantly mutating shrapnels, in this new 12” we feel immersed in their personal sonic factory.
In the long opener Eaves, with its length of 8 minutes, if we close our eyes, we can see them in the act of jamming into an active industrial factory, playing mutating noisy industrial technoid symphonies in a similar way Test Dept. did in the early days of industrial music. The industrial, morbid and claustrophobic atmosphere conveyed by it is worth the price of the record, and that’s only the opener.
Administration of Fear does something similar but within the bounds of a 4/4 rough techno beat, with its glitches, its noise injections and its alienating and filthy atmosphere. Boxer’s Omen is even rawer and sounds exactly as a working day in a factory located in some grey suburb of an industrial city, with its inhuman beats and its sampled morbid vocals. With its length of 8 minutes, this track sounds like alienation in its darkest and filthiest expression, the end of the world as we know it. The ending song Demoniache Presenze is a short rhythmic experiment descendant of aforementioned Test Dept. music, another snapshot of a working day in a filthy factory or the final track of the soundtrack of a movie about alienation in some industrial city.
In the end, after having lived our journey through this sonic apocalypse and this bleakest possible scenario for society – maybe what Teste may have wanted to achieve and what we searched in this kind of release – the final question we could ask ourselves when imagining the songwriting process used by Teste is: do we dominate the machines, or are we dominated by them? I think that’s one of the questions Teste tried to raise in their listeners.
Label: KR3 Records
Rating: 9,5