Music's heavy going for industrial rockers Laibach

The history of industrial music is littered with some of the most challenging sonic artefacts you'll find. Like some of the extreme sub-genres of heavy metal, or the more wilfully experimental corners of electronica, industrial music is frequently and deliberately very hard to listen to, and has been since the start.

That's because industrial music, with its frequently stated commitment to transgression, has often been more about shock and provocation, challenging people to think for themselves, upsetting their conceptions of what constitutes music, art or culture, than about making music that's pleasant to listen to in any traditional sense. Hence the tendency not only towards challenging, harsh, often borderline upsetting music, but also towards a more rounded idea of the artistic endeavour that often takes in elements of visual and performance art: conceptual movements rather than just bands who make songs.

There is no greater example of this tendency than Laibach. On the face of it, the Slovenian collective, formed in 1980, are a band that make industrial music with martial leanings, sounding like something an army would march to, backed up by unexpected cover versions - Status Quo's In the Army Now, Opus' Live is Life. But to appreciate them only on a musical level would be to miss most of what makes the band interesting: the complex, subtle, contradictory, subversive, disturbing substrata of ideological provocation that lie beneath it.

Laibach will be flexing all of their varied cultural muscles in Hong Kong over the next few weeks: a photographic exhibition taking place at CIA in Kwai Chung until March 20 has been accompanied by a series of screenings of videos of interviews, performances and documentaries, while the band will perform live at The Vine in Wan Chai on March 22, as well as participating in a seminar at City University the previous night.

"Not that we are not interested in other artists, but artists are not something that we compare ourselves with," Laibach member Ivo Saliger (a pseudonym) says. "We see us more as engineers of human souls. And those are usually very rare - and precious."

Forged in the crucible of late-1960s countercultural agitation, industrial music came into existence in the 1970s as a response to societal change, a reaction to individual powerlessness in the face of growing institutional authority and the alienating effects of mass production. Aiming to shock people out of their lethargy, bands took musical influences as diverse as composer John Cage, electronic pioneers Kraftwerk and avant-rock artists such as Captain Beefheart and the Velvet Underground (and of course Lou Reed's later Metal Machine Music, one of the first truly unlistenable adventures in pure noise), alongside cultural movements such as Dada and writers such as William S. Burroughs to create a dense blend of undertreated noise and apparently wilful experimentation informed by the tools of electronic music, the attitude of punk and the compositional techniques of everything from musique concrète to modern classical music to jazz.

A largely Anglo-Teutonic phenomenon in its early days that became extremely influential in the US, industrial music was pioneered by the likes of Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, taken to new extremes by groups such as Einstürzende Neubauten, Skinny Puppy and Test Dept, and later fused with electronic dance music and rock to score crossover success with bands such as Ministry and Nine Inch Nails.