Back in the year 2000, I was working in a major record store, and everybody was dancing to Madonna’s Music. Well, almost everybody. I, for one, was shaking my booty to a very different “Musique”. Preceding that moment in the early 1990’s, Norway’s Theatre of Tragedy was one of the first bands to blend gothic rock sensibilities with heavy metal. As far as I know, they introduced alternating between male death vocals and female clean vocals, a formula that later became a standard in the genre. To this day, Velvet Darkness They Fear (1996) may very well be the best metal album I’ve ever listened to. By the latter half of the decade, the band was well established and critically acclaimed. Theatre of Tragedy took everyone by surprise with the release of Musique in 2000, an album relying heavily on electronics, musically and thematically.  Exit Elizabethan English spelling, death vocals and double bass drums; enter red leatherette, vocoder and dirty snares. Electronic music was not unknown to metal, with the likes of Fear Factory, Godflesh or even Emperor already according synthesizers a prominent role. Musique, however, was something else. It sounded like Ministry turned disco, New Order reminiscing what punk was, and Kraftwerk gone berserk, all at once. The metal scene was taken aback, and the industrial scene was so obsessed with VNV Nation, it didn’t look twice. The relevance of this album to cyberpunk goes beyond electronic music, though. Thematically, the songs are about modern life : Neons and factory whistles (City of Light), concrete and cars (Reverie) or street fights (Crash/Concrete), mobile phones and public transportation (Commute), discotheque love (The New Man), fashion victims (Image), white collars obsessed with timetables (Commute) and blue collar “faceless men”, an android-like “cheap to rent” workforce (Machine). Computerised Voice synthesised Call me the mech man In a world of machines What can I do but to serve? Store the data and calculate Speak and spell and operate Engineer the rail and motorway Automaton of yesterday Some lyrics offer what I would qualify as “scientific nihilism”, that is to say that the scientific understanding of the world implies a loss of meaning. Cyberpunk often deals with this theme, as virtual reality, one of the most frequent tropes of the genre, is exactly about this dialectic of presenting something surreal that might seems stunningly real, but is in fact just code. The lyrics from Fragment, one of my favorite pieces on the album, never cease to make me think about how do we perceive reality: Time and age, what’s the difference Based upon the same reference Touch-and-go, who’s to know the random order? Contorted, distorted it doesn’t make any sense at all A fragment, a segment – bits and pieces, bits and Hertz Angular, circular It’s all the same There’s no sense, it’s all Volta, Ampere and Ohm Earth to Moon, it’s the same as London-Rome “There’s no sense”, because the universe is no longer moved by transcendent ideas, it is now quantifiable. The Moon is demystified, it is no more the romantic, god-like, unattainable entity in the sky. Earth to Moon is the same as London-Rome because both can be broken down into data: if one needs X to reach Rome from London, and the Moon is n-time further than Rome, than with nX one can reach the Moon. As paradoxical as it sounds, the world can therefore be understood as a “tangible virtual reality”. The official title of the album, [‘mju:zik], “music” in phonetics, exposes the skeleton of the word, as phonetics are a blueprint, a guideline on how to correctly pronounce a language. The title track, Musique (in French this time, for no obvious reason), proceeds from the same idea. It is an electronic song about composing an electronic song, with a chorus about writing a chorus. Computer music is just like oxygen Try and fail, again, again, again I need the recipe for the perfect melody I add more tracks, run out of DSP Timbre and tone, I want it synthetic Knobs and sliders, no button pushing matrix Dadaistic, nothing too profound Electric music resounding all around After eight gritty electro metal pop mashups, the album closes with three smoother pieces, Retrospect, Reverie, and the very Kraftwerk-ish Space Age (the official title is what I assume to be Russian: Космическая Эра), and a bonus hidden track, The New Man, a very upbeat romp about the darker side of clubbing: the “new circuit” is not love, but a “sort of softly touching you”, a random encounter, a pathetic attempt to escape loneliness. Behind the new man are old patterns, behind the promises of Utopias there is only more of the same, and behind the pop song is the grim reality of the human condition. This is the new circuit Tell me of your pain ‘Shove you around?’, now close the door This is not love This is my sort of softly touching you A Brownian motion of whacks on your face ‘Who are you?’ This is not the new man Another quality that makes Musique unique is that between Fragment and The New Man, between City of Light and Image, the album displays at the same time both a philosophical depth and a certain level of goodhearted fun rarely found in metal music, let alone goth metal. Theatre of Tragedy released a second electronic album in 2002, Assembly. This next opus was more pop oriented, the music was less noisy, the production more clean, and thematically it dealt with space, love and dance. Somehow it felt like Musique was theory and Assembly was practice. Don’t get me wrong, Assembly is a fantastic album, through and through, but it lacks the rough, low-fi-ish, “dadaistic”, avant-garde edginess of Musique. Then suddenly, in August 2003, the band sacked and replaced their long time female vocalist Liv Kristine, went back to traditional goth metal and eventually disbanded in 2010, while Liv Kristine formed the symphonic viking metal outfit Leave’s Eyes with her then-husband, Alexander Krull from Attrocity. While I wonder in frustration about what could have been if one or the other would have pursued in electronic music, being unique makes Musique and Assembly precious, and almost 20 years later, I still don’t have heard anything remotely close to that sound.