South London Industrial Pioneers Portion Control Break Down Their 77-Track Retrospective

Transmission 421: Interview with Portion Control

Formed in South London in 1979 amidst the immediate debris of post-punk, Portion Control approached electronic instrumentation not as a proxy for traditional musicianship, but as a direct vector for raw, unvarnished sound manipulation. Operating outside conventional industry structures from their early base in Kennington, the group bypassed formal composition in favour of heavy hardware sequencing, aggressive tonal sculpting, and early sampling via systems like the Greengate DS:3. Their work from this era, driven by the harsh, rhythmic frameworks of the 1982 debut I Staggered Mentally, 1983’s Hit The Pulse and 1984’s ..Step Forward, helped construct the foundations of electro-industrial and EBM, leaving an unmistakable imprint on subsequent acts ranging from Skinny Puppy to Nine Inch Nails.

Title: 1983-86 - Hit The Pulse To Purge...
Artist: Portion Control
Release Date: 2026-08-14
Genres: EBM, Electronica, Industrial Music
Label: Artoffact Records
Description: Portion Control discuss their 77-track retrospective box set on Artoffact Records, early sampler setups, and major label rejection in this Q&A.

Portion Control remain one of the most vital, unrelenting architects of British electronic music, their brutalist minimalism and refusal to dilute their output serving as a definitive masterclass in total artistic self-determination. Following a hiatus that began in the late 1980s after brief, uncomfortable encounters with major label culture, original members Dean Piavani and John Whybrew reactivated the project in 2004. Shifting their setup entirely into software, the duo initiated a second phase of production that began with the double album Wellcome and continued through Pure Form (2012) and the SEED EP series (2020–2025). In late 2025, the group partnered with Artoffact Records to collate their extensive back catalogue. The first result of this collaboration is 1983-86 – Hit The Pulse to Purge…, a 77-track retrospective box set released on 14th August 2026, comprising remastered albums, rare 12″ cuts, live recordings, and 16 previously unreleased tracks.

What made you choose synths and samplers over traditional instruments when forming in 1979?

Synthesisers, sequencers and later samplers offered a means of production that required no musical training. At that point the machines were still slightly disreputable — exciting, alien even — which left more room to define how we used them and how our output was shaped. It was the very advent of nearly affordable electronics, and we had as much appetite for the technology itself as for the sound we could make with it.

That uncertainty was useful. We were interested in sound as much as composition, and electronic equipment let us manipulate sound directly. It also suited the DIY attitude of the time — you could experiment, make mistakes, and end up somewhere unexpected with zero musical knowledge.

Which specific gear or artists most influenced your hard-edged sound in the early ’80s?

Our first synthesiser was an ARP Axxe, bought from the London Synthesiser Centre on Charlton Street. We followed it with a Roland CR-78 drum machine, an Atari ST, and the infamous Greengate DS:3 sampler running on an Apple II. We immediately bought Ultimate 1: The First Age of Darkness — unwittingly experiencing the birth of sampling and RPG computer games at the same moment. Other early hardware included a Roland SH-09, TB-303 and SH-02, an Akai S950, a Firstman sequencer, a Moog Rogue, and assorted distortion and tone-shaping guitar pedals. Anything not done in the studio went to a four-track cassette Portastudio. The Roland gear handled sequencing and rhythm; the analogue synths gave us the harsher tonal material. Sampling, once it arrived, opened up an entirely different area.

We took to sequencing early, on both hardware and computer.

As for artists — there wasn’t one group we consciously tried to emulate. We were aware of what was happening around us, industrial, DIY punk, experimental electronic music included, but the influence that mattered was the idea that electronic equipment could be used outside its intended context. We were interested in finding out what the machines could do; we never had the talent or the inclination to copy anyone else.

Did you feel connected to other early electronic acts, or were you working in isolation?

Initially, isolation. We’ve never liked working with other people or bands — it adds a layer of expectation and a loss of control. There was also a structural isolation: the infrastructure barely existed. No internet. Information came from live events, music papers, fanzines, John Peel, and word of mouth.

In the early-to-mid ’80s, in and around Kennington in South London, we ran into a healthy number of industrial groups — SPK, Nocturnal Emissions, Lustmord — all of them questioning the same assumptions about music, without necessarily sharing a musical style. The differences were often more interesting than the similarities.

The community existed because everyone was operating outside the mainstream. You didn’t have to agree musically to recognise you were involved in something beyond the conventional music industry.

What non-musical influences—art, film, or literature—shaped your raw aesthetic?

We lived in Kennington for much of early PC, so we took influences from everything around us. We followed the rise of the UK comic scene led by DC’s Vertigo imprint — Alan Moore (read our interview with Alan Moore), Peter Milligan, Grant Morrison. Alfred Bester’s novels. A run of computer games from the C64 through to the Atari ST. We wanted to build a dark mood holistically, rather than out of any specific political or art-world position.

How did the political climate of Thatcher-era Britain fuel the aggression in your music?

The aggression wasn’t a commentary on Thatcherism so much as a symptom of it — deindustrialisation, unemployment, the general narrowing of prospects for anyone not already positioned to benefit. London was collapsing and thriving at the same time. It was a difficult period, and impossible to avoid.

We weren’t making protest records in any straightforward sense, but the atmosphere inevitably worked its way into the music.

Electronic music was the appropriate language for it. Repetition, distortion, machinery, hard-edged rhythm — all of it communicated something about the period without needing to describe it literally.

What exact moment made you realise major label culture didn’t suit the band?

It became apparent through experience rather than a single moment. The expectations around a record diverged increasingly from our reasons for making one. A label has commercial considerations by nature; we were primarily interested in experimentation and keeping control of the music. Some of our ideas were altered or embellished in ways we hadn’t dealt with before, and couldn’t accept.

There were opportunities that could have pushed us further into the conventional industry, but they came with assumptions about what Portion Control should become. We were never interested in becoming a more acceptable version of ourselves just to make the music easier to sell.

Independence wasn’t an ideological position at the start — it was simply the most practical way to keep control of what we were doing. For context, the late ’80s was a period of huge profiteering from music sales. It was an ugly time to live through.

That led to a long period of inactivity until we reformed in 2004, with Dean and myself determined to have full control and to move production, against the grain, entirely into software. This new phase began with the double CD Wellcome 

As a forward-facing band, how did it feel to look back and curate this 77-track retrospective?

The discomfort is real and worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over. Curating a retrospective runs against the operating logic of a band that has generally treated its back catalogue as closed business, not raw material. What it’s given us is the chance to finally collate our material as completely as the various formats allow. Artoffact have been excellent in facilitating that.

How did you dig through the archives to choose the 16 previously unreleased tracks?

Most of the unreleased material had sat alongside the main releases all along. Some tracks were prepared for compilations; others were rebuilds of existing tracks for live use. The rest were demos from the brief, uncomfortable period when we were involved with larger labels.

How did the Rhys Fulber rebuild of “Refugee” come together?

The precise origin is difficult to recall with certainty, though it appears to have been initiated at Rhys’s request. We have maintained loose contact with him since the band’s earliest years. Rhys is a bit younger than us, and it seems Step Forward — the album on which “Refugee” appears — was a record that resonated with him formatively; “Refugee” was simply the track he elected to rework. As we have noted elsewhere, we are generally averse to third-party remixes of our material, but Rhys represents a clear exception to that position.

How did switching from ’80s hardware to modern digital tools change your writing process?

The main shift is in the cost of iteration. Hardware sequencing and hands-on synthesis imposed a discipline through friction — decisions had to be made, because undoing them meant starting again. Software removes that friction almost entirely, which changes the process from committing early to revising endlessly. That’s not a straightforward improvement; it trades one set of constraints for another.

The actual creative process is remarkably similar — we build bass and lead sequences against a rhythm track, and everything is sequenced or step-edited. The real difference is in the sound design: the ease and power of it, and how professional the results are even from a home studio. Computational power used to be a real constraint; it no longer factors in at all. We’ve always leaned toward whatever working method went against the grain of the established ones.

With this retrospective released, what can you reveal about your new original material?

A new collection of songs and tracks is in progress — recognisably Portion Control, driven by electronics and character, consistent with our material’s live delivery. Several tracks have rotated through recent live sets ahead of studio completion; that process has shaped structure and instrumentation, with material tested against an audience before being finalised.

The lead tracks sit alongside a number of darker, beat-driven ambient pieces, constructed for headphone listening — a deliberate contrast in intent and pacing within the same body of work.

Imagery is produced in parallel with the audio, developed from the same source material and reference points, and carries equivalent weight in setting mood and tone. Visual and sonic elements are treated as a single output which has to be consumed as audio and live.

Photos courtesy of © Portion Control

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others