Portion Control interview: ‘It’s closer to handling someone else’s archive that happens to have your name on it’
Portion Control talk to Side-Line about “1983-86 – Hit The Pulse to Purge…”, the 4CD Artoffact archive released on August 14, 2026.
Portion Control - Photo by Karo Kratochwil
Portion Control have always been slightly awkward candidates for canonisation. Formed in London in 1979, their early use of synthesisers, drum machines and sampling is routinely positioned at the beginning of a lineage that runs through industrial, EBM and harder forms of electronic music. Their influence on subsequent artists is well documented; Portion Control themselves, however, have rarely seemed particularly interested in behaving like a historical institution. Their attention has remained stubbornly fixed on whatever comes next. That makes “1983-86 – Hit The Pulse to Purge…” unusually interesting. The four-CD set, released by Artoffact Records on August 14, 2026, gathers material from one of Portion Control’s most consequential periods, including “Hit The Pulse”, “..Step Forward”, “Psycho Bod Saves The World”, singles, demos, rarities, live recordings and previously unreleased material. Paul Lavigne remastered the archive at Kontrast Mastering, while Stefan Alt created the new visual presentation. The collection also includes Rhys Fulber‘s rebuild of “Refugee”, allowing an artist shaped partly by the electronic vocabulary Portion Control helped establish to return to that vocabulary four decades later.
There is also a particularly good contradiction here. When Side-Line spoke with John Whybrew in 2020, he described new work as the band’s “lifeblood”, stressed that nothing remains still for long and was distinctly unsentimental about physical formats, including the CD. Six years later, Portion Control have signed to Artoffact after decades of independence and begun the process of formally curating their own history.
Having seen Portion Control at Wrocław Industrial Festival 2025, what struck me was precisely how little the performance behaved like heritage music. The material was physical, severe and entirely present. That raised a more interesting question than whether the old recordings had “aged well”: what happens when a band so committed to moving forward finally acquires enough distance from its own past to treat it as an archive? We talked about historical distance, control and independence, imperfect technology, remastering, the strange burden of being called influential, Rhys Fulber’s reconstruction of “Refugee”, why some old songs become more disturbing rather than less relevant with time, and whether unlimited technological possibilities can be as creatively restrictive as having almost none.
Portion Control interview
Karo: You have spent much of Portion Control’s existence resisting retrospection. In our previous Side-Line interview, new work was described as your “lifeblood”, and even now you have said that compiling this archive was almost the antithesis of your usual forward-facing approach. What had to change before looking backwards became creatively legitimate? At what point does preserving the past stop feeling nostalgic and become another form of authorship?
Portion Control: Nothing changed as a conscious decision; it was more that enough time passed for the material to feel like a document rather than a repeat. While you’re still inside a period, revisiting it just feels like going over old ground. Forty years on, it’s not the same band looking at its own work anymore; it’s closer to handling someone else’s archive that happens to have your name on it. That distance is what turns it into authorship rather than nostalgia; we’re not trying to relive 1983-86, we’re trying to finally, fully document it.
Karo: The period covered by “1983-86 – Hit The Pulse to Purge…” was also the moment when increasing industry attention, management and eventually a major-label relationship began to make you feel that control was slipping away. Four decades later, after years of determined independence, Portion Control has entered a partnership with Artoffact. What distinguishes collaboration from surrendering control for you now? Has doing almost everything yourselves for so long changed your ability to recognise that boundary?
Portion Control: The difference is consent and reversibility. Losing control in the mid-80s wasn’t a choice we kept renegotiating; it was structural, built into the deals we were in. Working with Artoffact is a genuinely acceptable, realistic partnership, and that’s precisely what keeps it from feeling like surrender. Four decades of doing everything ourselves has made us sharper at spotting the difference between someone adding capability and someone quietly taking a decision away from us. We’re not naive about it, but we don’t assume every partnership repeats that old pattern either.
Karo: An archive is never completely neutral. Once you decide which demos, B-sides, live recordings, alternate versions and apparently marginal pieces belong together, you are effectively establishing a new hierarchy within your own history. Did compiling the set alter your understanding of that period? Were there recordings you once regarded as peripheral that now tell you more about what Portion Control actually was than some of the records considered central at the time?
Portion Control: Yes, more than we expected. There were pieces we’d filed away as ambient/experiments that, heard again in sequence, turned out to carry more of what the band actually was than some of the tracks we’d always treated as the “proper” releases. Putting things into an archive forces you to listen for what’s consistent, and it’s usually the rough or marginal pieces where that consistency shows up most clearly. A lot of this material carries strong memories of the period that are impossible to listen past.
Karo: Paul Lavigne has remastered material created under technological conditions radically different from those available now. But those limitations, the noise floor, early sampling, imperfect machines and restricted possibilities, are also part of what gave the recordings their character. Where is the line between revealing what was originally there and retrospectively improving it? At some point, does an imperfection become part of the composition itself?
Portion Control: Paul’s remastering was about getting the material into the best possible shape given the formats we had to work from, not about correcting or improving it. The noise floor, the limitations of the originals, the crude sampling and early electronics: none of that is incidental to the sound, it’s structural to it. Scrub it all out and you’re not restoring the piece, you’re making a different piece that happens to share a title.
So yes, we think imperfection becomes part of the composition once enough time has passed; not because we’re sentimental about tape hiss, but because those limitations shaped the choices we made in the first place. Remove them and the choices stop making sense. Paul understands our material on all levels and it reflects in the care he has applied to the mastering.
Karo: When I saw Portion Control at Wrocław Industrial Festival, what struck me was that the concert did not feel archival at all. The material remained extremely physical and immediate. What allows a forty-year-old electronic piece to remain convincing in that environment? Is that durability already embedded in rhythm and sound design, or does older material have to be actively reconstructed through performance in order to survive?
Portion Control: It isn’t automatic; you have to keep reconstructing it through better equipment, process and performance rather than just replaying it. A track from this period has to earn its place in the set the same way a new one does; every track has to serve the overall physical energy we’re aiming for. We don’t have many tracks from this earlier era, but the ones we do have to sit naturally into that balance.
Karo: Portion Control is repeatedly described through the artists you influenced. That is obviously recognition, but influence can also become a peculiar historical trap: the discussion moves immediately toward what happened after you rather than asking what the original work was doing on its own terms. Does being framed primarily as a precursor ever obscure the work itself?
Portion Control: Sometimes, yes. It’s a strange position; being useful mainly as a reference point gets tiresome. We don’t resent the artists we’re named alongside, but the conversation tends to stop at “and then X happened because of this”, rather than asking what the work was actually doing on its own terms. We’d rather be talked about for what’s intriguing or specific in the material itself than for the lineage it’s slotted into.
Karo: That makes Rhys Fulber rebuilding “Refugee” particularly interesting. Someone who belongs to a later generation of industrial electronics, and who encountered a language Portion Control helped establish, is now returning to one of the pieces that helped form that language in the first place. Is there something circular about that? Can somebody influenced by your work hear possibilities in it that you could not possibly have heard in 1984?
Portion Control: Very much so, and it’s one of the most satisfying parts of this whole project. Someone who grew up in the industrial/electronic scene we helped shape comes back to rebuild one of our own pieces. Rhys was hearing things in “Refugee” we genuinely couldn’t have heard in 1984, because he’s hearing it through everything that’s happened since. We’re proud both to have been a small part of Rhys’s formative years, and for him personally with what he’s gone on to achieve.
Karo: “Refugee” is also uncomfortable because its subject has not become safely historical. When an old song suddenly seems newly relevant, is that proof of artistic durability, or evidence that the circumstances it responded to were never resolved? What happens to the meaning of a song when another forty years of history accumulate around it?
Portion Control: The second, honestly. We’d rather “Refugee” felt safely dated. That it doesn’t says less about the song ageing well and more about the conditions it was responding to never really going away. The meaning does shift with accumulated history, but not in a comfortable direction. It gets darker and heavier, not more historical.
Karo: I have to return to something you told Side-Line in 2020. You were remarkably relaxed about the decline of the CD because, as you put it, you never particularly liked the format anyway. Now we have this substantial four-CD archival set, accompanied by Stefan Alt’s design and a 24-page booklet. Has the CD finally won you over, or is there an important distinction between a format as a carrier of music and a physical object as a way of giving an archive shape?
Portion Control: No; we still have no particular affection for the format itself. The four-CD set isn’t a statement about CDs; it’s about giving an archive a shape you can hold, with the booklet and Stefan’s design doing most of the real work of contextualising the material. If a different physical format had suited the archive better, we’d have used that instead. The object is what matters here; the format is just the vehicle. We’ve always been stubbornly uninterested in using format as an excuse, whether that’s hardware, recorded media or working methods.
Karo: In 2020 you also criticised the tendency for electronic music to become almost tutorial-driven, with technique treated like a science while ideas become secondary. Early Portion Control was shaped partly by severe technological and financial restrictions. Today, when almost any sound can be produced and manipulated relatively cheaply, has limitation become something an electronic artist has to create deliberately? Can having too many possibilities now be as serious a creative problem as having too few?
Portion Control: Too many possibilities is a real creative problem. Our own limitations back then, technical, financial, whatever you want to call our “ineptness”, weren’t an obstacle to the sound, they were the sound. Today we can make the sounds we’ve always wanted to, and doing that well on a modest budget is entirely possible now. Our sound has always been built on a natural aggression combined with heavy sound design, and that’s still true; it’s just no longer constrained the way it once was.
Karo: There is now an interesting collision of times around Portion Control: Artoffact is beginning to excavate the catalogue, while you are still producing new material and performing. So perhaps this is the right place to finish. Has spending this much time inside 1983-86 changed anything about what you want Portion Control to sound like next? Or does examining that period actually reinforce the need to move somewhere it cannot follow you?
Portion Control: It’s too far back to have any real influence on Portion Control today. Nothing about how we made things in that period carries forward except the indomitable PC spirit and that we understand the technical synth/sampler sequencing of that era, but that’s about as far as it goes. Our new material, like all our material before, relies on whatever is new, challenges us but lies within our reach.
Portion Control live
- 24 October 2026, Zwickau, Germany
- 19th Elektrisch Festival, Club Seilerstraße. Portion Control perform alongside Escalator, Oszylator, Cyborg Projekt X and KRIEG-B.
- 1-4 July 2027, Canterbury, UK
- Shadowlands Festival, Gulbenkian Arts Centre, University of Kent. Portion Control are confirmed alongside artists including Foetus, Lustmord, Test Dept, Clock DVA, The Wolfgang Press, Regis feat. Liam Andrews, Githead, hackedepicciotto, People Like Us, Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan and :Zoviet*France:.
About Portion Control
Portion Control formed in London in 1979 and emerged from the first wave of British post-punk and industrial electronics. Their early work combined sequenced synthesisers, primitive sampling, drum machines, aggressive vocals and rhythmic structures that helped establish a vocabulary later absorbed into industrial, EBM, techno and other forms of electronic music. Records including “I Staggered Mentally” (1982), “Hit The Pulse” (1983) and “..Step Forward” (1984) established the group’s reputation for an unusually physical form of electronic experimentation. Portion Control toured with Depeche Mode in 1984 and subsequently became an acknowledged influence on artists including Nitzer Ebb, Skinny Puppy, Front Line Assembly, Nine Inch Nails and Orbital.
After a hiatus beginning in the late 1980s, Portion Control returned in the 2000s and continued developing the project through releases including “Wellcome”, “Filthy White Guy”, “Pure Form”, “Head Buried” and the recent “SEED” series. Rather than recreating their early sound, the renewed Portion Control has continued to work with contemporary production technology while retaining the aggressive rhythmic construction and detailed sound design that have remained central to the project.
After decades of independence, the group signed with Artoffact Records in late 2025. The label is now working with Portion Control both on new material and on a series of archival releases, beginning with “1983-86 – Hit The Pulse to Purge…”, released on August 14, 2026.
Based in Wrocław, I work as a music journalist and photographer covering electro, industrial, EBM, gothic, and darkwave. My work includes features and live coverage, as well as concert, portrait, promo, and theater photography. What interests me most is the connection between artistic intention, what the work communicates, and what unfolds live on stage, all in pursuit of the bigger picture behind the music.
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