Sandy Nys (Hybryds) interview about the evolution of industrial and electronic music: ‘I feel Industrial no longer exists. I don’t know what could replace it’

I had been mulling over the idea for some time of dedicating a more extensive interview to the early Industrial and Electro experiments of the 1980s. From an early age, I was drawn to that music, which felt like a direct counter-movement to the more commercial trends I found incredibly boring as a teenager—and still do today. As a result, I immersed myself in obscure sounds from even more obscure artists such as Test Department, Bourbonese Qualk, Z’Ev, Muslimgauze, Zaghurim, Zero Kama ao, but also bands like Die Form, The Klinik, Cabaret Voltaire, and even Front 242 in their early years. It didn’t just sound different; there was a clear sense of genuine passion behind it. Music and engagement went hand in hand—a unity that, over the years, I have seen gradually fade away. Growing increasingly nostalgic, this realization inspired me to conduct an interview on the subject. When I heard a fantastic podcast by Hybryds‘s Sandy Nys a few months ago about the early days of Klinik, I immediately knew I had found the perfect conversation partner.

In this extensive interview, Sandy reflects on his lifelong journey in the Belgian Industrial and Electro scene, from the DIY experimentation of the 1980s to his current projects with Hybryds and Rabbits Wear Boots. Across decades of performances, collaborations, and underground creativity, Sandy offers an unfiltered view of the artistic, social, and political forces that shaped his music. Readers are invited to explore not only the evolution of Industrial music but also the philosophy and ritualistic intent behind Sandy’s work. This interview preserves the artist’s voice intact, including personal, provocative, and deeply reflective insights, accompanied by links to music, performances, and podcasts referenced throughout. (Courtesy by Inferno Sound Diaries)

Sandy Nys (Hybryds) interview

Q: In the lead-up to this interview, you told me you prefer talking about the past rather than the present. That suits me perfectly, as that is exactly my intention. Are you nostalgic about the past? And how do you perceive the present, especially musically?

Sandy: Don’t we all become nostalgic as we grow older? Even my grandfather used to say, ‘Everything was better in the past’, despite having lived through two so-called ‘great wars’. I experience the present as profoundly dark. Music has lost its social function. It has been reduced to rhythm alone: dancing in order to forget that Western civilization is decaying. The Occident is burning, while the Neros of our time casually play their harps and watch the apocalypse unfold.

Politics has become the whore of religion. I HATE the monotheistic religion. Feelings such as hatred, aversion, or disgust toward cultural principles that don’t belong in a secular West and modern world have suddenly become legally punishable. You are no longer allowed to say anything about Islam (Islamophobia!) or about the genocide carried out by Israel (antisemitism!). You are no longer allowed to express certain feelings; instead, you are expected to conform to a left-green-woke moral framework. If you don’t, you’re immediately demonized as a racist or fascist. The ‘left’ has become the new fascism.

The technology I once believed would bring individual creative freedom has turned into a digital prison. People are reduced to data points, monitored and sanctioned by a Big Brother state. Social media has transformed human beings into zombies living for likes, chained to the opium of their screens.

In the 1960s, music often functioned as protest. Punk did the same a decade later. Today, however, I see no Electronic music acts daring to take a political stance that goes against imposed norms. I am deeply disappointed in the Belgian Electro scene. Even backstage, mentioning religion, or Islam in relation to politics, will get you labeled a Nazi. That is the result of decades of media indoctrination.

We are expected to accept ‘diversity’ being forced upon us, and to silently watch Islam—the most backward and pathological form of monotheistic religion—advance through Western society. Out of fear of being called racist? Out of cowardice? Or simply out of ignorance about what mass immigration is doing?

Q: I’ll get straight to the point: for me, Industrial music as we knew it in the 1980s is largely gone except for a few rare, obscure artists who still retain some Industrial elements. Do you share that view, and how have you seen Industrial music evolve over the years?

Sandy: Absolutely. Real, dark, uncompromising Industrial music today is almost exclusively made by older artists. Genocide Organ is still active, and to me that is pure Industrial pleasure. Occasionally, I still discover interesting work on obscure compilations, but Industrial as it existed ‘back then’ is no longer being made. Nine Inch Nails is now commonly labeled Industrial, but to me it’s simply Rock music with electronics.

Q: What I found so compelling about the Industrial scene of the 1980s was its creativity: people were building their own instruments, often from scrap metal, and experimenting without limits. What was driving that spirit, and how do you remember that period of creation and composition?

Sandy: Quite simply: I had no money to buy synthesizers. My first recordings were made with a Tandy stereo microphone, a small Tandy mixer without EQ, and three cassette decks, one of which could record at double speed and therefore played back at half speed. And, of course, everything that made noise was fair game.

I wanted to make music that didn’t exist yet. Friends of mine played in Rock or Punk bands, but what was the point of doing the same thing? I had always been fascinated by sound itself. In the 1970s, you could sometimes borrow records from an older, slightly unhinged friend: German Krautrock, Fripp & Eno, Guru Guru, Tonto’s Expanding Head Band. And of course Pink Floyd, one of the most formative influences of my youth. These artists broke away from conventional musical structures. That gave me far more satisfaction than Rock, Pop, or anything formulaic.

Q: Beyond the music itself, there was often a strong underlying ideology that fueled many artists think of SPK, Test Dept, Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, and others touching among others on political, social, religious, sexual, and psychological themes. At times, this seemed just as important as the music itself. How did you experience this, and what inspired and motivated you back then?

Sandy: Back then, you were still allowed to criticize politics and religion. The oil crises of the 1970s suddenly made the world feel bleak. We had all read Orwell’s “1984”. Ronald Reagan was threatening nuclear annihilation in order to destroy communism. The CCC was planting bombs in the name of liberation. The Brabant Killers spread terror throughout Belgium. Punk reacted directly against politics. Industrial went deeper, it allowed us to cut into the human psyche itself.

Today, that is no longer possible. A left, woke minority elite has weaponized the media as an Orwellian sword of Damocles, ready to decapitate anyone who refuses to conform. As a convinced and combative atheist, I am regularly threatened and insulted, labeled a Nazi or racist.

Hybryds arose because of my hate of religion. And religion became politics. The other members of Hybryds do not want to take a political stance with music. That is precisely why I started my solo project Rabbits Wear Boots. Fuck religion. Resist!

“Fuck Religion” videoclip:

https://archive.org/details/fuck-religion_202604

“We Are Not A Number” videoclip:

https://archive.org/details/rabbits-not-a-number-kl-sd-480p

Q: Industrial music in the 80s also stood out for its intense and uncompromising live performances, which, in my opinion, often seemed as important as the music itself. Was this a conscious choice? What was the purpose of these performances, and how essential was that aspect for you?

Sandy: Music is the expression of emotion, and emotion is best communicated physically. What happened on stage intensified the music. I remember Bourbonese Qualk performing at the Monty cinema, where they built a massive construction the audience had to walk through, which slowly collapsed during the performance. Or SPK, where metal barrels were suddenly thrown into the audience and then played among them.

La Fura Dels Baus turned the audience into part of the performance through brutal theatre and sound. They brought the underground to a broader public. I remember bourgeois spectators screaming and fleeing as blood and entrails rolled through the venue. And then there was Club Moral, where everything shocking and extreme could be witnessed.

Boundaries were crossed. Creativity intensified. Much of that has disappeared. The laptop replaced the group. There are still worthwhile initiatives, Porta Nigra in Aarschot still programs an interesting underground, but compared to the early 1980s, everything feels disturbingly well-behaved.

Q: Belgium was undoubtedly a productive, and above all high-quality, breeding ground for Electro and Industrial music. I have always associated this with the very specific international and national context of that era: cold war, rising unemployment, the terror caused by the CCC, the Brabant Killers, and a highly turbulent political climate. Why do you think Belgium became such fertile ground for this kind of music, and how did that context influence your own work?

Sandy: In the early 1980s, Antwerp was marked by violent polarization, especially with the rise of Vlaams Belang (extreme-right wing). There were literal street battles between left and right, arson attacks like the burning of the so-called ‘leftist’ King Kong cinema.

I never felt attracted to political movements. For me, the left meant Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. The right meant Hitler, Mussolini, Franco. The same garbage in different packaging.

What affected me more was the global atmosphere of fear. Ronald Reagan, the cowboy, threatening nuclear destruction. American missiles deployed in Europe. And already in the 1970s, the Strasbourg Resolution had opened the door to the Islamization of Europe, officially enshrining the ‘enrichment’ of Arab culture and values. Our politicians sold their own people as livestock in exchange for petroleum.

These tensions created fertile ground for subversive counter-movements worldwide, not just in Belgium. Belgium already had a reputation for Electronic music through New-Beat, but that scene was purely about dancing.

Q: Some readers may not realize that you were already very active at the time, with Maniacs as your musical outlet before your later collaborations with The Klinik and Absolute Body Control. What can you tell us about those early experiences, and what did Maniacs stand for?

Sandy: I wanted to create music that didn’t exist yet. Why make Punk, Rock, or Pop, genres being mass-produced and force-fed to us? For me, music was sound, and sound affects the human brain. My fascination with Ritual was already strong. When I was sixteen, I visited my parents in Africa and witnessed a fertility ritual in a little village. For a young white boy, that experience was overwhelming.

In so-called ‘primitive’ cultures, music is used to reach higher states of consciousness. My early Electro-Acoustic pieces were a form of purification, tools to reach altered states. Music was not a song or a composition; it had to provoke a physical reaction.

Sound is vibration on an atomic level. Everything has a frequency. And vibration can influence reality.

Q: Eventually, the rather unique project Absolute Controlled Clinical Maniacs came into existence, which originated from a performance in Norway. How did the collaboration between all those people come about? Who contributed what, and how were the compositions developed? Was there a shared ideology or philosophy behind it?

Sandy: Through my cassette label, I became involved with Radio Centraal in Antwerp—a free radio station overflowing with anarchistic creativity. That’s where I met the Electro underground: Mark Burghgraeve, Dirk Ivens, Eric Van Wontergem, Mark Verhaegen, Gin Devo. People with synthesizers, drum machines, sequencers, creating an entirely new sound.

When Jürgen Knudsen invited me to perform in Norway, I asked Dirk and Mark to join me. We merged our material and traveled as one entity: Maniacs, Absolute Body Control, and Klinik combined. The LP recorded there, financed by that performance, was released as “Sabotage” – Klinik on my cassette label and exploded like a bomb.

A shared ideology? The sense that the world was drowning in darkness. You can hear that in the sound fragments embedded in Klinik’s early work.

Netwerk: Podcast: Klinik early years:

https://archive.org/details/klinik-netwerk-podcast-sd-480p

Q: The music from that Norwegian performance was later released under the name The Klinik. Was this mainly due to Marc Verhaeghen’s influence and contribution, or what was the real reason behind that decision?

Sandy: Mark Verhaegen had already performed under the names Spier Relaxance and Klinik with Mark Burghgraeve. Klinik was simply a name that resonated—it sounded right.

Pre-Klinik: (Mark Verhaegen& Mark Burghgraeve)

Q: What was the common ground and underlying bond between all the members of Absolute Controlled Clinical Maniacs, and how did that evolve over time? Did you stay in touch, and what remains today of that early collaboration?

Sandy: Common ground? The love for Electronic music, of performing and expressing our feelings. Marc Verhaegen, however, was not an easy person to work with, and Klinik quickly became a duo of Dirk and Mark. My interest in Ritual and Trance didn’t really fit the concept either. Dirk and Eric became my lifelong friends. Dirk’s label DAFT released Hybryds and we toured and performed many times together. Mark later developed psychological problems, apparently, he does little more than play video games now. A pity, because he was a musical genius.

Q: You recently launched a podcast featuring a great deal of music from that era, including versions of well-known Klinik tracks that many listeners had never heard before. Was there ever a concrete plan to officially release this material?

Sandy: All recordings from that period belong to Klinik. Dirk made a selection some time ago, which was released in the Klinik box set.

Q: In the 80s, the concept of the ‘underground’ was, in my view, a culture in itself—rarely discussed and often misunderstood by mainstream media. What are your own memories of that underground scene, and what does the term still mean to you today?

Sandy: The underground probably still exists, though today it seems largely reduced to illegal raves. Back then, it encompassed everything: dance, painting, poetry, music—it was a total creative ecosystem.

In Antwerp, this took place in squats, galleries, abandoned halls, cafés, private homes. It was an extremely intense period. There was always something subversive happening—something that challenged moral norms and authority. Art and music were weapons.

A good example was Radio Centraal, run in its early days by the anarchist Peter De Ceulaer, who became my closest friend. There were insane happenings: men and women locked in toilets for days with only a microphone broadcasting their conversations 24/7.

https://archive.org/…/radio-centraal-toilet-project-sd…

When SABAM interfered with free radio, a week-long marathon of live music by Radio Centraal members was broadcast.

https://archive.org/det…/radio-centraal-anti-sabam-sd-480p

At night, open microphones broadcast vacuum cleaners, cleaning crews, city sounds, drunken ramblings, many thought it was Electronic composition. Total freedom. Peter died far too young; his excesses likely played a role.

Today, Radio Centraal has become a hollow, left-woke station. I was asked to revive “Netwerk” as a podcast. The first episode, about religion and atheism, was banned for being offensive. The second, about Klaus Schwab’s “The Great Reset”, was banned as ‘conspiracy theory’.

https://www.mixcloud.com/…/netwerk-20-podcast-religie…

https://www.mixcloud.com/…/netwerk-the-great-reset…

Q: You mentioned your own show on Radio Centraal in Antwerp. Together with a handful of fanzines and small magazines, this formed a crucial platform for discovering music and exchanging information. How important was this for you, and how do you look back on that period?

Sandy: It was everything. There was no internet. A global underground network emerged through Xeroxed magazines and cassette tapes. Politics, sex, music, everything circulated outside mainstream control. It was total creative freedom. Nearly thirty years later, this culture is finally being rediscovered online. My radio show was called “Netwerk”.

Netwerk archive:

https://www.mixcloud.com/…/netwerk-2-november-1989…

Martin Franklin’s podcast series documents this beautifully:

https://cassetteculturepodcast.com/cassettes-on-the…

Cassette Culture

Q: I also recall that until the early 1990s, there was a strong interaction between different art forms, sometimes resulting in ‘total concepts’ presented in unusual locations. Today, artists seem to work far more in isolation. Has that interdisciplinary connection become rare, or am I romanticizing the past?

Sandy: Yes, that interdisciplinary connection has almost disappeared. ‘TraumaSutra’ and Peter Geysels still do interdisciplinary work, but in the 1980s this was constant. Now it happens only sporadically.

Interdisciplinary performance by TraumaSutra & Peter Geysels:

https://archive.org/details/liminal-harmony-sd-480p

Q: Around that same period, you also started Hybryds, which sounded like a completely different musical direction. What were the origins of this project, and what was the underlying concept?

Sandy: My parents were always traveling around the world. I was raised by my grandparents in a Catholic environment. My childhood was dominated by Catholic trauma: nuns, priests, guilt, fear, corporal punishment. Monotheism poisoned our minds early on, because for Catholics, everyone is a sinner.

When I was 12 and my parents were for a while back in Belgium, they sent me to an Atheneum in the big city, where I suddenly had to attend ethics classes. A world opened up. Long time ago, the moon landing on a small black-and-white TV had made a huge impression on me; of course I wanted to become an astronaut. I was obsessed with rockets and space travel. My parents took me to the cinema to see “2001: A Space Odyssey”. I didn’t understand the story, but I sat there with my mouth open. A visual and musical trip. That was the first time I realized that music could manipulate body and mind.

The city library gave me a new universe. Books replaced religion: “Chariots Of The Gods” by Von Däniken, Charroux, Kolosimo. At thirteen, I became a convinced atheist, through access to information alone.

Later, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, art became my tool for understanding existence. I taught myself airbrushing, made large political and philosophical graffiti on paper, exhibited at Het Pannenhuis and small galleries. Later I worked as a graphic designer at the zoo, and Hybryds emerged as an art project centered on ritual, paganism, and pre- monotheistic religion. A way to understand and give meaning to the world. Working at the zoo with the smell of aroused tigers, the heat of the snake enclosures, the yellow eyes of crocodiles. It had an immensely deep meaning—an atavistic primal feeling you could never experience as a visitor. It reconnected me to ritual I once attended in Africa. We even composed Electronic Soundtracks for zoo exhibitions and performed in the zoo.

In the 1990s, Hybryds became a duo with Leen Smets (Yasnaïa), balancing Ritual and Cyber-Punk influences inspired by William Gibson.

Mistrust Authority, Promote Decentralisation: Cyperpunk.

https://archive.org/details/hybryds-stubnitz-cyber-kl

We often collaborated with others like Vidna Obmana, Ah Cama Sotz, Djen Ajakan S. The ritual should be kept alive:

https://archive.org/details/hybryds-nurnberg-93-sd-480p

Yasnaia also had her solo project.:

https://archive.org/details/yasnaia-dream-unfinished

From 2000 onwards, I performed solo as Hybryds for a while, then met Madeline in Germany, who became the new singer/musician. Later Peter De Koning joined, and we gradually became a group again. Music emerged from long hardware improvisations, later shaped into compositions in the studio. With Peter as a multi-instrumentalist and percussionist, Hybryds returned to being a Ritual group. Initially, the DAW was just a tape recorder; Peter taught me to use it as an instrument. During COVID, I fully embraced the DAW, which also led to my solo project Rabbits Wear Boots, a necessary outlet for political and religious anger that HYBRYDS could not accommodate.

Q: A subject I consider extremely important today is artistic freedom, or rather, the limitation of that freedom through algorithms and the influence they may have on younger generations. Should we be concerned about the future of art?

Sandy: Artistic freedom is nearly gone. The left-green woke monster has reached the point where even having an idea that differs from their norm is punishable. Algorithms decide what you see. Big Tech shapes behavior. Our original Hybryds Facebook page was deleted because of a naked breast in an artwork. The MOTHERGODDESS is a very important symbol in my concept. That is why my artwork depicts the erotic female, the witch, the priestess, the prostitute, the mother, the girl. LILITH, every woman is a demon and a goddess. She symbolizes the fear of female autonomy by the monotheistic religion and the admiration of her power in the Pagan world.

“Fire And Ice”; an imaginary mythical story about Vikings & strong woman (on Bandcamp) erotic

clip:

https://archive.org/details/voices-with-force-18-sd-480p

People scroll, like, climax, and forget. A video clip gets eight seconds of attention. Zombies. It’s terrifying that algorithms decide what you are allowed to see. I’m convinced they steer you in directions chosen by Big Tech, not what you want, but what Big Tech wants you to see. The younger generation is being led like sheep to the slaughterhouse of the Matrix. The digital world is becoming a prison, run by governments and Big Tech. I fear not just for art, but for humanity itself.

Q: Which artists, groups, or collectives from the early 80s Industrial scene stand out the most to you today?

Sandy: Genocide Organ, Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Einstürzende Neubauten, Catharsis.

Q: In the 1980s, artists performed with oil drums, grinding wheels, and hammers, while today many acts perform behind a laptop, yet it’s still called Industrial. Did I miss something, or has the genre fundamentally changed?

Sandy: Yes. Everything is on laptops now. Much is lost live. Some acts still deliver power and action on stage, Front 242, Dive, Vomito Negro, but subversion is gone. They’re too busy staying politically correct.

Q: More than forty years later, what do you still recognize of the young Sandy Nys in your musical approach today?

Sandy: The ritual, the trance I was searching for making music that can take me to other dimensions. “The Ritual of the Witch” on Zoharum is, for me, a very strong and pure Hybryds sound, but with contemporary influences of Techno and Trance.

“Ritual For Pazazu”:

https://archive.org/details/ritual-for-pazazu-kl

Q: So much has changed over the years. What have you gained from all these changes, and what, if anything, do you miss?

Sandy: Recording quality has improved enormously. You can now make recordings at home that required an expensive studio in the 1980s. What I miss are the many mail-order shops in the Netwerk past and physical discovery. It is all digital on Bandcamp now and Spotify is a scam for independent artists. We removed our music from Spotify, but someone else seems to have uploaded Hybryds albums again.

Q: The subject of AI fascinates me, but it also frightens me when it comes to creativity. Where does genuine human creativity fit into this future?

Sandy: I’ve been working with AI for video clips for some time now, and it’s a learning process. You have to describe what you want in very image-rich language. Even now, a three-minute clip takes me a week, creating images, rendering, editing in Final Cut Pro. It doesn’t come ready-made from AI, and the images remain clearly recognizable as AI.

I now work more with my own photos as a basis for the video clips.

The theme: The seven deadly sins. A collaboration between Hybryds (music) and Miss PolyEster (text and vocals). Apocalyptic poetry topped with a BDSM sauce.

“Seven Deadly Sins” will be released in 2026 on Zoharum.

Two versions: digipack and limited edition with erotic art book by Hybryds:

https://archive.org/details/hybryds-pain-kl-sd-480p

“The Seven Deadly Sins.18+ version”:

https://archive.org/details/htbryds-glutony-kl-sd-480p

https://archive.org/details/greed-rated-sd-480p

AI in music: Sumo is trying to create a new kind of DAW with AI, it’s far from perfect, but there are possibilities. AI can help refine ideas, fine-tune, work with stems and more tracks—that will be the future. What we hear now is still plastic perfection, an airbrushed version of what music should be.

I see the future as bleak. AI is already used for deepfakes and lies, things indistinguishable from reality. What are we supposed to believe? Disinformation will become both the greatest truth and the greatest deception of the digital world.

Q: You remain very active with Hybryds. How do you approach composition today, and how do you see this evolving?

Sandy: In the old days, I mainly worked with acoustic elements manipulated through tape speed and my first Korg sampler/delay. Later came synths, drum machines, sequencers, they’re still in our studio and used when the group comes together (“I Am The Eye Of Horus” is an example).

https://hybrydsmusic.bandcamp.com/…/i-am-the-eye-of-horus

But during COVID I dove into my DAW (Logic Pro), and that’s now my main way of working. I can do everything alone, send stems to Germany for vocals, or have TraumaSutra add parts later. It makes me far more productive and versatile than working only with hardware.

Q: Finally, what advice would someone from your generation, who stood at the cradle of Industrial music in Belgium, give to newcomers today?

Sandy: It’s getting harder and harder, everything has already been done. In the 1960s, music was a language of protest against the establishment. Industrial went deeper into the human psyche. Now everything is ‘woked’, weighed, and filtered to fit algorithms. Subversiveness has disappeared. I feel Industrial no longer exists. I don’t know what could replace it.

My advice: don’t follow rules or norms. Fuck woke. Do not believe ‘left’ nor ‘right’ political systems. Think for yourself. Create different personas, never use your real name on the internet. Throw your smartphone in the trash, use an old mobile phone. Use a VPN to connect to the internet. Try to create something that doesn’t yet exist. Don’t march with the digital media masses. The world is ruled by Big Tech and multi national corporations. Making the masses homogeneous, stripping them of identity and culture to control them more easily. Keep fighting that. Be individual and unique. Don’t be afraid. Reclaim your freedom of speech.

“WE HAVE A CITY TO BURN!”:

https://archive.org/details/rabbits-city-to-burn-kl-sd-480p