Outsiders: Nicolas Ballet

Kiosk Radio x Kanal

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Person sitting against a wooden backdrop, blindfolded, wearing dark clothing, with a red tint covering the entire image.

Kanal is not only a building a museum, but also a sound. Online community radio Kiosk proved the perfect partner to help broadcast it into Brussels and beyond. For the Outsiders series, once a month on Sunday mornings, Kanal invites over an artist for a one-hour set: a new composition, a mix, an interview.

Nicolas Ballet is an art historian and associate curator in the new media department of the Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou. In 2025, he published the book Shock Factory: The Visual Culture of Industrial Music.

His set explores the connections and exchanges between foundational industrial music projects such as SPK, Throbbing Gristle and Z’E, and other artistic movements – from the experiments of sonic pioneers like Pauline Oliveros and Maryanne Amacher to a new generation of artists who draw on these legacies while adopting a more hybrid approach to creation.

These networks highlight how the industrial scene has remained fresh and flexible, caught up in an ongoing process of cross-pollination with genres such as noise, harsh noise, power electronics, hyperpop and hardcore.

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