(Original English text by Piero Scaruffi)

The Missing Foundation were one of the most radical rock bands of all time. Emerging from the anarchic entourage of New York’s neo-Dadaist art scene, they were first and foremost a multimedia collective, whose primary modes of expression were graffiti and records. Their shows in Alphabet City turned into colossal orgies of destruction, with the audience armed with spray cans. Suspected by the media and police of inciting disorder and preaching looting, the band maintained a minimal anonymity, though the singer, Pete Missing, had very little left to hide.

The group was actually formed in Hamburg in 1984 (with two members of KMFDM). In New York, Pete Missing re-formed it with Chris Egan, Mark Ashwill, and VKP.

Missing Foundation (Purge, 1987), the first testimony of their brutal political rituals of total harmonic disintegration, is a jumble of abrasive noise: in All Washed Up the singer barks at the moon, guitars wail randomly, percussion drags in a muted crawl, and everything drowns in the deafening buzz of electronics, generating a hellish atmosphere; Sucked Into Eternity is a concert of hammered wood and metal, backed by free-jazz jams and psychotic vocalizations in the foreground; Eat By The Pool is a concentration of vocal and percussive cataclysms.

The other side of the band is that of a cult of frenzied maniacs, devoted to unsettling rituals. Powerful and grotesque voodoo cadences (or war drums, take your pick) drive Little Jean Of France, with the shrieking voice shouting lyrics over the usual dissonant bacchanal; Waco Waco, wildly torn apart by horrific intermittent riffs and choral cries of perverse lust; and the raucous, feverish danse macabre of Star Of David.

Pure “industrial” chaos is reached in Kill The Hypnotic Bastards, where music is reduced to a faint trace, and every sound emanates an epic yearning for frontal battle.
More than songs, these are hysterical crises, neurotic tics, and lunatic asylum speeches. From vocal loops to indestructible layers of distortion, it is an ode to cacophony, chance, primitivism, and sustained affront. These are solemn odes to the filthiest corners of daily reality, played with the entire body, using all objects and sound sources available, with the mind fully engaged, and centuries of frustration and repression behind them—always performed as if these were the last four minutes of life. No figure in industrial music has ever dared to dive so fully into the most unpleasant universe of sounds (and combinations of sounds). Only by combining the darkest nightmares, the most blasphemous heresies, and the most inhuman paroxysms of Pop Group, MC5, and Chrome can one approach this level of barbarity.

The next release, 1933 (Purge, 1988), does nothing to temper the revolutionary drive but accentuates the primitivism of their music: Kingsland, for example, is practically a composition of nothing but screams and muffled thuds, naturally entirely disconnected. By reducing music to its bare minimum, their ritualism became even more bestial, as evident in Burn Trees (with a spine-chilling electronic dissonance finale) and Jameels Turmoil; and in at least one track (Martyr Of The City), guitar distortions burst in to create further chaos. The poster-like tracks, programmatic, didactic, emphatic, warped by slogan loops and endless sonic diversions, shine with an increasingly malevolent light (Invasion Of Your Privacy and 1933). Greater expertise in mixing allows for “concrete” sonic frescoes of great impact, even if barely musical (Go Sit On The Beach). Aside from Missing’s vocals, the most characteristic sound is Chris Egan’s dense tribalism. Melody is entirely absent; the singing has the sweetness of an animal cry.
Lacking any sense of humor, Missing Foundation can be caustic to the point of the macabre: CIA World Fair is a fair of horrors, hinting at decades of torture and massacres. While their theory aligns with that of David Peel and the Fugs of old, their practice follows the most radical Trotskyism.

Humanity Demise (1989) loosens the grip somewhat, without diminishing the political commitment.

Ignore The White Culture (Restless, 1990) and Go Into Exile (Restless, 1992) redefine their sound as the soundtrack of the leader’s deliriums.

From their ashes, the Spitters would emerge.

Missing Foundation are the minstrels of cultural apocalypse in the post-industrial era. Their claustrophobic, Kafkaesque records are the experiences most in tune with the rapid deterioration of living conditions in metropolises like New York. Their music is above all the terrifying cry for freedom of cyberpunk culture.

In the late 1990s, Peter Missing released a few collaborations in Europe of noise, ambient and electronic music, summarized on the 4-CD compilation 1984-2004.

Nature Revolt (2002) and Rocket the U.S. (2002) were collaborations with DJ Hazard. War of the Minds (2010) was credited to Missing Seven Hazard.

Missing Foundation returned with Nature Is Watching You (2018), Real Freedom (2018), Hard Surface (2021).