The vegan author Jordi Casamitjana reviews the new groundbreaking sonic art album “Industry Standard” created to communicate the sound experience of animal exploitation
It’s closer to me than it sounds.
During my new incarnation as a vegan writer — which has dominated my activism in the last five years — I have written many articles reviewing the work of others. I have reviewed documentaries, mainstream films, animated movies, novels, non-fiction books, children’s books, musicals, and speeches, all from the perspective of veganism and animal protection. However, I have never reviewed a music album or a piece of sonic art.
On the face of it, trying it would be out of my depths, you may think. If you look deeper, though, you may learn that it may not be. I am, by no means, an expert on music, but I am not a novice either. In my youth, I used to sing in many choirs, I could read music, I could play some instruments, and I even composed some work — including an overambitious attempt to write a competing full-orchestra symphony to Haydn’s oratorio “The Creation”, which I called “Evolution”. Academically, sound became part of my subjects of interest when I became an Ethologist, because part of the science of animal behaviour is to study the acoustic communication of animals, a discipline known as Bioacoustics. Indeed, I even published a peer-reviewed article on bioacoustic research, specifically on the vocal repertoire of the woolly monkey Lagothrix lagothricha. Professionally, my expertise in sound analysis helped me to secure a successful prosecution against an illegal hunter in England when I managed to prove he encouraged his hounds to chase a fox against the Hunting Act 2004 by doing an acoustic analysis of his horn and the hounds’ cries.
Music and sound, therefore, and not distant from my life and knowledge, so I could venture to review an album, if I dared to do it, and one interesting enough crossed my path. One just did, thanks to Gemunu de Silva, a fellow vegan undercover investigator with whom I did some work in the past (I was an investigator for a while), who sent me one (titled “Industry Standard”) that he and Gnostic Front have just launched. This one was a very interesting piece of animal activism in the form of a sonic art piece created from the sounds Gem and other investigators captured during his undercover work exposing animal exploitation.
It was, therefore, perfect for me.
Witnessing the Hidden “Industry Standard”
Sonic art (also known as sound art) is a contemporary art form where recorded or synthesised sound is the primary medium and subject (as opposed to musical notes from instruments or singing). Using noise, musical elements, unusual sounds and even silence to create immersive experiences, sonic art often explores space and conceptual ideas beyond traditional musical structures. It is often shown in the form of installations where the audience hears the piece in a space, sometimes aided with visual elements that take a more supporting role. However, sometimes it is just shown as a recording to be experienced by listeners as they experience any other type of music. This is the case of “Industry Standard”, although it also includes a visual element in the form of a physical vinyl album and photos in an accompanying booklet.
Crafted by Gemunu de Silva and Gnostic Front, “Industry Standard” is a groundbreaking sonic art album that exposes global animal exploitation through sound. Made from recordings captured during undercover investigations all over the world, it offers a new way to hear the realities of the lives of exploited nonhuman animals, normally revealed only through photographs and video — even if what happens to them is “standard” in the animal exploitation industries they are trapped in.
The album skilfully processes and combines mechanical rhythms, human voices, animal movements and environmental noise inside factory farms, fur farms, slaughterhouses, laboratories and live animal markets. These sounds are transformed into immersive compositions that create an artistic experience not only because of their acoustic nature but also because of the cruel reality of the story told, which the audience can learn before listening, thanks to the information they can read in the accompanying booklet.
Across eight tracks, “Industry Standard” moves from the claustrophobic ambience of fur farm sheds to the metallic resonance of slaughterhouse kill floors and the sterile hum of laboratory rooms. Each track is not simply a recording of real sound captured on the sites of abuse, but a true musical composition (with harmonies and rhythms) using recorded sounds as notes intertwined with one another and combined with other more musical elements (such as percussion beats or long chords). The tracks reveal different stories of exploitation that are neither obvious nor hidden but can be felt in such a way that invites people into a mesmerising space of empathy and denunciation.
In addition to being a piece of art to experience as any other, this album can be used as a soundtrack for both visual content created by other animal activists or even as an ambient sound during vegan outreach. In a press release, the authors wrote, “For organisations that want alternatives to graphic visuals, Industry Standard offers a powerful option. The authenticity of the field recordings, combined with the emotional impact of the compositions, makes the album suitable for many forms of outreach. These include education work, talks, exhibitions, activist gatherings, university events and any space where reflective listening may be more effective than video. Sound can bypass defences in a way that images sometimes cannot. Industry Standard gives audiences the chance to sit with the realities of animal industries without having to view violence directly.
The album will be released in different formats. Firstly, a limited edition 12-inch coloured vinyl to be released on 18th January 2026, which includes an eight-page booklet with investigative photography, track notes, and context behind the recordings. Copies can now be pre-ordered on the Industry Standard webpage. Secondly, a digital release on Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp and other platforms.
The Art of the Investigators
This work of art is the product of two animal activists turned artists — or the other way around. Gemunu de Silva, founder of the global animal protection agency Tracks Investigations, is a professional British investigator who has spent over 35 years documenting the realities of the meat, fur, research, and live animal trades. His footage has been used to expose cruelty, change laws, and inform campaigns of over 40 organisations in 58 countries. For this album, he curated sonic material from hundreds of hours of covert field recordings, collected inside facilities most people will never enter or even imagine. He said, “We wanted to create a record that does not simply tell you what is wrong with these systems. We want you to feel it. The repetition, the moments of horror, the strange quiet. It is about bearing witness in a different way.”
Gnostic Front (Karol Orzechowski) is a Canadian experimental musician, filmmaker, activist, and former animal industry investigator and current Resource Director at Faunalytics. Since 2009, Gnostic Front (GF) has been putting out records, touring, composing soundtracks, doing sound installations, and more, primarily under the name garbageface. He releases music independently through everyoneisdoomed.org . GF manipulated, layered, and composed the raw material for Industry Standard. The hum of a fan system in a factory farm becomes a layered drone bed for mediation, the sound of a sheep’s skittering hooves across a metal floor becomes a rhythmic shake. He added ambient synths, rhythmic pulses, and tonal dissonance to produce an absorbing, visceral work.
Gem was responsible for the concept, field recording curation/assembly, and photographic sourcing, while Gnostic Front did the composition, instrumentation, production, mixing, and artwork layout/design. Canadian Harris Newman did the mastering. This project was made with support from LUSH, a UK handmade cosmetic company that often supports animal rights activists.
Gem explains his background in art, music, and animal rights investigations that generated this project:
“My journey into animal rights began long before my first investigation. It started with punk. In the early 1980s, bands like Conflict, Crass, and Subhumans brought animal rights into the spotlight. Listening to Conflict’s Meat Means Murder was a turning point for me. I went vegetarian soon after. Those anarcho-punk albums weren’t just music, they were manifestos. In a time before the internet, it was record covers, lyrics, and liner notes that introduced me to political ideas. They were artefacts of resistance. And I wanted to pay homage to that.
That’s why Industry Standard is being released on vinyl, complete with an eight-page insert of photographs and reflections. I’ve always believed in art as a tool for advocacy. My very first film, Meathead, was a drama-documentary with punk and new wave icons Captain Sensible and Lene Lovich, with a soundtrack to match. Over twenty years ago, I exhibited a video installation at London’s ICA under the same title: Industry Standard. The seed had already been planted.
While my creative work took a back seat to undercover investigations and traditional campaigning, the urge to combine art and activism never left me. I took a part-time course at the University of Oxford on sonic art and environmental sound and created a prototype audio piece that reignited my desire to make a full-length sonic album. I had the concept, but I was struggling with the execution. The sounds I was using felt too brutal, too obvious.
Then, about eighteen months ago, I had a chance encounter with Karol Orzechowski, also known as Gnostic Front, at an animal rights conference in the US. Karol is a filmmaker, musician, former investigator, and Resource Director at Faunalytics. We were talking about investigations, and I casually mentioned this sound project I was struggling with. He offered to help. What followed was a year and a half of back-and-forth collaboration, fortnightly Zoom calls, sharing sounds and sketches, refining ideas. Karol brought a musical intelligence and sensitivity that completely transformed the project. I’m deeply grateful to him for his patience, creativity and vision.”
A Moving Experience
I thought that, for someone like me who has been an undercover investigator, the experience of listening to this album would be, somehow, different to that of an average listener. Like a film director watching someone else’s film, I thought I would immediately switch to analytical mode, trying to picture in my mind “how it was made.” That did not happen. The tracks are so powerful that I surrendered to them, letting myself get lost in the experience as a discarded napkin evacuated by torrential rain.
I did try to scrutinise each track’s component, and I did listen with an extra intensity to identify each sound, but in the end, the power of the track took over my analysis. As with any meaningful piece of art, I was disarmed of deconstructing intent and absorbed by the raw form and its guttural power.
Listening to each track is a unique experience that gradually pushes you away from your comfort zone. The first track is titled “Le voyage”. Distorted voices, machinery sounds, mechanical beats, shouts, cows mooing, dissonance, murmurs, silence and coastal sounds, transported me to a dark journey with no return that felt vividly bovine.
In the tract “Angora in F major”, string instruments, minimalistic repetitions, scissors, heavy drum beat, and high-pitched screams created a contrasted juxtaposition of bucolic scenery with industrious mutilations that transformed me into a terrified rabbit.
In the tract “Torn from the wild”, sounds of water, birds, rivers, plants, metal cages, breaking of branches, voices, machinery destroying vegetation, alarm calls, and then silence, hammers, and building, all combined with scary, long background chords and a crescendo beat, made me experience the horrible invasion of the humans.
The crescendo sounds of erecting scaffolding, ethnic drums, panels moved, sheeps’ calls, distorted chants, and dissonant chords, made me feel like a Lamb of God, the title of the fourth track.
The next three tracks (“Live Fast, Die Young”, “Concrete Mothers”, and “Cage Variations”) all moved me to different locations and transformed me into different victims, but it was the last track, titled “Beloved”, that had the strongest impact on me. Lasting less than three minutes, the crescendo machinery and synthetic drum beat morph into….Well, I leave it to you to experience it.
I did not expect Industry Standard to be so… moving. I was trying to find the right adjective, and I think “moving” is, not because it made me emotional or cancelled my desensitisation (a side effect of doing investigations), but because it moved me to eight different locations — and bodies. It transported me to places as dark and confusing as the sites where the eight nonhuman animal victims lived and died. The actual places where the beings we can hear through the human noises of clinical violence literally lived and died.
The renowned vegan musician Moby said this about the album: “Since I became a vegan in 1987, I’ve been consistently amazed at how animal rights activists use their creativity to draw attention to the horrific realities of animal exploitation. This is a challenging record, but the hardest truths are never easy.”
Yes, that’s it. My surprise came from my low expectations. I expected sounds, not music. I expected messages, not experiences. I expected screams, not silent suffering. I, like Moby, was amazed by what the activists did with Industry Standard, because I did not know how good artists they were.
Their album reminds me a little bit of the works of Jana Winderen, a Norwegian artist known for her underwater recordings and environmental sounds, or Chris Watson, known for his field recordings and immersive soundscapes, sometimes addressing environmental issues.
Industry Standard is not only an excellent sonic piece and a poignant document of reality that allows you to hear animal exploitation in a vivid and impactful way. It’s more than that. It’s a voice. It’s a voice that speaks. A voice that speaks for them.
From the victims’ perspective, animal exploitation has a sound most people never hear — even when they watch a documentary. A sound that, if you truly hear it, soaks your brain and drowns your mind. Sharp, distorted, repetitive, disorienting. A chilling, ominous, and dreary sound. Bearing witness to it and communicating it to others effectively is both an artistic and an advocacy achievement.
Exploitation has a sound, and now you can hear it.
