Stigmata

According to John Barth's classic tragi-comic existentialist novel The Floating Opera, one of his favorite books and one he's read over and over numerous times since he first discovered it in 1976:

1. Nothing has intrinsic value.
2. The reasons for which people attribute value to things are always ultimately irrational.
3. There is, therefore, no ultimate "reason" for valuing anything.
4. Living is action.  There's no final reason for action. 
5. There's no final reason for living (or for suicide).

Healing takes time, but by 1988, he felt like he had been tried by fire.  He tried to silence that untrustworthy narrative that he had been telling himself ("The story of your life is not your life; it is your story," Barth later wrote) with alcohol, loud music, and nihilism until he was partially dead inside, all charred wood and cold ashes like an old burned-out house that somehow still remains standing.  In a manner of speaking, part of him did die that night on the bridge. 

Healing takes time, but during the healing process, it needs a protective layer of gauze and bandages to protect the one recovering.  To keep the painful feelings at bay, he cocooned himself in music that was cold, unemotional, and free of sentimentality, and not necessarily even human sounding.  He had seen where raw emotions could lead (the I-90 Bridge).  Ministry's The Land of Rape and Honey provided just the right amount of cold industrial metal to protect him, and provided his soundtrack for 1988.  

One other note: the sound in the video version of Stigmata is as good an example as any of how digital compression can destroy analog music.  Dynamic range compression reduces the volume of loud sounds or amplifies quiet sounds in music by narrowing or "compressing" an audio signal's dynamic range. On the positive side, this makes it easier to hear the vocals in a recorded version of a song, but on the other hand, it takes away one of a musician's creative means of expression (variations of volume).

In the analog version of Stigmata that he used to own on cassette tape, the opening electronic sounds were relatively quiet, but the first drum line ("bum-bum-DA-bum") was shockingly loud.   As the drum line got repeated several times over at irregular intervals, it created a dramatic tension, an expectation that all hell was about to break loose and break loose very loudly, which it did with Al Jourgensen's scream and initial guitar attack.    

In the digital version heard in the video, everything's at the same volume - the opening electronic sounds are cranked up much louder, but the drum figure is muted down to that same volume level.  As a result, there's no dramatic tension before the scream starts, and when it does, it's not only not louder than anything else before it, it's actually so quiet it's almost lost in the mix.  Boring, and a sad defacing of Jourgensen's original artistic statement. 

It makes him wonder what he's missing out on in music that he's only heard digitally.