Graeme Revell - Noises from the Anatomical Theatre

A pioneer of "old school" industrial since 1978, Graeme Revell, born in 1955, branded a genre already prone to sonic and thematic extremism with the stylistic intransigence of his band SPK: the noise assault of their live shows – combined with video projections of real surgical operations and anatomical dissections – makes for one of the most radical experiences the human mind could conceive. Milestones such as "Information Overload Unit" (1981), "Leichenschrei" (1982) and the singles-and-rarities collection "Auto-Da-Fé" bypass the crude irony of Throbbing Gristle, arriving at an even more abstract and cruel language.

Graeme, let's start with the present. I read about a new project called SPKtR with your son Robert.

True. I've started working on this unreleased material that we'll present at the Wave Gothik Treffen in Leipzig in May. It will be a combination of the various genres I've worked in, so industrial, noise, tribal and cinematic, with Robert contributing his own deathcore influences. It's already clear there will be two different styles split between shows that are strongly industrial, hard-edged and extreme, and more melodic shows. I'm thinking of using a new technology in a particularly original way, but for now I can't say any more.

Robert's full-length released last year, titled "Torn Remnants Of Nobility", is an interesting debut.

It does seem to be getting a decent amount of success. Robert is a talented multi-instrumentalist capable of doing worthwhile things in whatever musical genre he chooses. I'm afraid he's inherited one thing from me above all: unpredictability, which would give me great pleasure.

A friend of mine told me he attended an SPK concert at Heaven in London in 1980; according to him, you played more extreme than Throbbing Gristle, who performed after you. What was your gear at the time?

Ah, well… we were definitely more extreme than TG, who I think were almost an ambient band. The equipment back then consisted of my favorite synthesizer, the EMS VCS3, electric guitar, a drum machine with Latin-ish rhythms, tape loops and lots of pedals. For "Information Overload Unit" we processed and recorded every track using pedals and the bass amplifier. I should point out that I was the sole author of the tracks on that album.

If you call TG "ambient", how would you label, for instance, Cabaret Voltaire?

A pop band.

A year after "Information Overload Unit" you released another masterpiece: "Leichenschrei". What do you remember about making it?

I started, as I always do, by throwing away everything I'd done before. I also got rid of the drum machine, replacing it with metal percussion that we played in an abandoned factory in Sydney and recorded onto cassette tape. Most of that "percussion" was played by James Pinker. I wanted it to be a more performed record than the previous one, less studio-based. The other two things that contributed to the chaotic feel you get from the album were the use of tapes with voices of psychiatric hospital patients, and the fact that I'd reunited with my partner Neil Hill (who at the time went by the moniker Ne/H/il), even though we didn't work side by side: he'd produce tracks and then pass them on to me so I could add my own ideas. Let's say it was a collaborative project.

Did you ever suspect Neil had suicidal intentions before that tragic February of 1984?

I remember Neil with great affection. If I hadn't met him, I probably wouldn't have become a musician. He was a brave, sociable person. I, on the other hand, am very closed off, and it was he who created the right conditions for us to be able to perform live. He was a friend I felt very close to, and we always got along. But when I moved to Europe and got the offer from Industrial Records to reissue our early singles, well, the fact that he didn't want to follow me was frustrating. Unfortunately I had sensed his suicidal tendencies: among his obsessions were the work and life of Yukio Mishima and everything to do with the ritual of seppuku. Looking back now, it seems like it was inevitable. He had what I'd call a "toxic" relationship with his wife: when he killed himself and she died too, I was in England. The news didn't so much sadden me as plunge me into rage.

You mentioned working in a psychiatric hospital; from New Zealand you moved to Australia to work in what today would be called a Mental Health Center. What did that experience leave you with?

New Zealand is very far away, both geographically and culturally: that's both a blessing and a curse at the same time. Australia is often seen as a stepping stone, a place to earn enough money to then reach Europe. What I remember most vividly about the psychiatric hospital is the despair in the eyes of the poor inmates, who are essentially the same people we see abandoned on the streets of cities all over the world today.

Your first childhood memory of New Zealand?

Wide open spaces, freedom.

Did that land shape the composer you became?

The biggest influence New Zealand had on me has to do with its very origins as a nation: the settlers I descend from were more than happy to get away from the culture they came from and leave behind the horrors of the First World War. So, unlike you Europeans, I grew up without an oppressive cultural history, and even today I feel like I'm living in a kind of blank slate that lets me explore and embrace every possible cultural variant.

In SPK's early years, the imagery was focused on pictures and videos of malfunctioning bodies, illness, surgical operations and autopsies. Put simply, why?

Working at the psychiatric hospital, I noticed that the staff ended up becoming almost as "disturbed" as the patients, and I began to understand that many aspects of the so-called "cures" were, in fact, quite mad themselves. I'm referring in particular to lobotomy and electroconvulsive therapy. Truth be told, even the pharmacological treatments of the time proved largely ineffective. I felt that same disturbing sensation when, at night, I would visit the Department of Medicine at the University of Sydney. I discovered a bizarre form of creativity not only in the dissected bodies but in the very work of the dissector, who had left his signature on the formalin-preserved flesh of a dead infant or on the head of an old man. My emphasis was placed on the lacerations, on these "drawings," which I read as an extreme instance of the logic expressed in the writings of the philosopher Jean Baudrillard.

So your aesthetic wasn't merely provocation?

It was also a metaphor, or if you prefer, wounds on the surface of meaning foreshadowing an epistemological rupture that I felt approaching, a rupture in which representation would no longer veil reality, but would completely replace it.

"Machine Age Voodoo": what were you hoping to achieve with that commercial turn? The arrangements are decent, but...

That's kind of you to say, but to be honest, that record served to prove to me that I wasn't cut out to be a pop composer. I don't like it at all, but it was made with a very specific purpose: to earn me enough money to buy the Fairlight, an electronic system I considered essential for making the music I had in my head.

Speaking of arrangements: who do you consider the most accomplished arranger to emerge in the Eighties?

Oh God, I wouldn't know. In the pop realm, maybe I'd mention Trevor Horn.

After the pop episode of "Machine Age Voodoo" you released the excellent and little-known "Zamia Lehmanni: Songs Of Byzantine Flowers". Let's start with the meaning of the title.

The Zamia Lehmanni is a low-growing, palm-like plant with rigid, leathery, symmetrical leaves arranged along a central stem, giving it a harsh, almost aggressive geometry. Like all plants of the order Cycadales, it reproduces through cone-like structures rather than flowers, and contains neurotoxic compounds. This is one of the main reasons why Cycadales have long been associated with danger, ritual and taboo. Culturally, it was regarded as a brutal plant of prehistoric origin.

What about the Byzantine element of the title?

The West was beginning to embrace world music right as I was avidly searching for new sound sources. Above all, I had no intention of repeating the sonorities of "Leichenschrei". Byzantium thus became a metaphor for this kind of cultural crossroads, which I represented by mixing and altering samples and sounds of musical instruments that, for the most part, I played myself, albeit badly. The album thus became the carrier of a noise I might call "historicized," one that flows through us as a cultural residue.

A question useful to collectors: why do some tracks from "Zamia Lehmanni" also appear on the later "Digitalis Ambigua-Gold & Poison"?

When the Canadian label Netwerk contacted me to ask for an album, I no longer had any interest in producing commercial tracks. I resolved it by deciding to blend two attitudes: a handful of easy-listening pieces and a bit of experimental material. It was a transitional moment, since I was just starting my career in the world of film scores.

The same year as "Zamia Lehmanni" you released your solo debut "The Insect Musicians", a work that, I suspect, has the whiff of a concept album about it.

The Fairlight allowed you to draw, with an optical pen, each of the 128 harmonics of any sound waveform, and it gave me the idea for what I called "micro-music," an approach in which any sound can be transformed into any other. Not only that. My intention was also to bring sounds from the micro-world (of insects, precisely) to the macro-world represented by human hearing. It helped to look into the Japanese cultural view of nature, a view well summed up in the custom of keeping a cricket in a small cage so as to be able to appreciate its song. Since then, much other work has been done in this specific field, but never with quite the same richness of detail.

You had a traditional musical education, so it would be interesting to understand how your attraction to noise came about.

I never had conservatory training and I don't consider myself a particularly skilled musician on any instrument. I took piano lessons – which I hated – until I was 11, then a bit of music theory, some experience in the school band, and not much else. To be honest, my interest in noise and in strange sound combinations, if you can call them that, remains a mystery to me too. Except that, as a human being, I have the characteristic of having very quick emotional reactions when I hear certain sounds.

What does this characteristic translate into?

I understood very early on that a complex sound, or in any case a mix of sounds, was a kind of challenge for me: in order to survive those auditory stimuli I had to learn to decode them. I managed to bring this sort of challenge into my modus operandi for building soundtracks. The first example was the score for Phillip Noyce's "Dead Calm", in 1989, starring Nicole Kidman and Sam Neill.

Of the many soundtracks you've composed, which ones do you feel work musically even without the images?

"The Crow" by Alex Proyas, "Red Planet" by Anthony Hoffman, and "Blow" by Ted Demme.

You also worked on the original score for one of the most troubled films in cinema history: Wim Wenders' "Until the End of the World".

It was a pretty difficult project to tackle. For starters, Wim's cut ran over six hours, and I was just at the start of my career in film scoring. Still, from the very beginning I set myself a rule that has shaped the rest of my career: even when the "canvas" I have to work on, or a film's plot, is vast beyond measure, the stories within it are still always about human beings and always carry a very intimate dimension; because of this, I happily opt for a stripped-down instrumentation. In that case it came down to a solo cello, a string quartet, winds, and samples. The experience with Wim later allowed me to conjure up the emotionally charged music needed for "The Crow".

One of your most elegant albums is "Vision II", made with Roger Mason, a work inspired by the writings of the Persian poet and mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi. What fascinates you about his poetry?

I'd probably make that record in a completely different way now, but it was a fantastic experience working with musicians from so many different cultures, people like duduk master Djivan Gasparyan and singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. As for Rumi, suffice it to say that, even though his work was written in the 12th century, it still feels miraculously relevant today.

Spiritual books that have left a mark on you?

They don't really fall into the category of spiritual works, but the poems of William Butler Yeats and Rainer Maria Rilke had a huge impact on me.

One distinctive trait of industrial music – especially live – is evoking a genuine sense of danger in the listener. Which bands excelled at this?

I'm sorry, but I have to say SPK. At what other shows could you have witnessed the use of an actual flamethrower fired right above your head, close enough to singe your hair? At what other shows could you have been pelted with bits of animal brain? Other industrial bands might try to seem vaguely threatening by dressing up as clowns, but that stuff isn't for me.

Lustmord didn't have kind words for me when talking about Genesis P Orridge. What's your take on him?

Look, I only spoke to him once, for about an hour. He was a great admirer of the work of William S. Burroughs, Aleister Crowley and characters of that ilk. He particularly admired those sorts of deviant, deranged stars like Charles Manson. I'm the exact opposite. Anyway, we do owe him thanks, because he was an excellent "salesman": without him, the industrial brand certainly wouldn't have achieved the success we still credit it with today. Beyond that, we had nothing in common. Recently, people who knew him well told me he was someone who stole other people's ideas with great ease.

Going deeper, what does industrial music teach us?

The biggest impact concerns the world of soundtracks, from films to video games, meaning the way images, sound effects and music get mixed together. It's a particular paradigm that didn't exist before the release of “Ore 10: calma piatta” and which is now almost omnipresent. Just listen to any film soundtrack on Netflix. The real nobility of this shift lies in the fact that music from any culture or people, even the most distant or forgotten, has now acquired almost the same weight as that of the dominant culture in consumer society. Another example: before “The Crow”, the only use of ethnic music in films was when you were in a geographical location or dealing with a character that justified it. Nowadays the extraordinary beauty of “world” music and all its instruments has finally found its way to becoming part of a universal emotional repertoire.

A feeling that contemporary society overrates? Love? Happiness?

No, no. I really don't think those feelings can be overrated — if anything, there's an ever greater need for them today, especially in a world populated by sociopaths like the one we live in now.

When you compose, what target are you trying to hit?

Being as original as possible. And that's getting harder and harder, I'm afraid.

The essential ingredient of your ideal day?

Learning things. For at least 18 hours straight.

The epitaph that suits you best?

I like to quote an aphorism by the American writer Octavia Butler: “All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.”

What's the most extraordinary aspect of being an artist?

With art you can create a new “self” in every instant. And it's only recently that I've come to understand that art in general, and music in particular, can have a real influence on people's existence, letting us remember those who are no longer with us and, at times, contributing to our salvation. Today I feel very grateful to be able to help offer gifts of that kind.

(25 January 2026)

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