Throbbing Gristle - Industrial Trans-Humanism

At dawn, after driving all night, they reached the outskirts of Hell. The flickering flames coming from the petrochemical plants lit up the wet cobblestones. No one would come to meet them there.

(J.G. Ballard, "The Atrocity Exhibition")

Gripped by searing psychic pain, we struggle toward a self-perfection that is hardly attainable, defying the laws of humanism and nature.

We might be mechanical devices, reduced to apparatuses held together by bodily unity, clinging to an illusory space-time metamorphosis of our Self. A Self back from fighting its own futuristic nightmares, fleeing every historical-social constraint, prostrated by the sunset of every West, gutted of its amniotic enchantment.

What's left to do? We could rattle off our rosaries before some austere pontiff, trusting in forgiveness and eternal salvation in pseudo-paradises steeped in good intentions, or bathe in the Styx of ill thought, or else drift, slothful, on a static, everyday Nothing, or perhaps sublimate our egotisms into demagogic missions… The possibilities are manifold, and evolution only thickens the fan of options. And within that fan, another, mad option: to penetrate the weave of the system and let oneself be run through by it, bearing its permanent marks, thus becoming guinea pigs of oneself and brave devotees of an other world — one that escapes most people, in its most dangerous individual and social radioactivity.

Coum Transmissions, or the Aesthetics of Disappointment

1969. Hull. England.

No pretense of vacuous beauty, no will to push the boundaries of any kind of harmony, no allegiance to any pre-existing sect — only a blind faith in the warlike potential of post-modern decadence. Genesis P. Orridge, born Neil Andrew Megson, a student at the time, gathers up this more or less explicit statement of intent along with a collective of fellow students around the Coum Transmissions project, initially driven by the desire to piece together shards of destruction to build a musical project fused with a strong performative streak. A "non-music," able to actualize itself even in the provocative madness of a concert without instruments.

The performance reaches its peak in 1971, when Coum Transmissions is joined by Christine Carol Newby — renamed by Genesis first Cosmosis and later Cosey Fanni Tutti — of a dark, statuesque beauty marked by an in-human introspection, able to read between the lines of a collective destiny intoxicated and dazed by its own civilization.

From that date on, Coum's shows become all-consuming performances, grounded in the idea of an art that denies its own dogmas and instead breaks their mystifying power, with an anti-establishment spirit, with the aim of founding a self-sufficient formula, free of any cliché and of any opportunistic allegiance to some already-written manifesto. An art meant to guarantee the most constructive of disappointments — one that confronts the audience with its own earthly wretchedness, so that it might become aware of it and act accordingly.

A non-art propagated by Genesis through signals of improbable self-celebration, with the founding of degenerate pseudo-movements such as L'école de l'Art Infantile and the Ministero della Antisocial Security. A spirit utterly out of step with its time, tied to a form of avant-garde seemingly too cerebral not to be mistaken for sheer madness — but one that was well understood by the lone voice outside the chorus, John Peel, who, as early as 1971, managed to glimpse its future potential, declaring that the apparent madness of Coum Transmissions could, paradoxically, serve as a panacea against the invisible danger posed by an entire unaware human race.

1973 marks the turning point toward total emancipation from any unwanted association with any artistic movement whatsoever, even from Fluxus itself, which was drawing ever closer to Viennese Actionism — a current Genesis and Cosey, forcibly entangled in it, decide to break away from, moving instead toward a body of work that, from provocative, grows increasingly ambiguous, dark, explosive.

The two move to London, renting a studio on Martello Street, soon nicknamed the Death Factory, because of its proximity to an old abandoned factory.

Liberation from the constraints of art can, at last, lead to the most extreme form of experimentation, bolstered by Cosey's new parallel career as a model and porn actress — an activity entirely complementary to their onstage performances, perfectly captured by "Coming Of Age," a 1974 piece born from a collaboration with graphic designer and photographer Sleazy, born Peter Christopherson, intrigued by the trashiest aspects of sex. And indeed, from that point on, the performances begin to take on a heavily sexualized morphology, in which the body becomes fertile ground for every sort of unspeakable perversion: sexual acts, self-mutilation, secretions of every kind, performed by and on the bodies of the performers themselves, against a backdrop of subliminal messages spoken in the voice of Charles Manson.

A hasty, short-sighted and indignant eye dismisses it all as filthy pornography and depravity, but some critics note that those bodies, deliberately exhibited in their basest human aspects, instead simulate what an entire civilization demonizes out of its inability to admit it to itself, insulating such a raw weakness beneath the narrowness of a rigid morality, sick with taboo and strangled by an unspeakable sense of inner death.

Coum's journey, having consciously crossed the threshold of tolerable truth about human nature, thus becomes preparatory to the future explorations of Throbbing Gristle.

Throbbing Gristle, or On Nuclear Pulsation

Just as the performance, pushed to its extreme, begins to turn into fertile ground for a kind of pseudo-artistic speculation, Genesis and Cosey decide to shake things up by turning to an expressive channel truly immune to any external labeling, thus founding, together with Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson and Chris Carter — a technology and recording-technique enthusiast capable of building his own synthesizers — Throbbing Gristle, officially formed in September 1975.

The name, literally translatable as "pulsating cartilage," but used colloquially to mean a sudden erection, helps underscore a physicality that is at once at its most fragile and at its most alive.

The debut took place the following July, at London's Air Gallery, with a concert announced under the heading "Music From Death Factory", described as noise drawn directly from a scenario of imminent apocalypse, marked by urban destruction and human dispersion — some of the key traits of what would become the signature Throbbing Gristle meta-sound. And shortly thereafter, with one final act of blasphemy, the curtain also fell on the Coum Transmissions experience, documented by the exhibition "Prostitution", at London's ICA, a kind of abuse and exploitation of the pornography industry undertaken by Cosey — model and porn actress by cultural choice — in order to investigate from within the fabric of an industry paradoxically sustained by the surface-level morality used to insulate society's reverential fear of its own basest instincts.

The exhibition closed after a week, amid great outrage from the English Parliament, feminists, and the porn circuit itself, and Cosey, found guilty of exploiting the sex industry and offending female dignity, was permanently barred from the erotica market.

On this point, one could note that another piece of the destabilizing mission had been slotted perfectly into place: Throbbing Gristle have no interest in pleasing, in making money, or in creating a new cultural trend. Their aim is far removed from any of these motivations, consisting instead in liberation from moral and cultural obscurantism, whether self-imposed or imposed from above — through parliaments, churches, the mass media, false messiahs, new-age healers, a drunken civilization. The aim is to root out the redundancy behind which the collapse of human societies hides, exposing its most evident signs: the squalor of urbanization, the deafening metallic din of the city with its factories, the desolation left behind once every futuristic — paradoxically futuristic — pseudo-foundation or sandy pillar has crumbled.

Man is interpreted as a thoroughly transient being, subject to instability and constant change, from whom nothing certain can ever be expected — a fragile, shifting essence, as the band's own career attests, characterized above all by the choice to vary the execution of the same piece in form, across live shows and record releases, as well as by the endless array of unofficial recordings, made in locations and circumstances not always traceable or identifiable.

What happens between Coum Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle is a kind of natural grafting, beginning in 1977 with the splitting into two cooperating entities for the making of the film "After Cease To Exist", performed by Coum with a soundtrack by Throbbing Gristle, who had meanwhile gathered their first recordings made with Peter Christopherson and Chris Carter on "The Best Of Throbbing Gristle Vol.I" and "The Best Of Throbbing Gristle Vol II" — tape recordings partially recovered on the 2001 vinyl release The First Annual Report Of Throbbing Gristle, put out by Get Back, on which one can already sense the embryonic shape of the amorphous Throbbing Gristle cell: from the futuristic pneumatic-drill noise broken by Genesis's martial narrating voice ("Very Friendly"), to the metallically funereal ceremony of "Scars of E.", passing through the confused apocalypse, broken by voices taken from radio and TV, of "Whorle Of Sound" and the obsessively detuned, distorted guitar of "Final Musak".

The video document "After Cease To Exist" gathers Throbbing Gristle live performances from 1976, borrowing its name from a Charles Manson song also used by the Gary Gilmore Society, founded by Genesis, Cosey and Monte Cazazza in honor of the American murderer Gary Gilmore, known for his repeated requests to be executed.

What unfolds on The Second Annual Report, officially released in September 1977, is a decadent discourse geared toward post-destruction, heralded by a warplane flying at ever-lower altitude ("Industrial Introduction"), and steered into destinations both identical and opposite through the monotonous repetition of the same idea — more polished in one case ("Slag Baith Live At Southampton"), more dramatic in the other ("Slug Bait Live At Ica"). And this tendency toward polymorphism of a single track, displayed in ever-shifting, discordant guises, would remain, from this very first album onward, a constant feature of the band's output.

In the four different versions of "Maggot Death", this is confirmed by their differing intensity: the synthesizer takes something of a lead role over Genesis's voice in the live at Ica version, the sound is cleaner and dotted with Cosey's incursions elsewhere, a cybernetic spleen acts as the soundtrack to the wreckage at Southampton, and there's genuine improvisation, laced with scattered insults, in the freakedelia of Brighton.

Right after the long transitional moment between the Coum Transmissions happening — a meeting point of stunned awareness of disaster, of which only the industrial noise of planes, assembly lines and blaring sirens remains — and the Throbbing Gristle concert, where melodic lines give way to far more synthetic input ("After Cease To Exist"), came the single released immediately after The Second Annual Report, with the bionic zombies' sabbath ("Zyclon B Zombie") on side A, and on side B the only track that resembles a scathing, obsessive, alien form of song ("United").

The playing with a shifting imagery open to the manifold suggestions generated by the spontaneity of moods, which on the first album had been kept to a minimum by an immaculate cover bearing only the title and the band's name, takes on, on the second effort of 1978, D.o.A The Third And Final Report, the guise of a little girl almost confined to a playroom, with, like a distant subliminal image, the reflection in a mirror of another child posed in an ambiguous, morbid manner.

The first thousand copies of the album came with a poster of Kama Brandyk, the same girl pictured on the cover, as if alluding to the unconscious yet inviting pedophilia lurking within the potential listener — a provocation perhaps encouraged by the strange interest stirred in the public by The Second Annual Report, which unexpectedly sold out within a few months of release.

Compared to the debut, D.o.A feels like a proper album, made to follow a tendency that, from being performative, gradually refines itself into sonic research — research that begins to take on an increasingly well-considered identity, marked by experimentation so improbable it even extends to waste: a computer tape thrown into a bin outside IBM's offices becomes the album's opening track ("Ibm").

"United", from the catatonic version found on The Second Annual Report, is compressed here into sixteen seconds of fast-forwarded tape, while the version on "Dead On Arrival" stands as the first of a long series of industrial dances — icy, neurotic, and enriched by the new type of synthesizer built by Carter, the Gristleizer, capable of reproducing all the instruments used by the band simultaneously. The use of field recordings is likewise abundant and varied: in "Valley Of The Shadow Of Death" they capture the erotomaniac Christopherson's attempts to lure young people, while in "Weeping", combined with Genesis's grieving voice, they take on a new morphology of industrial-avant-folk, anticipating much of today's more unhinged trend toward digital manipulation.

There's no shortage of episodes of deranged synthetic ecstasy either, from the piercing screams of "Hit By A Rock", to the visionary spasms of "Blood On The Floor", through the mad yet striking sampling of Kraftwerk and ABBA — Carter's fixations — in "AB_7A", to the scientific speculations across various radio channels in "E Coli", to the apparent innocence of children's voices absorbed in their own games, built by Cosey around unsettling, martial sonic spirals, right up to the assault on the eardrums carried out with unprecedented, masterful ferocity in "Walls Of Sound".

Closing things out are the two singles released immediately afterward, for the French label Sordide Sentimental, in 1979: the suite for heavy industry that turns from monotonous into hypnotic, "Five Knockle Shuffle", perfectly framed by the shifting tone of Genesis's voice, through to the raw, brutal hysteria of a 1976 track also found on "The Best Of Throbbing Gristle Vol. II", the crude declaration of misogyny titled "We Hate You (Little Girls)".

Just as the (non-)sound of Throbbing Gristle is about to become a trademark, ça va sans dire, the mutagenic gene reacts to the external stimulus of cataloguing/pigeonholing, strengthening the collective's subversive potential. That activation surfaces on 20 Jazz Funk Greats, a title as reassuringly ordinary as the cover, which shows the band in everyday clothes, smiling, amid green fields above a sheer cliff over the sea. In an equally mirrored move, the music on the album seems to give up the chaos of their earlier recordings in favour of structure, engaging with more traditional forms, more regular rhythms and less abrasive sounds: an attempt at normalisation, we'd call it today. The low blow dealt to the industrial people, hungry for new stupefying clangour, proves on closer inspection to be yet another destabilising act, meant to muddy the waters and “guarantee the disappointment” of expectations, exactly as planned. In particular, it reveals new possibilities for developing a music genetically prone to rapid implosion, to debasing its innovative drive into the cliché of gratuitous provocation.

It's in this habitus of vibrant vitality that the greatness of Throbbing Gristle lies, a quality that fits 20 Jazz Funk Greats like a glove. Every detail works in favour of dynamism, surprise, unpredictability, starting with the alternation between rhythm and stasis that runs through much of the record. The title track, with its Eno/Hassell-esque explorations of synth and treated cornet over a slo-funky base, gives way to the heavy ambient swaying of “Beachy Head”, the place pictured on the cover, which we discover to be a chosen destination for numerous suicides: it's the ambiguity of the message that generates unease.

“Tanith” and “Exotica” move along the same tidal line, chamber industrial pieces for treated instruments and noise loops, caressed in the upper register by Gen's vibraphone. The rhythmic patterns programmed on the sequencer by Sleazy mark out another distinctive trait of the group's signature, giving rise to archetypal industrial tracks like “Still Walking” and “Walk A Day”, mantras punctuated by a whirling/pulsing drumming that drags voices, sounds and noise into a centrifuge of alienation, modern transpositions of the Velvet-esque “Sister Ray”. It's the seriality of production (including record production itself) pushed to the paroxysm of obsessiveness, the fraying/decomposition and recomposition of information corrupted by endless mediation and returned/perceived in distorted form.

“Persuasion” and “Convincing People” lucidly tackle psychological themes that remain relevant today, concerning the individual's capacity for persuasion, and the media techniques aimed at control and the manufacturing of consent: “There’s never a way/ and there’s never a day/ to convince people/ there’s several ways/ there’s several days/ we don’t want to convince people/ let me tell you/ I’ll tell you what I want you to do/ it’s no way, no way, no way/ to convince people”.

Sonic research and attention to content don't cancel out Throbbing Gristle's “pop” factor, which, raised to the power of their own sensibility, yields a marvel of mutant electro like “Hot On The Heels Of Love”, Cosey Fanni Tutti's lascivious whisper over synthetic glitter hinting at postmodern dances and futuristic sonic scenarios for the group, or a “Walkabout” that openly pays homage to Kraftwerk.

The Velvet-esque black angel, evoked in “Six Six Sixties”, brings down the curtain of death on what we consider Throbbing Gristle's finest record, without discounting the historical importance of Second Annual Report, because, beyond containing the most significant traits of their artistic experience, more than any other release it succeeds in its intention of thwarting the craving of a master-like audience, which had tried to place illusory, definitive seals on a musical identity that is, by its very nature, ever-changing, as the years to come would prove (“we guarantee disappointment”).

The establishment, partly unaware of the subversive charge of 20 Jazz Funk Greats, keeps searching for meaning in a deliberately elusive mutability even in the following work, made with a certain taste for the potential of amateurism. Heathen Earth was recorded at the Death Factory studios by Stan Bingo on 16 February 1980, and released in June of the same year by Industrial Records. The artwork is once again destabilising: on the cover, in dark shades, appears the number 23, cabalistically significant, set above the bared, gnashing teeth of a dog, bearing a line from a Charles Manson song, an icon repeatedly honoured by Throbbing Gristle, “…can the world be as sad as it seems?”.

At the same time as Stan Bingo's first recording experience, Monte Cazazza, a figure long close to the band, made his first approach to video recording, documenting the whole affair in a videotape released a year after the LP.

Heathen Earth, while retaining an industrial approach, refines its pursuit of complex, dark, searing sounds that, taken together, still manage to convey the idea of a distinctive sonic fabric, never an end in itself, but genuinely capable of amplifying the emotional desertification of an entire civilisation.

The noise of machines, which almost seem to take on a life of their own in the night of the factories (“Cornets”), announces the chilling tale of an old man who, in a forgotten time, crushed by the oblivion of rubble, smiled (“The Old Man Smiled”).

The heart of the record is a perfect synchrony between Carter's synth, which on “The World Is A War Film” plays at minimalism and a fluid, muffled slowness, and Christopherson's effects souring everything and annihilating with cold, mounting anxiety (“Dreammachine”), which returns in the closing danse macabre (“Don’t Do As You’re Told”), right after a dialogue of echoes in the dark (“Still Walking”).

What happens in “Don’t Do As You’re Told” resembles a dancing dynamism in the underground chambers of the Ego, a sort of elastic motion.

Just when everything seems primed for an explosion, albeit within the narrow confines of a certain false intelligentsia, Throbbing Gristle, consistently uninterested in signing up to any manifesto, choose to carry out a thoroughly anti-commercial act, both in intent and in the production itself: they release two singles, “Something Came Over Me/ Subhuman”, the latter built around indignation at a Roma encampment that had settled near the Death Factory, and “Adrenalin/ Distant Dreams”, featuring the mechanically diabolical drive of the proto-techno-dance track “Adrenalin”.

Heathen Earth is followed by a series of live shows that, time after time, confirm the band's definitive mastery of the live dimension, pushed to infinite extremes.

Funeral In Berlin, recorded in November 1980 at SO36 in Berlin, and released by Zensor in 1981, alternates slow-motion nuclear-evacuation atmospheres (“Stained By Dead Horses”) with an apocalyptic vocal register, driven by a kind of chainsaw, in a crescendo of painful delirium pushed to spasm (“Zudive Bunker Experiment”), closed by a metallically struck scythe hunting for humans to mow down, before opening into an infinite, false post-sacrificial bliss (“Denial Of Death”).

In November of that same year, the band returned to play at SO36, leaving behind, on the 12-inch released by Fetish in 1981, the staggering testimony of a live version of the single "Discipline," an industrial march with a laser-sharp beat, and a single, delirious, ferocious order: "Discipline, I want discipline," repeated to the point of obsession and interrupted only by a strange, paradoxical music-box close.

"Discipline" is then handed back to us, on the same 12-inch, in another live version from December 1980, at Manchester's 666, cleaner, sharper and more robotic than the previous one.

In 1981, revisiting the synchronic relationship between music and cinema, Throbbing Gristle made In The Shadow Of The Sun, the soundtrack to the film of the same name by director Derek Jarman, a crucible of Super 8 fragments shot between 1974 and 1981.

The album, split into two long parts, is a faithful mirror of the director's cinematic approach, made of superimposed images, slowed and fluid movements, and altered colors, as though born of a distorted state of perception, in which the noise seems lodged inside the brain, within a labyrinthine, reverberated listening experience, giving rise to a listening experience that is not easily shared, precisely because it takes place inside a kind of emotional bubble invisible from the outside.

In March of that same year, Journey Through A Body was recorded at the Rai Radio Tre studios: the band's final studio work, right before splitting up. A conceptual work with no filter, its sound dense with noises that are brutally and ambiguously human, born of a mix of surgical echoes and infantile moans, at times smothered by the voices of the pseudo-doctors themselves, busy with forced organ removals ("Medicine"); the demystifying of a hypocritical morality, desecrated on its own altars, around which to dance morbidly ("Catholic Sex"); the lascivious exoticism of beast-men in some phantom synthetic jungle ("Exotic Functions"); the painful pleasure of both victim and perpetrator of rape ("Violentia (The Bullet)"); the bondage massacre, carried out with icy showers, small electroshocks and skin-searing solder, closed by a piano that, without a break, slows the tension down until it subsides ("Birth And Death").

The concert held in San Francisco on May 29, 1981 marked the band's definitive breakup. As if driven by the will to leave behind the densest, most harrowing, most lingering memory possible, starting with the title itself, Mission Of Dead Souls — emblematic of a mission that can only continue in a realm devoid of substance, yet pulsing with an entirely virtual morphology — Throbbing Gristle conjured a devastating sabbath capable of staging a thoroughly cerebral theatre of cruelty, opened by terrifying, pained invocations ("Dead Souls") and EBM tribalism ("Guts On Volk"). The live set carries on bleak and menacing, and the deathly trance is amplified by obsessive sounds of scraped sheet metal ("Looking For The Oto"), seething cascades of sound celebrated by the drum machine, which tries to soften Genesis's vulture-like call, lending it a wave edge ("Vision And Voice"), rites of clandestine burial beneath the rubble of a rotting city ("Funeral Rities"), long upheavals of the unconscious stirred by spirits floating in a pitch-black ether accompanied by Cosey's cornet ("Spirits Flying").

In keeping with their habit of turning the original structure of every track inside out during live performances, the set closes with "Persuasion U.S.A," its bass blurred together with other indecipherable voices to make the sonic fabric even denser, already thick with Genesis's martial spoken-word delivery, reduced here to shreds of diabolical, enraged arrogance ("Discipline (reprise)"). The live album ends, as if trying to close the circle in order, with "Something Came Over Me," a song-form barely lit by moonlit synth, leaving the disaster behind and turning toward other planets still to be explored.

Funeral rites

Right after that last, devastating live show, the original cell split into other particles: Genesis, true to his fascination with industrial ruin, carried on along the same lines with the Psychic TV project, while Chris and Cosey rewound the tape back to the synth-pop glow of 20 Jazz Funk Greats.

In 1981, the first Greatest Hits was released in America by Mayo Thompson's enlightened Rough Trade, distributed the following year in Japan by Alfa Records and in 1983 in Europe by Mute, on cassette.

Through a whole string of unreleased publications, Throbbing Gristle's breakup can perhaps be considered a purely physical one, since, on the contrary, the sonic material itself seems to be resurrected starting in 1984 through the release of a series of live albums, vintage recordings, box sets and compilations; in 1978, a live set was recorded at London's Cryptic One, later released by Mental Decay in 1984 under the title Special Treatment. The atmosphere, thickened into a shroud of black fog, is a paroxysmal, autistic performance seething with nervous breakdowns, screams, physical and psychic torture, within which every character seems to play, indifferently, the role of both victim and perpetrator, in an exhausting "homo homini lupus" the morning after some cosmic deflagration, where one digs with disturbing pneumatic hammers, pushes forward dodging the rust of the gears, escapes one's own auditory hallucinations booming with piles of radio voices, television voices, elevator conversations, psychiatric streams of consciousness able to perfectly convey that sense of disorientation, vertigo and agoraphobia capable of completely isolating the individual, making him a slave to his own incommunicable nightmares.

In 1986, Grey Area, a Mute subsidiary, dusted off an unreleased recording dating back to 1979: TG CD1, a suite running just over forty minutes, hovering on coordinates that are not exclusively industrial but also gothic-ambient, with a minimal, synthetic vocal track, yet swollen with darkly shifting sonorities, embracing the various strands of a sound-film in its negative.

And again in 1986, released by Castle Communications, came the live excerpt Sacrifice, recorded on April 12, 1979, part of the longer The Psychick Sacrifice.

Unlike TG CD1, here we find a live set performed with a more markedly industrial inspiration, with a return of voices, blurred, overlapping one another, deliberately grotesque, as happens in the excellent version of "Convincing People," and in the sonic centrifuge of "Persuasion," swollen with noise, screeching, a seething delirium tremens howled by Genesis.

Once the phase of recovering a live past rich in tense suggestions that, as mentioned, invisibly hold together the threads of a long, complex sonic fabric came to an end, a new nostalgia operation began in the Nineties, starting precisely in 1990 with the release of a Greatest Hits on Mute Records.

In 1993, Mute reissued the band's entire live output from 1976 to 1980 in a four-CD box set.

The new millennium, perhaps sensing a long-awaited reunion, opened in December 2002 with the hugely ambitious Novamute (an offshoot of Mute) release titled TG 24, a comprehensive opera omnia of the Lords of Industrial, packaged in a format that even included vintage-style merchandise tied to the group's conceptual aesthetic.

The drive to give Throbbing Gristle their due continued in 2004 with the tribute album Mutant TG, again for Novamute, a collection of remixes by Simon Ratcliffe, Basement Jaxx, Carl Craig and Cosey Fanni Tutti herself.

In early May of the same year, as a further signal of an imminent new release, The Taste Of TG – A Beginner's Guide To The Music Of Throbbing Gristle was published, a compilation that, as its subtitle makes clear, serves as a starting point for understanding the band's body of work — this time choosing to put on the cover a photograph of a Buddhist monk caught lying and, as punishment, filmed having his tongue cut, a ritual penalty.

After the fall

Less than two weeks later, the limited-edition TG Now was released — the first EP since the band's 1981 split, recorded at Astoria Studios in London. The production, stripped clean of any vintage imperfection, perfectly conveys the timeliness of what feels like a nightmare that never ended, starting with the seething revisitation of “X Ray”, moving through the renewed virulence of “Splitting Sky” and the sub-human swoon of “Almost Like This” (later to become “Almost A Kiss” on Part Two – The Endless Not), right up to the closer laden with metallic drones, the lengthy “How Do You Deal”.

2004 closed out with A Souvenir Of Camber Sands, the first live album for the ever-faithful Mute, on its Grey Area sub-label — after the split and all the resulting friction, uproar, controversy, tension and reconciliation symptomatic of a relationship never fully resolved, yet still pulsing with life and capable of delivering a thoroughly respectable musical code. This culminated in TG +, a collection of the last ten live shows remastered by Chris Carter, in a Deluxe edition — a little gem designed to desecrate a wholesome Christmas.

Nevertheless, two more years and countless rumours had to pass before the first official album of Throbbing Gristle's second phase was finally released.

Part Two – The Endless Not makes no particularly radical departures, aside from the changes in P-Orridge, presenting a group that has certainly not lost touch with reality and the present, possessed of an artistic stature, self-control and self-determination sufficient to come through the reunion test unscathed and dodge the sniper fire ready to chip away at their status as a “classic band”. Updating their arsenal of effects and noise for the age of laptops, sampling and modern recording/mixing technology can only benefit the depth of the sound, never as layered and dense as it is here (the war dance of an alien army, “Vow Of Silence”). The sonic matter stretches out to fill real spaces between individuals — spaces that have become nearly unbridgeable (or overflowing with hypocrisy and opportunism) when set against the virtual ones in which we're all “friends” (the lobotomised telematic chant of “Lyre Liar”).

Elsewhere (“Separated”, “Geasy Soon”, “After The Fall”) the stellar ambient sound of late Coil (orbiting around “Music To Play In The Dark, Vol.1 & 2”) draws closer from pneumatic depths, casting its impassive gaze on self-devouring megacities, shantytowns swept away by natural disasters, expanding Silicon Valleys and economic empires in slow decay.

What makes this record precious and full of promise for the new course ahead are the “songs”, among the finest compositions ever released under the Throbbing Gristle name: “Rabbit Snare”, a mournful jazz number played by a deformed pianist in a post-atomic night club (“do you love me?/ why are you scared?/ are you scared?/ do you love me?/ is this insidious?/ is this inside of us?/ simply insidious/ kind of ridiculous”), and the searing “Almost A Kiss”, a post-industrial blues that Christopherson's orchestrated choral loops lift into an otherworldly dimension.

Two years later, Throbbing Gristle quietly released the second studio album of their new era, The Third Mind Movements (2009), which revives two core principles of the TG project: absolute self-sufficiency (the record is self-produced under their own Industrial Records imprint and distributed only at concerts and through their official website) and a taste for hallucinated jamming. The quartet engages in a relentless, de-evolved, instrumental flow made of slimy electronics, acoustic distortions, wild cut-ups and penetrating rhythmic pulses. The sound is modernised yet proudly vintage, able to make you taste the still-fresh flavour of analogue gadgetry and tape manipulated in real time.

The listener sinks into its subliminal flow on a psychedelic journey that doesn't always run smoothly — every so often the machine jams (“Secluded”) and stumbles (the overlong “Perception Is The Only Reality”) — yet it still hypnotises with all the effectiveness of the old days, unchanged (“PreMature”/”The Man From Nowhere”). And listening to the lengthy title track, structured in three sections, it's easy to picture these four now-aged disturbers of the senses pouring onto tape the improvised, deviant fruits of their imagination — as precious and relevant today as ever.

Throbbing Gristle keep travelling along parallel paths, carrying with them an age that is only a matter of birth certificates, genetically devoted to experimenting with sexual mutation — championed by Genesis with the founding of a new category defined as Pandrogyny, pursued in the erudite electronic experimentation of Chris and Cosey, and reflected in Sleazy's return to his love of video.

And all we — voracious seekers of the next good new thing — can do is exclaim, scrolling through the most obscure MySpace pages of the new artisans of electronic music, “Hey, this is Throbbing Gristle!” A story too elusive not to fascinate, and to be emulated.

Contributions by Mauro Roma (“The Third Minds Movements”)

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