Throbbing Gristle

In the beginning there was Coum Transmission, the English artistic collective active since the early Seventies, terrorizing Britain's art venues with shocking body-art performances centred on sexual acts, obscenity and self-harm. Coum Transmission's happenings harked back to the neo-Dadaist ones of the Fluxus group, but above all to the far more brutal exhibitions of the Viennese Actionists, a group of Austrian performers who placed violent acts upon their own bodies at the centre of their art, aiming to achieve a palingenesis of the spirit through crude sadomasochistic practices. It was Coum Transmission that imported such aesthetic practices into England, not so much with the intent to shock as to destabilise the consciousness of spectators, allowing them to disinhibit their own repressed instincts. This was the so-called process of "deconditioning" that Genesis P. Orridge would go on to pursue first with Throbbing Gristle and later with Psychic TV.

Orridge and his partner-in-crime, Cosey Fanni Tutti, thus came from the art world - not so much its official, institutional side, but rather its underground and esoteric circuits. From 1975 the two transformed Coum Transmission into a collective not so different but equally radical: Throbbing Gristle. Together with photographer Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson and Chris Carter (a skilled technological experimenter who, as Simon Reynolds recounts in "Post-Punk", had invented keyboards capable of reproducing pre-recorded sounds, later dubbed "gristleizers"), the pair of "psychopathic" performers gave life to a new project that stood as a direct continuation of the previous one.

The only real difference between Coum and Gristle, in practice, lies in an evident widening of scope: the deconditioning operation championed by the group now had to spread through the mass media. The isolated body-art actions of the Coum Transmission period, however clamorous, were no longer enough: the mission of Throbbing Gristle now demanded a multimedia diffusion, pervasive and massive, encompassing both video and sound. New multimedia shows thus emerged, more complex in structure, accompanied by what can be considered the definitive soundtrack for the masses at the close of the century: industrial music, the medium through which Orridge would carry out the de-manipulation of the minds of all those bold enough to listen to such degenerate music. A mission never completed, since it proved difficult to lure large audiences with music that gives the listener no pleasure and instead often generates outright repulsion. What's more, Orridge was careful never to get his hands dirty with the mechanisms of the music business - a fundamental step for anyone, like Throbbing Gristle, aiming to reach a mass audience.

"Second Annual Report" thus wanted to reach the masses with a musical proposal that was anything but popular, and one truly needs to be sick in the head (and yes, the author of this review is) to take pleasure in music so ill-omened and neglected. To be honest, it isn't even music in the conventional sense: it's more a mixture of concrete and synthesized sounds, an electronic-noise concoction. And it has nothing in common with other unwholesome music that had previously infested the rock universe: before "Second Annual Report", rock composition could still follow the normal rules of sonic construction or, conversely, of deconstruction (which, as such, still represents a system of composition, based on a structure, only organised unconventionally); Throbbing Gristle instead propose a music that goes beyond destructuring. Their sound is that of rock once boned, stripped of its supporting structure: there is no longer a real rhythm, no harmonies, not even dissonances, no singing; all that remains is an indistinct vortex of abstract sonic matter.

This is music from the death factory ("Music from Death Factory", reads a line inside the booklet), music inspired by the sonic environment of Western metropolises, whose grim survival mechanisms drive man to alienation, apathy, despair, depression. To depict such an apocalyptic scenario, Throbbing Gristle picked up the noise experiments of Luigi Russolo's Futurist music, subverting its progressive and positivist framework and adapting the aesthetics of the "intonarumori" to the poetic demands of the tragic Seventies. "Second Annual Report", as the title itself suggests, is a documentary-record that speaks in the language of the metropolis, the sorrowful cities of modernity: chilling sounds, terrifying noises, mournful crackling. Everything is mechanical, electric, devoid of life. Orridge himself clarified, in a now-historic statement, how their music came about: "After finishing the recording of our first record, we went outside and suddenly heard trains passing by, and there were roadworks going on under the railway arches with lathes and electric saws running, and it struck us: 'actually we haven't created anything at all, we've just absorbed it subconsciously and then re-created it.'"

What else is there to add? Nothing, except the recommendation to handle this masterpiece of diseased music with "care". At this point in the review, you would rightly expect the traditional track-by-track description, but be understanding, put yourselves in my shoes: what should I say about the various versions of "Slug Bait" and "Maggot Death", putrid sonic masses at times psychedelic, at times noisily corrosive? And how to describe "After Cease to Exist", the soundtrack to the "Coum Transmission Film", which seems to lobotomize the cosmic music of Syd Barrett and Manuel Göttsching? 

One has to turn to the bonus tracks of the CD edition to hear anything remotely comparable to a song. But when you consider that the first of these two tracks references Zyklon B in its title - the pesticide used by the Nazis in the gas chambers where Jews were exterminated - it becomes immediately clear that here too there is no possibility of musical redemption.

Never more than with this record does it make sense not to analyse the tracks one by one; all that remains is to wish you a mephistophelian "happy listening", should you have the courage to venture into this dark sonic wood. But remember, as the supreme poet warned at the gates of hell (because, make no mistake, hell is exactly what this is), to abandon all hope.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

07/03/2010