Among the many aesthetic and musical legacies of new wave, one of the most fearsome and fascinating to examine was undoubtedly its appropriation (at least within certain niches) of themes that up to that point had had little or nothing to do with rock. Punk's nihilism and its relentless drive for provocation led many (non-)musicians to play dangerously with extreme imagery. Just think of the flaunting of swastikas and Roman salutes, the aestheticizing use of practices borrowed from body art and Viennese Actionism, the celebration of the absurd and of a weirdness bordering on outright mental illness. In the esoteric circuits of post-industrial music, provocation often curdled into cult worship.

Some figures gave those images a literal interpretation, and in doing so ended up eroding their iconoclastic potential. In other cases, the line between those who truly "believed" and those who simply enjoyed provoking proved genuinely thin, and the ambiguity could only be resolved through an explicit act of distancing. Throughout the Eighties and Nineties, these kinds of imagery haunted the sleep of many listeners while at the same time fueling the creativity of numerous musicians. Below, three noise-rock outfits worth rediscovering, who in one way or another turned their own (anti-)artistic practice into an anthropological essay on sonic and thematic radicalism, and on the dismantling of those classic-rock mythologies that were once nonconformist but that the mainstream gradually filed down until they became harmless.

The Dancer of the Absurd

Kathleen Lynch, aka Kathleen, aka Ta-Da the Shit Lady, is one of those women who, if they didn't exist, you'd have to invent them — and since she did exist, and still does (even though she seems to have literally vanished off the face of the earth), maybe you'd want to clone her too.

So who is Kathleen Lynch? Essentially a mysterious being, a concentrate of genuine weirdness, a performer so unhinged as to remain an unfathomable figure even to those who were once artistically close to her. And those "someones" were none other than the Butthole Surfers. Although she was never an official member of the Texan band, she was nonetheless an important part of it: Kathleen Lynch was the naked dancer who accompanied their concerts between 1986 and 1989, playing a decisive role in amplifying their popularity in the States and even more so in Europe.

Lynch emerged out of nowhere in 1984. With Cabbage Gomez Jr. she formed the short-lived Easturn Stars, who nonetheless had their brief moment of fame in Atlanta. After attending a Butthole Surfers show in the Georgia capital, the two women joined forces with Gibby Haynes and Paul Leary. Cabbage took on drumming duties, while Lynch became the band's frenzied, half-naked dancer, performing topless or with her private parts covered by little more than a layer of colored paint. What a phenomenon of a woman Lynch was — though never a sideshow freak. Far from vulgar or artificially staged, her performances were demonic rituals that helped turn Butthole Surfers shows into experiences of pure collective hysteria, a black pit of psychedelic drugs that, as the story goes, you could practically smell in the air before ever trying them.

On YouTube you can see her in action in a clip from "Bar-B-Que Movie", the (thoroughly cult) short film by filmmaker Alex Winter, essentially a spoof of Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre". The Butthole Surfers, with the inimitable Kathleen in tow, appear in the film's final section, captured in a wild performance of "Fast". Here's what the Butthole Surfers had to say about her — if you're squeamish, you might want to skip this part:

Paul Leary — "Once the band got lice. We had to hold Kathleen down by force to treat her. She said she didn't want us to kill the lice because they were her friends."

Gibby Haynes — "Once we were supposed to play in Atlanta but had no idea where the venue was. We kept asking people: 'Hey, where do the queers hang out? Where's the college area?' We ended up playing at the Celebrity Club, where RuPaul and Lady Bunny used to perform before moving to New York. And for some strange reason this crowd of deranged artsy types loved us. In Atlanta, Kathleen was the link between us and them."

Teresa Taylor (aka Teresa Nervosa) — "When we ran into Kathleen again in New York, she was working for Sex World in Times Square. Down there she was known as Ta Da the Shit Lady because she couldn't hold it in (…). We brought her along on the show. She stopped talking for a year, and when I asked her why, she said God had asked her to take a vow of silence. She loved the human body, the smells it gave off. Things like urine and dirty socks were things she loved — loved so much that it was hard to get her to wash. I remember once we had to hold her down to wash her underwear while she screamed 'no, no!'"

Paul Leary — "We were at home and we saw Kathleen pee into a spoon without spilling a single drop. Then she put the spoon full of urine into a pot of dried-out mac and cheese. At that point a drag queen showed up and started eating that mac and cheese with the same spoon. We were stunned and said: 'Felicia, Kat peed in the pan, you know.' She replied: 'I'm eating from the side.'"

Jeff Pinkus — "We went to Key Largo, it was our first vacation since becoming a band. We decided to go snorkeling, but Ta Da stayed on the boat with the captain. When we came back up, the captain was looking at us like we were crazy. We had no idea what had happened and he wouldn't tell us. Later he told us that Ta Da had thrown up and had diarrhea at the same time. She was holding the diarrhea in her hand and throwing up into the toilet. She said she was feeding the fish."

If your lead-lined stomach has allowed you to make it this far, you should know that, despite all this, Lynch was in her own way an extremely spiritual person. We'd call her a hippie of the post-punk generation, if that weren't (almost) a contradiction in terms. For instance, she didn't experience nudity as provocation, but rather as a natural expression of her own being. Here's what she had to say about her live performances: "It's the moment that excites me most, I love it. I don't see nudity as a challenge. Simply, there was nothing I could wear that could describe who I am and where I'm going. Bodies say more than clothes ever could. I was repressed my whole life, but with the Eastrun Stars I had to push past that. When I have a fear, I have to face it."

Well, after her stint as a dancer alongside the Butthole Surfers, Lynch went back to making music in her own right, forming Beme Seed, whose albums have still never been reissued and which, despite the general oblivion and the hyper-specialized corners of the internet, aren't the object of any real cult following. A fairly telling sign of a decade (the one just gone) that has seen a full-on revival of Eighties, Seventies and Sixties music. Less so the Nineties — and here we could open up a much broader discussion, but that would take us off topic.

Beme Seed released just three albums before fading into obscurity. At least the first two are worth rediscovering. Their debut — "The Future Is Attacking [aka Beme Seed]" — came out in 1989 on Blast First. Here Beme Seed deliver a raw, lopsided, at times inarticulate noise-rock, subtly psychedelic in the very sense the Butthole Surfers gave that word. Lynch screams, writhes, sighs, whispers, but on the whole seems to be running almost constantly on her own separate track from Michael Albin's Asheton-esque guitar.

Rather than relying on defined structures, the rhythm section takes a back seat to the soloing. The resulting sound is a cross between mentors Butthole Surfers and Oxbow, with more than a touch of feminine moodiness thrown in. The emotional peak of the record is the ten-plus-minute "The Love That Touches", a kind of uterine "The End", equally lost but more desperate and explosive.

A more canonical, structured noise-rock and a better production define the following "Lights Unfold", released in 1991 on No. 6 Records. It features gripping songs like "Go" and "Old News Song", where Lynch shows off her chops as a screamer, but also a supple, versatile singing style. Lights Unfold also has its own moment of psychodramatic psychedelia — actually two: "Move Your Body Like You Move Your Mind" and "All Souls Growing In Glory". Battered by a wall of feedback, the first drifts for nearly seven minutes through a limbo of pure abulia, with Lynch reciting over it as if absent from herself. The second is structured similarly, but proceeds through more pronounced rhythmic upheavals.

A songwriting style more focused on the impactful noise-rock song marks the third record, "Purify", which closes out the career of a band that evidently had nothing left to say.

The battered body

The story of Bodychoke is a deviant parenthesis within the already deviant story of Kevin Tomkins, one that would need an article of its own to be told properly. In the early Eighties, Kevin Tomkins was one of the key figures of the power electronics season. A member of Whitehouse and, above all, founder and main force behind Sutcliffe Jügend, Tomkins spent the decade steeped in raw noise and an aberrant imagery populated by serial killers and bodily torture. Suffice it to say that the name of his main project was inspired by that of a notorious British serial killer, Peter William Sutcliffe, better known as The Yorkshire Ripper.

Starting from the second half of the Eighties, many figures orbiting the London power electronics scene, recording for the "rival" labels Come Organisation and Broken Flag, began reframing their experiments within a sonic context more closely related to rock. After a start heavily marked by a power electronics aesthetic, Ramleh, for instance, turned to noise-rock. It was above all the (non-)musicians of Broken Flag — Skullflower first and foremost — who acted as the link between the post-industrial music of the Eighties and the British trance sound embodied by acts such as Loop, Silverfish, Terminal Cheesecake, Godflesh, Spacemen 3 and so on. From there it was a short step to the isolationism of the Nineties.

Kevin Tomkins followed the trend by forming Bodychoke. The band's members included, among others, future Giddy Motors drummer — and for a time a member of Cranes — Manu Ros. Between 1994 and 1998 Bodychoke released three albums of increasing quality, built on an original sonic melting pot of noise, trance, metal and gothic, yielding a sound that was almost a cross between Swans, God Machine and Godflesh.

The psychological violence — at times imploded, at times exploded — of its eight tracks makes "Mindshaft" a fierce, emotionally harrowing album. The percussive monotony of the title track and the following "Treshold" set the record on the path of early Swans. The melodic intensity of "Release" makes Bodychoke sound like an equally compulsive but slightly more lascivious God Machine. The subsequent tracks stay balanced between tedium and visceral force, right up to the nearly eleven minutes of "Shallow", a magnificent metallic power ballad with rather decadent, moody tones.

The "tribute" title to Jack the Ripper and the usual borderline themes dissected in the lyrics and song titles make "Five Prostitutes" a provocative album, in keeping with the tradition of the London power electronics scene. Where Mindshaft featured rather conventional noise-rock constructions, on "Five Prostitutes" Tomkins works by addition, in the literal sense of the word. That is, he works on the arrangements, achieving a remarkable leap forward in terms of structural complexity. He leans more heavily on industrial-style percussive solutions ("Whore", "Anal", "Hole"), while the persistent use of Mike Alexander's cello adds a poetic intensity with gothic overtones to the mix ("I Can't Wait", "Skinflick", "Cripple"). Steve Albini's production does the rest, making the grain of the sound malleable to the mood of the tracks. What emerges, ultimately, is a sound quality that is at once more compact and more multifaceted.

"Cold River Songs" definitively sheds that distant hardcore-noise specter that had loomed over the two previous albums. The sound reaches its highest degree of structural complexity, at times even brushing up against the post-metal territory of Neurosis. The production is pristine, the riffs granite-hard and the rhythms incisive. The opening is traumatic. After a power electronics intro, "Control" evolves into a rhythmic-guitar progression of mounting pathos. The vocals are a jumble of frustration and despair, conveying a sense of deep unease that clearly finds release in self-destructive rage. In "Cold River Song" the guitar swirls and pneumatic bass repeat themselves for ten minutes, painting a fascinating journey into the dark monotony of a trance whose cathartic or annihilating nature remains impossible to pin down.

Where the previous albums mostly relied on the outward venting of rage, here the violence is also conveyed subliminally, especially in the moments of apparent calm that precede the storm. A case in point is "Your Submission", which winds for over three minutes over an ambient bass line — underscored by sinister noise textures — before erupting into a storm of alienating riffs. The taste for ballads remains intact, as shown by the splendid "Ideal Home", built (again) on a dark bass line, torn apart by a decadent cello melody.

"Cold River Songs" was reissued in 2009 by Relapse with the addition of three bonus tracks.

Snuff noise

The trajectory of Sweden's Brainbombs is closely tied to some of the most degraded imagery conjured up by the British power electronics scene. The themes they've given voice to are rooted precisely in the obscene sadomasochistic extremism of Whitehouse — a lascivious, apocalyptic imagery populated by serial killers, rape, torture, depravity and sexual perversion.

The story of Brainbombs begins in Hudiksvall in 1985. The original members — Jonas (guitar), Peter Råberg (vocals) and Drajan (drums) — formed the band with the explicit intent of recontextualizing the monotony and noisy wreckage of industrial music through traditional instrumentation. Brainbombs' lyrics — macabre at best — were written by Peter and Jonas. The two nursed an unhealthy passion for serial killers and, more specifically, for the horrifying butchery-like details surrounding murder cases. This interest in the dark side of existence was passed on to Peter by his older brother Dan, who wrote poems on precisely these themes.

In addition, Brainbombs were captivated by the actions of Peter Sotos and the themes of his chilling fanzine, "Pure", in which the former Whitehouse member offered lurid details about the crimes of serial killers and Nazis. Financed by Drajan and Jonas and dated 1989, "Jack The Ripper Lover/No End" marked the official debut of Brainbombs. The single passed almost unnoticed at home, yet it managed to win over a niche of deranged fans across the globe.

The follow-up single – "Anne Frank / No Guilt" – was written by Dan after reading "The Diary of Anne Frank". The lyrics overflow with anti-Semitism and misanthropy, carried by music as claustrophobic and vicious as any produced in that era. The aim of these true animals was not to shock, but simply to vent their bestial instincts through noise. If anything, Brainbombs operated within their own niche, indifferent to and even irritated by any prospect of commercial following.

Brainbombs' music is an even more tedious and decayed version of Flipper's noise, that is, an unbroken sequence of monotonous, deflagrating riffs played in the gutter, a challenge to the listener meant to test their tolerance for noise. If anything, conveyed through an exhausting, abrasive minimalism, their repetitiveness seems to be a sonic metaphor for the psychological concept of fixation. From Wikipedia: "In psychiatric and psychological sciences, fixation refers to the stalling of a drive that finds no outlet: the subject is left at the mercy of a fixed thought or an ineradicable habit that undermines, often profoundly, their social relationships and personal fulfillment".

Dan and company never tried to change their style or let it evolve, except in terms of the speed and heaviness of the riffs. Then again, the hell of mental pathology is perpetually the same as itself. Records to recommend? All and none. Meaning that if you're accustomed to this kind of sound, then Brainbombs' discography deserves to be embraced in toto, given that their albums are, on average, of good quality. A preference goes to the debut "Burning Hell", which stands out from the rest thanks to a more garage, Stooges-oriented sound. And also to "Urge To Kill", marked by their most convincing songwriting by far. If, on the other hand, you're not into noise, pack up your tent and pitch it on healthier shores, because here you'll want to slit your wrists.

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