"Yea yea twist again better than we did last summer, laughing in the face of all rock and roll historians collectors revivalists purists inquisition members puritans bores creeps and not forgetting the fussy midgets with obscene hairdos." So wrote Claude Bessy in the liner notes to Throbbing Gristle's Greatest Hits, one of the five classic Throbbing Gristle albums Industrial Records have just reissued, and which now sit upon my desk, uncanny and accusatory, over 30 years after that pre-emptive fit of snark. Throbbing Gristle were never meant to be reliable, but here they come again, ready to be harvested by the very culture industry they alternately solicited and spat upon so long ago.
Permit me to adjust my obscene hairdo and offer those of you not already in the know some history: In their first incarnation as the Death Factory, they were the house band for Coum Transmissions, an abject performance-art troupe whose presentation of used tampons, anal syringes, and pornography featuring band member Cosey Fanny Tutti in the ICA gallery for their "Prostitution" show in 1976 earned them tabloid infamy and denunciations in Parliament as "wreckers of civilization." So far, so punk. But the music of the Death Factory, soon re-named Throbbing Gristle after a Yorkshire slang term for an erection, was a horse of a different color: "industrial music for industrial people," a dystopian, negative form of what the band itself called "post-psychedelic trash."
While the rest of the Class of '77 pogoed steadily, Throbbing Gristle blew hot and cold, a passive-aggressive tug of war between the sharp and the slimy: The formal elegance of Chris Carter's synthesizers are scrawled upon by Genesis P-Orridge's bass riffs and Cosey Fanni Tutti's fuzz guitar freakouts, spiced with violin and dubby honks of cornet. This already pungent stew is spiked with taped material selected by Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson-- excerpts of everyday intimacy and true crime verité-- and the arsenic tang of Genesis' vocals, either sung in a soft sort of sprechstimme or howled into effects. On their debut, The Second Annual Report, the music alternately chugged along like a squelchy, crude cop of the Velvet Underground, or stretched out into malingering new age, like a syphilitic Tangerine Dream. But they got both more virulent and more ambitious with time, upping the hostility and dread on D.O.A, taking a kitsch detour toward mutant disco on 20 Jazz Funk Greats, auto-cannibalizing their catalog in the live-in-the-studio ritual recording of Heathen Earth, and reasserting a strangely forceful collection of avant garde anti-pop for a Greatest Hits package revealingly subtitled Entertainment Through Pain, which collates their singles output as a quiver of tense stabs at accessibility.
In time for Christmas, a revived Industrial Records has just re-released all five of these classic albums, lovingly repackaged in deluxe gatefolded 2xCD editions. In each case, the original album is (wisely) preserved intact on one CD, while a second CD collects period singles, live performances, and a smattering of alternate mixes and unreleased material. Artwork is supplemented with alternate takes from photo-sessions, and it's a jarring experience for collector scum like myself to see and hear these goofy blooper reels and deleted scenes, in which the avatars of colder-than-thou aesthetics stand on one foot or giggle. Savvily recognizing the waning moment of the CD as such, there are vinyl editions of the albums too, which faithfully reprint the original artwork at full size and format. While so far I've only checked out the vinyl for 20 Jazz, it looks drool-worthy and sounds far stronger than any other pressing that this fussy midget has encountered.
Given that these albums have stayed continuously in print for years through arrangements with Fetish Records, and later Mute, one must ask: Why bother paying attention to these reissues? In a triumphant vindication of sound over image, the real motivation for this re-presentation of a back catalog is that all five of these five albums have been remastered by Chris Carter himself, a labor of obsessive-compulsive love whose consequences I intend to unpack, album-by-album, below. On the face of it, the idea of an "audiophile TG" makes for a jarring proposition: The band always seemed weirdly proud of the dismal fidelity of its early recordings, and its stated objective was to be repellent and un-assimilable. As an early Coum Transmisions slogan put it, "We Guarantee Disappointment." However off-message, the immersive experience of these new versions redeems what might sound gratuitous, or merely greedy, about this gambit. It's the audio equivalent of a "director's cut" edition of a beloved series of seedy cult movies, something to file between your Kenneth Anger boxset and a Hermann Nitsch coffee-table tome.
Assessed as an archival work of restoration, it's a bullseye. I've been listening to these records for 25 years, and for me, this feels like the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel, if the Sistine Chapel were painted by Hieronymous Bosch instead of Michelangelo. Simply put, the heat and noise and grit and dirt and gristle is still there, but Chris Carter has finally put meat on the bones. There's simply more vitality and physicality to the music, and yet it still sounds "very TG": The harsh, brittle, and scalpel-sharp high end is preserved, but the kick drums are heavier, the riffs hit harder, and the field recordings now produce a tactile IMAX-theater immersion effect. But going beyond these side effects of possibly overheated fanboy devotion, the re-introduction of Throbbing Gristle into the cultural bloodstream also offers up a temperature-taking opportunity to assess both the entire arc of their career and the harder question of whom it might speak to today.
Recorded in their rehearsal space and at various grubby gigs onto a Sony cassette recorder in a defiantly lo-fi manner in 1977, Second Annual Report makes an oddly recalcitrant candidate for a remastering job. Music this deliberately weedy was never going to please audiophiles, and the wags at Industrial Records know that even today this record is a tough sell. For sheer sangfroid, it's hard to beat a press sheet that boasts, "Contains three different versions of 'Slug Bait', a song about eating a baby." Talking about killing people isn't necessarily interesting (hello, Foster the People), but when I hear Genesis P-Orridge describe a businesslike psychopath butchering a family ("I cut his balls off with my knife (KNIFE); I make him eat them right there in front of his pregnant wife (WIFE)"), I still blink and twitch a little. The creeping dread "Slug Bait" achieves lies not in the lyrical body count but in the hiccupping repetition of trigger words as Gen's vocal longjumps from a casual speaking voice to a garbled shriek, and in the deliberate misfit between the vocal's desperation and the detuned pastoral synths smeared underneath.
It's hard to say whether this was a raising or a lowering of the bar, but the bunker mentality of "Industrial" subculture as a power-obsessed stance of aesthetic nihilism wedded to nasty, lo-fi noise was born on this record, leaving a bloody trail for Wolf Eyes, Brainbombs, Prurient, and others to follow into the present moment. As if that were not prescient enough, Second Annual Report counterbalances the bloodthirsty yang of its first eight songs with the yin of its long, brooding final track, the gauzy, scuttling, 20-minute soundtrack to the Coum Transmissions film "After Cease to Exist". Which is to say that, in 1977, TG already forecasted the ongoing migration of noise dudes toward new age (take a bow, James Ferraro), a sea-change which has been recursively washing over the underground for the past several years.
Widely regarded as the band's finest hour, 1978's D.O.A. effortlessly surpasses Second Annual Report both in its ballsy, forceful execution and its passionate range. If TG are Fleetwood Mac, then D.O.A is their Rumors: the sound of a band alchemically transforming romantic upheaval into their sharpest statement. In a proggy gambit worthy of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, D.O.A. explodes the idea of a unified album into a suite of collective songs punctured by four solo pieces from each band member. Sleazy's "Valley of the Shadow of Death" is a fetishistic fly-on-the-wall compilation of working-class men and boys talking shit, a sonic file folder of vanished moments that are naggingly unclear (Chit chat? Hustling?). Gen's melancholic pleading on his solo effort "Weeping" couldn't be further from the tranquility of Cosey's idyllic "Hometime", and this polar juxtaposition flags the album's messy personal backstory (the album was recorded after Gen and Cosey's ongoing romance imploded, and Chris and Cosey's lifelong partnership began). But the standout solo track is surely Chris Carter's celestial arpeggio staircase "AB/7A", a clear influence upon the now-much-imitated Emeralds aesthetic of heart-tugging synth mandalas.
Counterbalancing these solitary excursions, the group efforts on this album are exhilaratingly bleak: From the chemtrails of distortion on "Hit By a Rock" to the amplified sound of early computer code stored on cassette on "I.B.M." to the final raveup of "Blood on the Floor", it's never less than car-crash fascinating. At the center of the record is "Hamburger Lady", a nightmarish vision of a burn victim's excruciatingly prolonged survival in the administered world of a high-tech hospital. It's probably Throbbing Gristle's greatest song, and it sounds tougher and more menacing than ever. The re-mastering has put a bass-jeep-worthy oomph into the low end of the kick drum, thickened the seasick, doomy bass dirge that, yes, throbs at its heart, and sharpened the edge of the scything central riff, a party horn run through a custom-built effects unit called the Gristleizer. Witch-house wishes it were this creepy, but even upside-down crosses won't save you from the horror of everyday life. A nauseating masterpiece, and an essential recording.
You could write an entire book about the sly wit and polymorphous slipperiness of 20 Jazz Funk Greats, whose kitsch seaside holiday photo on notorious suicide spot Beachy Head tips off the viewer to the deliberately fishy insincerity of its sonic contents. In a smash and grab that testifies to both increased musical ambition and a relentless urge to wrongfoot audience expectations, 20 Jazz Funk Greats finds the band waking up from D.O.A's dark night of the soul and feeling curiously frisky. Snacking on not only the titular funk and jazz, the band also takes touristic zig zags through exotica, rock, and disco. Like the alien mimic in John Carpenter's sci-fi horror film "The Thing", each song seems almost persuasive as a stab at these genres, but crucially twists itself out of alignment in a perverse reveal.
"Hot on the Heels of Love" is a delirious slice of Moroder-esque boudoir-disco complete with breathy vocals from Cosey and, thanks to the remastering, a floor-filling low-end thump. The blueprint for 100% Silk's hipster-house shenanigans arguably starts here, with people who have no business taking over the dancefloor doing it anyway, with surprisingly solid results. An even stronger case for the critical re-thinking that mastering can achieve, "Convincing People", which has previously struck me as a less-than-successful stab at a cynically collapsed political anthem, now sounds suitably fist-pumping. But the standout moment here is still "Persuasion". Handcuffed to a plodding, two-note bass figure, Gen croons a narrative of pornographic photography sessions, which is punctured by squealing shards of Cosey's guitar and deeply unnerving tapes of unidentifiable people in compromising situations that seem to mingle distress, ecstasy, and pain. Tilting a repellent and yet seductive purr against found audio fragments, it's as if the crew of "To Catch a Predator" arrived too late to stop the Drake of "Marvins Room" from making a snuff film: once encountered, you can't hit undo.
But as much as TG tried to deliberately "guarantee disappointment" and mutate away from any signature, certain gestures had started to recur: "Six Six Sixties" ends this album in the riff rock grind-mode just as "Blood on the Floor" ended D.O.A. Patterns had begun to emerge, and the cumulative pressure of their own survival now forces the band members to work harder to surprise themselves. It's in the pathos of their promiscuous liasons with the forbidden territory of various forms of "real music" that this album generates a weirdly gripping power of its own. I am biased and perhaps lonely here, but this fussy midget regards it as their peak.
A live-in-the-studio séance recorded in one take in front of a posse of friends and associates, I've always regarded Heathen Earth as the dog in the manger, sounding slightly stiff relative to the unhinged and abrasive live sound captured on the TG24 boxset, which archives their scalding live gigs before frequently hostile crowds with less fidelity but more heart. The opening salvos of this concert draw upon songs and rhythmic tapes already deployed on 20 Jazz Funk Greats, and they sound tentative, fragmentary, slightly inhibited. But things begin to erupt when the whistling-led mirage of "The World Is a War Film" dissolves into a ripping version of "Something Came Over Me", turning that single into a propulsive, masturbatory launchpad for a swirling noise-dub overload which Carter's remastering has pumped into startling new prominence. Gen holds back from taking much of a vocal frontman position, and the result is a greater awareness of TG's ear for texture. It would take a spicerack of adjectives to do justice to the gnarled, twisted, flanged, and serrated soundworld conjured by the band's unique gear and more-is-more approach to processing. But it's a testimony to their precision that, for all their influence, nobody quite sounds like them when they are truly on blast, as they are here. Things come to a suitably frenzied peak in the stomping, cornet-led "Don't Do as You're Told, Do as You Think", in which Cosey's horn-through delay finally makes good on the clammy flirtations with jazz from 20 Jazz Funk Greats. Having promised a séance on a rainy afternoon, a relaxation technique cassette concludes the jam.
Though they are taking the piss in passing themselves off as band who had "hits," this compilation from 1980 of 7" singles and assertive album tracks in fact does the trick nicely: It makes a first-rate introduction to the band and offers a less torturous entryway to their prickly, poisonous oeuvre than any particular album. The swells of "Hamburger Lady" start us off feeling nausea, and this bumpy ride builds in force from there. You can sense in this victory lap a kind of précis of their career arc that testifies to the strange tractor-beam effect of pop values on an experimental band. The single element from Second Annual Report is "Tiab Guls", a backward version of "Slug Bait" that effectively censors the bloody lyrics by upstaging them into a blur. The perkiest and most uptempo high points of D.O.A. and 20 Jazz dominate, and the cover, a pastiche of Arthur Lyman and Martin Denny exotica sleeves, tips its hats to the cover of 20 Jazz as well. But the real peaks are the spiky singles "United" and "Adrenalin", fantastically complete exercises in minimalistic synth-pop songwriting that imply an alternative universe in which Throbbing Gristle were just a fuzzier, more dyspeptic cousin to Depeche Mode and John Foxx.
I wish there were a hidden TG album with 20 more songs like these, and it just so happens that the bonus tracks on this CD are the most intriguing and fully formed, including alternative mixes of "AB/7A" and "The Old Man Smiled". It is this full-speed-ahead electronic pop aspect of TG's lineage that aligns these pioneers of industrial music with the minimal synth, cold wave, and proto-techno revivalists of today. TG were crucial early pioneers of an aesthetic that now cuts a broad swathe across the audio landscape, from Martial Canterel, the Wierd Records posse, and Cold Cave, through to, arguably, lots of recent pop and R&B production, where icy synths and stark drum patterns undergird alienated vocals ad infinitum.
It's an unintended irony that a band so hostile to the very idea of "music" as such should have created recordings that have become enshrined into canonical constellations, but TG's influence has spiraled outwards as a direct result of their very unreliability and deviance. Thanks to the weird range and high quality of their catalog, separate strands of Throbbing Gristle's DNA are now entwined within the histories of electronic music, techno, dance music, goth aesthetics, occult subcultures, the avant edge of indie rock, and the entirety of the noise underground. It's a capitalist fairtytale born of hipster hindsight: The people who tried as hard as possible to make their audiences uncomfortable turned out to have a little bit of something for everyone.
In the wake of Sleazy's startling death in 2010, a kind of melancholic asymmetry has settled into place: the archive as mausoleum. The band can no longer re-unite and tour, though rumors and speculation continue to circulate about the ultimate fate of the extended recording sessions that the band tracked in London at the ICA for an extended deconstructive cover of the entirety of Nico's Desertshore album. In the wake of the decline of the CD and the seemingly inevitable slide downward in fidelity as the new brigade of information hunter-gatherers settle for the lossy, filed-shared free-for-all of torrents over the material culture of collectables, it's a perhaps deliberately out-of-step gesture to decide at precisely this point to remaster, repackage, and represent these Mosaic tablets of noise into upscale commodities memorializing a vanished moment of rebellion. So much for laughing in the face of historians, collectors, and revivalists.
Having the last laugh while seemingly anticipating this bittersweet outcome, Throbbing Gristle still don't add up: These albums are perversely inconclusive, by turns drably ugly and beautifully vital. However much Chris Carter has clarified their sound and stabilized their canon, the work itself remains as profoundly self-differential as ever. To cite a phrase the band used for its LP of the cut-ups of their icon and friend William S. Burroughs, there is "Nothing here now but the recordings." But those recordings have a funny way of coming to life. In 1981 in the NME, Paul Morley prophesized that "one day TG's music will sound rich and sweet." Thanks to Chris Carter's remastering and the necromancy of Industrial Records, that day has arrived.
