Summary.
The term "industrial music" was first used by Monte Cazazza,
an avantgarde composer based in San Francisco, but the meaning of
"industrial music" was defined in Sheffield, England.
Performance artists had employed abrasive, lugubrious soundtracks for their
shows since the 1960s. As the technology improved, those soundtracks became
more and more extreme. The marriage of avantgarde art and avantgarde music
that dated from the days of Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground was revived
by the new wave, especially in California, and eventually landed in Europe.
Sheffield became the emblem of the industrial society.
Throbbing Gristle and
Cabaret Voltaire, the inventors of "industrial
music", were familiar with the noise of a factory and decided to use that
noise as a metaphor for the human condition at the end of the 20th century.
They began composing lengthy suites of electronic noise that were inspired by
the creaking, the hissing and the thuds of machines, by the metronomes,
by the clockwork mechanisms of a factory.
However, the core theme of the music played by
Throbbing Gristle
was not science-fiction: it was pornography and horror.
Chris Carter, Peter Christopherson, Neil Megson (Genesis P-Orridge) and
performance artist Christine Newby (Cosey Fanni Tutti) were more interested in exploring
disturbing states of the mind than painting the future of humankind.
Their focus was on the traumas of ordinary souls, souls lost to the
machinery of the industrial society. Their manifesto and masterpiece,
Second Annual Report (1977), was subtitled "music from the death
factory". Its pieces used cacophonous electronics, terrified screams,
atonal guitars and found sounds, to create a ritual of therapeutic shock
and cathartic liberation. They employed free-jazz improvisation and winked at
the avantgarde techniques of "musique concrete" and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
The sound of the metropolis that came alive in their suites was the sound of
the lives sacrificed to the machines, not the sound of the machines that used
those lives.
Their performances coupled this "noise" with multimedia shows that were no less
provocative: Newby pioneered performance art based on bodily fluids
and all sorts of erotic fetishism.
Throbbing Gristle never stopped producing this kind of Freudian mayhems, as
documented by the studio album Heathen Earth (1980), by
the live Mission Of Dead Souls (1981)
and by the soundtrack for In The Shadow Of The Sun (1984), all of which
are structured around lengthy streams of consciousness and abstract
sound-painting, but, at the same time, the band changed course with
D.O.A. (1978), a collection of electronic vignettes inspired by
Brian Eno's Before And After Science and Ron Geesin's Electrosound
that, for the most part, focused on the mechanical landscape of factories,
warehouses and assembly lines. The new protagonists were the machines: their
cold steady rhythms, their screeching metallic noises, their symphony of
inarticulate patterns. 20 Jazz Funk Greats (1979) added synthetic
dance beats and simple melodies, thus opening the floodgates to disco-oriented
industrial music, the progenitor of synth-pop.
Full bio.
(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
Throbbing Gristle have gone down in the history of modern music for having coined a new genre, that of “industrial” music. Although born and raised within the ranks of London’s intellectual circles, Throbbing Gristle mainly referred to the industrial towns of the North. Influenced by a flourishing sci-fi and horror literature (which extended the apocalyptic prophecies of George Orwell), Throbbing Gristle based their entire career on denouncing the dehumanization of industrial civilization. Their music presented frighteningly decayed scenarios that could be interpreted either as an extreme synthesis of the “noises” of the industrial world (a literal reading) or as an abstract transcription of the mental devastation caused by alienation (a metaphorical reading). Industrial music was born as the music of machine noises and, indirectly, as a subgenre of electronic music.
The link between Throbbing Gristle and punk actually ends there. Punks were not intellectuals and did not frequent art galleries. But the story of Throbbing Gristle does in fact belong to the punk era, because it was the explosion of punk (and, not least, the advent of independent record labels) that favored the emergence of radical genres like theirs.
Throbbing Gristle (slang for “erection”) were born in London in 1976 from the meeting of singer Genesis P-Orridge (Neil Megson), who since 1969 had been running the COUM Transmissions project—whose performances incorporated vomit and urine—the guitarist and pornographic model Christine Carol Newby (a.k.a. “Cosey Fanni Tutti”), and the two experimenters Chris Carter and Peter Christopherson. That year COUM Transmissions held an art exhibition entitled “Prostitution” at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art, which caused a scandal because it included pornographic and even lesbian material (photographs of Newby published by various porn magazines as early as 1972). In their live performances (mostly in conjunction with art events), the four specialized in a multimedia show ante litteram. What made them famous within the underground were both the music (electronic and atonal) and the show, centered on a gruesome and repellent stage design and on erotic and sadomasochistic provocation, flooded with strobe lights. The audience was scientifically stunned by a barrage of unpleasant sounds and images.
At first the ensemble supported itself on the meager earnings of the four amateurs: Christopherson a photographer, Cosey a fashion model, Carter a truck driver, Orridge unemployed.
The music gradually evolved from a simple therapeutic shock, from a soundtrack to a delirious ritual, into a more conscious manipulation of sound in line with the experiments of the electronic avant-garde: dissonant electronic bands, macabre bass pulsations, collages of conversations, cacophonous turbulence, imitations of factory machinery. The nonconformist practice was completed by a manic predilection for the rape of acoustic instruments of Eastern origin and by a blind devotion to the metallophone. The bombardment was continuous and total.
Le loro performance furono piuttosto rare, ma facevano epoca. Celebre quella in
cui diffusero dagli altoparlanti "muzak per il traffico" su Tottenham Court
Ignorati dai locali metropolitani, cercavano asilo presso club d'avanguardia e
associazioni culturali di perferia. Fondarono infine la Industrial Records,
un'etichetta discografica autogestita che sanci` la nascita della
"musica industriale".
The first album, Second Annual Report (Industrial, 1977 – Fetish, 1979 – Mute, 1983), subtitled “music from the death factory,” is a report on the first year of activity. The pieces in their repertoire (Maggot Death, Slug Bait, and the soundtrack to the film After Cease To Exist) were recorded on different occasions and, duly welded together (the first two in several versions), form a single continuum of subway noises, ambulance sirens, passers-by’s chatter, underground traffic vibrations, thuds of presses and roars of machinery, electric and metallic shocks, labored breathing and terrified screams, tunnel reverberations and the clatter of trains, composing overall a chilling fresco of the industrial metropolis.
Industrial music thus reveals itself as environmental music, because it is conceived in function of an environmental scenography. But it is also, above all, music of death, as the logo of Industrial Records suggests—a Nazi concentration camp; and the music leaves little doubt about the intention to identify that place of atrocities with the metropolis itself, another “death factory.” The record aims to be a documentary of the apocalypse, an apocalypse envisioned as a slow collective agony. The lugubrious atmospheres of Throbbing Gristle describe that magma of atrocious spasms that is everyday industrial life. Their truth-sound focuses on the process of social annihilation of the individual, on the dispersion of personality into the voracious gears of that abnormal machine that is modern society, capable of reducing the individual to a gear himself, endowed with a fixed and periodic motion and noise.
Traditional instruments and the synthesizer serve a rhythmic or melodic accompanying function with respect to the tape base. The result is a very dense tangle of sounds, partly electronic and partly acoustic (but always more or less improvised). Everything, in turn, aims at theatrical representation. This radical art derives on the one hand from gesturalism and on the other from musique concrète. In particular one hears echoes of Stockhausen-style experiments in voice manipulation, Varèse’s chamber music for sirens, Subotnick’s Dadaist suites, and Henry’s concerts for everyday noises. The schools of Paris, New York, and Darmstadt converge in a riot of cacophonies meant to serve as the soundtrack for the industrial era. performance and rhythm.
Live, the group continued to experiment with ever bolder musical forms, but on record far more banal pieces ended up appearing, as if the group had merely re-listened to Ummagumma by Pink Floyd, Before And After Science by Brian Eno, and above all the records of Ron Geesin. The bio-technological chaos of machine society constitutes the subject of the second work, D.O.A. (Industrial, 1978 – Fetish, 1981 – Mute, 1983), subtitled “third and final report,” but in reality the second part of their expressionist saga.
The record seems to have been spawned by another group. The angularities of the previous one have been largely smoothed out. Rhythms move to the foreground. The novelty, compared to the previous disc, is fragmentation. Each track is in fact a concise sonic gag, from the tape-stored impulses of IBM computer data to the robot ballet of DOA. Industrial music thus reveals itself to be a many-headed hydra: dreamlike (Weeping), psychedelic (Hit By A Rock), minimalist (AB/7A), environmental, subliminal depending on the situation. The chaotic world of the “death factory” returns only (for two minutes) in Walls Of Sound, a true wall of sound for drills and bulldozers.
A transitional work, DOA abandons the Wagnerian proportions of the live performances and settles for the format of electronic vignettes. With this record, which alternates charming vignettes of robotic life with Tibetan prayers murmured by ranks of clones, Throbbing Gristle move away from the avant-garde and draw closer to the rock song form.
20 Jazz Funk Greats (Industrial, 1979 – Fetish, 1981 – Mute, 1983) continues along this path of partial retraction. The album is clearly inspired by the postmodern dance music preached by Brian Eno. The Throbbing Gristle operation consists in transferring the tenets of “industrial music” into this genre. The noises of the factory of death become arrangements for ballets and robotic melodies. The landscape remains the chilling one of the first album: long electric laments, echoes of winds lost in the dark labyrinths of the subway, anguished pulsations, caterpillar-like cadences, synthetic syncopations, primordial screams. The atmosphere oozes desolation, terror, impotence.
But the title track unleashes jazz trumpet reverbs over a funky rhythm, and Tanith uses jazz and funk to create stasis and hypnosis in an “ambient” way (a practice pushed to the limit by the impalpable Exotica); Persuasion is a comic folk ballad camouflaged in asylum-like apathy; What A Day is a spiritual from the technological plantations, a chant of the industrial jungle.
The manifesto of the new course of Martian metronomies is Still Walking, a mini-concert for metallurgical workshops. In Convincing People those industrial rhythms give rise to a primitive tribalism that, in Hot On The Heels Of Love, brushes against sensual disco music and, in Walkabout, produces a gripping mechanical ballet. The change of direction overwhelms the decadent dance music of off-discotheques in a delirious apology of paranoia and “devolution.”
A rather schizophrenic record, made up of catacombal hymns to death and plastic rhythmic metamorphoses, 20 Jazz Funk Greats sanctions adherence to the practices of postmodern dance music.
Other relics from this period would later be released posthumously on Assume Power Focus (Hollows Hill, 1998).
To the group’s entirely underground discography one must add the singles (among them the macabre Subhuman and the dance of self-destruction Discipline, 1981), Journey Through A Body (Walter Ulbricht Schallfolien, 1982 – Mute, 1993), featuring the long tracks Medicine, Catholic Sex and Violencia, the last studio album, Heathen Earth (Industrial, 1980 – Fetish, 1981 – Mute, 1983), and the soundtrack In The Shadow Of The Sun (Illuminated, 1984).
Heathen Earth (Industrial, 1980 – Fetish, 1981 – Mute, 1983) is a programmatic work that reconnects with the debut album. After Cease To Exist, The World Is A War Film and Dreamachine refine the group’s early anguished jams.
In The Shadow Of The Sun (Illuminated, 1984 – Mute, 1993) is perhaps the group’s most complex composition, a long suite lasting almost an hour.
After the concert of May 29, 1981, in San Francisco, the group disbanded. Their final performances were collected with commendable diligence, but between 1981 and 1984 the market was flooded with a disproportionate amount of posthumous material: Special Treatment, recorded live in London in 1978; Fuhrer Der Menscheit, recorded live in Berlin in 1980, on Funeral In Berlin (Zensor, 1981); Mission Of Dead Souls (Fetish, 1981 – Mute, 1983), recorded live in San Francisco (with the eight-minute Spirits Flying and nine other fragments worthy of the first album); and so on—mentioning only the major releases.
For the most part, these later documents return to the expressionist chaos of the beginnings, but from a completely different perspective. Instead of mimicking the machines that have conquered the world, the music seems to place itself in a later age, when the civilization of machines has been demolished by an immense catastrophe. The protagonists of their suites are then technological ruins lashed by radioactive gusts and populated by grotesque monsters: violent torrents of distortion, voices from beyond the grave, electronic geysers, galactic signals, erotic gasps, occult presences, piercing sirens, menacing metronomies, cybernetic whimpers, electrostatic discharges.
The suites, improvised live, give no respite to the nervous system: they constitute a violent acoustic electro-shock, a vast mural fresco of graffiti and sonic hieroglyphs on the “factory of death,” a slowly moving magma of deformed chords, kaleidoscopes of cosmic visions and nightmares of the subconscious.
Sparks of orgiastic electronics in the manner of Subotnick alternate with impressionistic rifts à la Schulze. Fragments of Stockhausen-like choirs, Ligeti-style continua, and suspended chants in the vein of Nono intertwine until they blur into one another. A Babel-like summa of the idioms of the electronic avant-garde, the “industrial” suite constitutes an important point of arrival within the “popular” sphere of rock music.
Posthumously, countless albums long kept in the drawer were released, some recorded as early as 1975–1976.
Chris and Cosey continued as a duo, carrying forward the intellectual synth-pop of the third album, while Genesis P-Orridge kept the banner of industrial music flying with Psychic TV.
Throbbing Gristle transplanted the expressionist, theater-music rituals inherited from the Velvet Underground into a futurist scenario. While preserving the decadent aspect of shock-representation, the Gristle shifted the emphasis onto technological holocaust. At least Second Annual Report, Heathen Earth, In The Shadow Of The Sun, and Mission Of Dead Souls belong to the future of music (rock or otherwise).
(Original English text by Piero Scaruffi)
A box-set,
24 Hours (Mute, 2003), collects 24 live performances dating from the
early years of the band.
TG+ (Mute, 2004) is a 10-cd box-set that collects
Throbbing Gristle's final ten performances.
CD1 (1986) is a live performance.
Mutant TG (Mute, 2004) is a remix album, the ultimate offense to
the memory of a great band.
Throbbing Gristle reformed and recorded Part Two The Endless Not (Mute, 2007), a rather inessential album whose main attraction is the way the four
seasoned musicians integrated their separate projects
(Chris & Cosey, Coil and Psychic TV) into an organic whole.
However the shock therapy of their "real" albums is not even hinted at in
this reunion album. This is a living-room album that won't "shock" anyone,
especially in 2007.
Despite the extended duration of
Vow of Silence, Greasy Spoon, Lyre Liar and Endless Not, the songs ultimately hark back to the song format of
20 Jazz Funk Greats rather than to the free-form maelstroms of the band's masterpieces.
The best they can offer is the sophisticated jazzy ambience of Rabbit Snare.
Throbbing Gristle even released a battery-operated soundbox,
Gristleism (Throbbing Gristle, 2009).
Peter Christopherson died in 2010 at the age of 55.
