Throbbing Gristle – { feuilleton }

Do You Have The Force? Volume 2

Cosmic background by John Harris.

Three years have passed since the release of Do You Have The Force?, Jon Savage’s compilation of space disco and post-punk recordings. The collection proved popular enough to prompt a follow-up which arrived here last week. I enjoy Mr Savage’s curatorial instincts so a second dose was irresistible even though I already own more of the tracks on the new album than I do with the earlier collection.

Data 70 for the win. Dee D. Jackson opens the new collection with a pulsing paean to robot sex.

I was thinking recently that the value of the historical compilation album—those collections that contain previously released material—has been diminished considerably by the rise of the internet mix. Before Mixcloud et al the home-made cassette compilation was a youth-culture staple (I made lots of them) but cassette collections seldom travelled beyond their maker’s immediate circle of friends. Official compilations had the advantage of wide distribution, access to quality sources and scarce recordings. The better ones also featured authoritative sleevenotes, an essential thing where those scarce recordings where concerned. One of the drawbacks of the home-made tape was brought to my attention in the late 1980s when a Dutch friend sent me a mix he’d made for a group of acquaintances who staged live art/occult performances. The contents were a soup of dialogue and music recorded from TV layered over borrowings from record-library albums which included a particularly haunting snatch of something that he only remembered as being “music from Ancient Egypt”. I spent the next ten years searching for this whenever I was in a record shop with a decent international section. I did find it eventually (it’s the funeral music from this) but without persistence and a chance discovery I might never have known what it was. One thing we don’t lack today is information, so the chances of being nonplussed in this manner are much more remote. The erosion of the former strengths of the compilation album have only placed more emphasis on the person of the compiler; all those Back To Mine collections have turned out to be models for the future.

Do You Have The Force? Volume 2 follows the form of Savage’s earlier collection by starting out in the disco/dance zone before sliding in the second half into the post-punk world, an area conterminous with disco yet seen at the time as being in opposition to any rock and pop that was regarded as too commercial, too trivial, etc. I’ve never been someone who needed to reappraise disco, there was more than enough in its cosmic and futuristic excursions to engage my interest at its peak of popularity. Not being a club-goer, however, the good stuff wasn’t always easy to find so I’m still learning from collections such as these. The post-punk material is home territory by comparison. The contents of the new album include yet more Cabaret Voltaire (I’d probably have chosen the uptempo Sluggin’ Fer Jesus instead of Red Mask), the beatless Beachy Head by Throbbing Gristle (the closest TG get to Eno’s On Land), and Monochrome Days by Thomas Lear & Robert Rental. The latter is from Lear & Rental’s The Bridge, a one-off collaboration released on Throbbing Gristle’s Industrial Records, and a cult album round these parts. If you’re familiar with Savage’s tastes, all the above are the kinds of inclusions you’d expect. Less predictable was another number from Fourth Wall, the second album by The Flying Lizards, which follows the Fourth Wall track that Savage included on Volume 1. I bought Fourth Wall when it was released in 1981, in part because Robert Fripp was credited among the players and I was curious to know what Fripp was doing with such an eccentric bunch. (This, if you’re equally curious.) David Cunningham’s Lizards are best known for their off-beat cover versions, the most popular of which, Money, was a surprise chart success in 1979. But Cunningham was (and still is) an experimental musician, and Fourth Wall showed much more of this side of his group, juxtaposing short looped pieces and other weirdness with a handful of original songs. Patti Palladin does most of the singing, also co-writing a huge favourite of mine, Hands 2 Take, that (once again) I would have chosen over Savage’s selections even though it’s not electronic enough for the album as a whole. But that’s one of the benefits of the compilation: it compels you to follow somebody else’s inclinations instead of your own. Biggest surprise of all has been Soft Space on the disco side, an electronic instrumental credited to Soft Machine. If you’re familiar with Soft Machine’s early albums, which evolved from psychedelic pop in the late 1960s to jazz-rock improvisation in the 1970s, then nothing prepares you for this piece, a one-off synthesizer composition recorded in 1978 by keyboard player Karl Jenkins. And that’s another benefit of the compilation album: an introduction to discographic anomalies that you’ve been missing all these years.

Will there now be a third volume? There’s more than enough musical material for another collection along the same lines so we’ll have to wait and see. Volume 2 is out now on Caroline True Records.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Talking time: Cabaret Voltaire interviews
• Do You Have The Force?

Weekend links 666

Muy Mago (Portrait of Aleister Crowley) (1961) by Xul Solar.

• “…snails amaze with their capacity to move so far, to spread so widely, while doing so little. This, it seems to me, is one of the real marvels of snail biogeography. Individuals do not need to exert great effort because natural selection has acted for them, acted on them, acted with them, to produce these beings that are so unexpectedly but uniquely suited to a particular form of deep time travel, drifting. From such a perspective, rather than being any kind of deficiency, the highly successful passivity of snails might be seen as a remarkable evolutionary achievement.” Thom van Dooren on how snails cross vast oceans.

• “Slow art has layers. And this is why it requires time and effort. We should see this as a good and necessary thing. If this is a kind of obstacle in the way of easy assimilation then it is an obstacle that is integral to the value of the thing itself. The mind is calmed, or disturbed, or made exultant by the art that rewards us for our goodwill and our capacity to take our time.” In Praise of Slow Art by Chris Horner.

• “I have set naturalism and the supernatural in binary opposition but perhaps there is a third way. Let’s call it the supranatural stance…” Paul Broks explores the roots of coincidence.

• At Unquiet Things: The art of Hector Garrido, an illustrator who specialised in the Gothic staple of women in gowns fleeing at night from sinister mansions.

• “The writer Jorge Luis Borges once referred to his friend the artist Xul Solar as ‘one of the most singular events of our era’,” writes Miriam Basilio.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Japanese craftsmanship meets Pokemon at Kanazawa’s National Crafts Museum.

• At Public Domain Review: Martin Frobenius Ledermüller’s Microscopic Delights (1759–63).

• New music: Rest Of Life by Steve Roach.

• The Four Horsemen (1972) by Aphrodite’s Child | Supper’s Ready (1972) by Genesis | Six Six Sixties (1979) by Throbbing Gristle

Weekend links 623

A symmetrical ink blot from Gobolinks, or Shadow Pictures for Young and Old (1896) by Ruth McEnery Stuart & Albert Bigelow Paine, a book where the blots are much more interesting than the interpretative verses that accompany them.

• “…within a year, they were on The Tube, performing their German-language extrapolation of Throbbing Gristle’s Discipline to a visibly nonplussed audience.” Alexis Petridis on the return of Propaganda. The group’s debut album, A Secret Wish (previously), has long been an obscure object of desire round here.

• RIP Alan White, drummer in Yes for much of the 1970s (see Sound Chaser for details), and also—although nobody mentioned this at the time—the originator of the drum sounds sampled on a Fairlight for Beat Box by the Art Of Noise.

• “For the anthropologist Stewart Guthrie, pareidolia is not a fringe phenomenon: it is at the core of religious experience.” Hunter Dukes on the interpretation of ink blots.

• “…self-righteousness is the one thing that I don’t agree with,” says John Waters. “We used humour to fight when I was young.”

• New music: October Cut Up by Black Glass Ensemble, and New Witness by Michael Begg.

• Also RIP Shiv Kumar Sharma, master of the santoor.

• “Scientists recreate Cleopatra’s favourite perfume.”

• Simon Fisher Turner’s favourite albums.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Len Lye Day.

• Cleopatra’s Barge (1962) by Alex North | Cleopatra’s Needle (1963) by Ahab And The Wailers | Cleopatra King Size (2002) by Jah Wobble & Temple Of Sound

Richard H. Kirk, 1956–2021

Q: Was the initial idea to be a music group?

Richard H. Kirk: I suppose that depends on how you define “music”. No, the initial idea was to be more of a sound group, just putting sounds together like jigsaw pieces. If the result did sound like music then it was purely coincidental.

From Cabaret Voltaire: The Art of the Sixth Sense (1984) by M Fish & D Hallberry

This was a shock, in part because I tend to think of certain artists as perpetually young even when I’ve been following them for decades. In the case of the not-so-young Cabaret Voltaire it was an easy frame of mind to slip into when Kirk and Mallinder were only photographically visible up to about 1990. After this the group resumed their former obscurity, cloaked by abstract images and Designers Republic graphics.

Oddly enough I’d been running through the early Cabs albums only a couple of weeks ago, and wondering how long Kirk was going to keep the revived group going on his own. I suppose this means that Cabaret Voltaire is now definitely finished, in which case it’s a double RIP. And just a few days ago I was reading a Mark Fisher essay on Joy Division, feeling as frustrated as I always do when Curtis and co. are praised for “channelling” (or whatever) the spirit of William Burroughs when nobody would think to connect Burroughs and Joy Division if you changed the title of the song Interzone to something else. Throbbing Gristle were closer to Burroughs personally than were Cabaret Voltaire but the influence on TG only became really overt when Industrial Records released Nothing Here Now But The Recordings, an album of Burroughs’ tape experiments. The Cabs were more important to me as a youthful reader of Burroughs’ novels for seeming to be broadcasting from inside his texts. Their early albums were disturbed and disturbing (a friend once asked me to switch off their music for this very reason), an unwholesome amalgam of dialogue taped from TV and radio, crude electronics, threatening voices, and songs that were warped into strange new shapes. “This is entertainment…this is fun…“ I’m still amazed that their first album included a cover of No Escape, a song by psychedelic group The Seeds, which didn’t sound out of place despite the weirdness surrounding it.

William smiles. Left to right: John Giorno, William Burroughs, Stephen Mallinder, Richard H. Kirk. Photo by Sylvia Plachy from the gatefold interior of A Diamond In The Mouth Of A Corpse (1985), a compilation album released by Giorno Poetry Systems.

Cut-up theory was a constant in the Cabaret Voltaire discography, and in many of Richard Kirk’s solo recordings, with the group starting out as Dada-inspired tape collagists* before they found a way to present their experiments in a musical form. The concept is to the fore in the title of Cabaret Voltaire’s debut album, Mix-Up, and exemplified in the track that opens side two, Photophobia, a reworked version of a Surrealist monologue that dates from the group’s days making recordings in Chris Watson’s attic. Photophobia pulls you into the same queasy dreamspace in which you find yourself when reading Burroughs’ early cut-ups, a catalogue of oneiric splicings—”they’re injecting the rivers with stainless-steel fish…a coelacanth/a body with a shrunken head…”—the phrases being increasingly overwhelmed by rising synthesizer drones and Kirk’s squeaking clarinet. Kirk’s solo debut, Disposable Half-Truths, was a cassette-only release on Industrial Records infused with the Burroughs spirit in both technique and content, offering track titles such as Information Therapy and Insect Friends Of Allah. Cabaret Voltaire continually referred to Burroughs’ speculative essay collection The Electronic Revolution in interviews but it was Kirk who extended the group’s cut-up experiments to film and video. By 1982 they’d accumulated enough of their own video material to release a VHS collection on their own music and video label, Doublevision.

If I’ve concentrated on the early recordings it’s because the post-punk period continues to seem like a miraculous moment, a space of four years when anything was possible musically, a time when Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis could record an album as uncompromisingly strange as 3R4 then have it released on 4AD and sold in racks next to albums by label-mates Bauhaus and The Birthday Party. Cabaret Voltaire took advantage of this unique period to warp expectations in their own way, and to extend the boundaries of the possible. Richard H. Kirk’s subsequent career was prolific, releasing a blizzard of albums and singles under a variety of pseudonyms (Discogs lists 42 different Kirk aliases). One of my favourite pieces from his solo recordings is White Darkness from 1993, the last track on a 12-inch single, Digital Lifeforms, credited to Sandoz. There’s a mysterious quality here that I wish he’d explored more often on his later albums instead of letting the rhythms run their course for another seven or eight minutes. The sampled voice maintains a thread of continuity with Kirk’s music before and after, as does the reference to LSD in the Sandoz name, taking us back to Mix-Up and the mescaline experiments described on Heaven And Hell. Psychedelia by other means.

* For a taste of unadorned Cabs-related tape manipulation, see The Men With The Deadly Dreams, a cassette release compiled by Geoff Rushton/John Balance which features contributions from Chris Watson and Richard H. Kirk. Note that the blog post doesn’t give an accurate description of the tape contents.

• At Vinyl Factory: An introduction to Richard H. Kirk in 10 records.
• At The Wire: two interviews with Kirk from the magazine’s archives.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Recoil and Cabaret Voltaire
• Pow-Wow by Stephen Mallinder
• TV Wipeout revisited
• Doublevision Presents Cabaret Voltaire
• Just the ticket: Cabaret Voltaire
• European Rendezvous by CTI
• TV Wipeout
• Seven Songs by 23 Skidoo
• Elemental 7 by CTI
• The Crackdown by Cabaret Voltaire
• Neville Brody and Fetish Records

Weekend links 585

Fox Woman (c. 1916) by Bertha Lum.

• “Apparently he had been walking though customs/arrivals with a large cube of weed stuck on the end of his silver Dr Martens and a foot long silver flashlight full of seed, but when they realised who he was, and that today was his 60th birthday, he was released with just a warning.” Radio Lancashire DJ Steve Barker remembers the late Lee “Scratch” Perry, and links to one of his shows with Perry (and Roger Eagle) here.

• “…it’s the chase itself that shapes the film’s distinctive aesthetic—the under-lit interiors and the sunless and frigid exteriors of the many locations across the city, sites that take the cops well beyond their usual beat, to places both above and below ground.” Chris McGinley explains how William Friedkin’s The French Connection reinvented (and exploded) the police procedural.

• “Toibin, who is himself gay, has always extended historical sympathy to sexual outsiders. As he’s written elsewhere, ‘There are no 19th-century ballads about being gay.'” Dwight Garner reviews Colm Toibin’s The Magician, a novel about Thomas Mann.

Here is the key point: to experience such marvels you have to risk an unsophisticated, even credulous love for corn, and part of that love involves a willingness to submit to what [Phil] Ford calls a “magical hermeneutics” capable of transforming marginal chunks of pop culture. As he writes in the wonderful 2008 essay that inspired the episode, exotica is “less a genre of music than a class of cultural objects that share a characteristic projection of the self across boundaries of space and time.” This makes it essentially psychedelic—“film music for daydreams”—and Ford draws out that historical connection in his essay, which argues that while the hippie movement that Nature Boys like Ahbez prophesied looks like a radical rejection of the space-age bachelor pad of ’50s consumerism, tendrils of transcendent yearning link the exotica imaginary to the earnest if stoned mysterioso to come.

Erik Davis on Eden Ahbez and Californian exotica

• Edgar Froese interviewed on WSHU radio in 1974 where he talks about Tangerine Dream, live performance and the future of electronic music.

• At Dangerous Minds: A momentary lapse of reason…when Dario Argento interviewed Pink Floyd in 1987.

• It’s that man again: John Doran interviews Kevin Martin, aka The Bug.

• David McKenna on The Strange World of France, La Nòvia & friends.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Tape deck.

• Exotica (1958) by Martin Denny | Exotica Lullaby (1976) by Harry “The Crown” Hosono | Exotica (1979) by Throbbing Gristle