This Week's Essential Reading
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10 Friday, February 24, 2012 www.thenational.ae The National thereview The National thereview Friday, February 24, 2012 www.thenational.ae 11 this week’s essential reading ‘War dogs’ Sarajevo-born writer fondly remembers his family’s Irish setter, Mek, who survived { by Aleksandar music { Hemon, Slate the Bosnian war despite scrapes with army trucks and trigger-happy drunk soldiers playlist Four more bands who followed in the footsteps of Throbbing Gristle’s machine-like noise Cabaret Voltaire The Voice of America (1980) In the early 80s, Sheffield was the hub of the UK’s electronic music scene, with Cabaret Voltaire, as well as Human The wreckers of civilisation League, Heaven 17 and Moloko, emerging from the city’s grim industrial wastes. All of these bands’ stripped- down, minimalist sound owes a huge debt to the sonic experimentation of TG. The whole set of reissues – also As their back catalogue is reissued, Andy Battaglia including the live-studio set looks at the taboo-smashing English band Throbbing Heaven Earth and Greatest Hits, both from 1980 – heaves with a New Order Gristle. Formed as a sort of tense standoff between breathless, panting energy for invention. It also goes a long way Movement (1981) art and music, the gruesome post-punk outfit have toward reminding the latter-day listener of just how inciting and Although they’d been hinting proven to be as seminal as they were notorious incendiary music can stand to be. at an electro/rock hybrid It’s easy to forget these days, with Closer, the final album It says a lot about the elasticity of B Zombie, compiled on a bonus with tales of past radicalism so under their previous guise pop music that it can comfortably disc (each of the reissues comes omnipresent as to seem blasé, of Joy Division, it wasn’t fully accommodate a hit song called with an extra disc of singles or live that sound retains a genuine realised until they’d reinvented Hamburger Lady. Not a novelty material), layers ghostly murmurs ability to unsettle and unseat. themselves as New Order. The song about a happy or campy char- over what sounds like a guitar bur- But it does, regardless of how rattling drum machine, dark acter fashioned after a sandwich dismissive we might deign to ied deep beneath a cesspool. waves of synthesizers and but, rather, a grim, grisly, in all It’s sickening, but also mesmer- be. Looking at best-album lists ways grotesque screed about a ising. It was also an antidote to the from the past year, one can sense grim lyrical content was pure hospitalised woman who has been contemporary punk music that a yearning for that unsettling as- Throbbing Gristle. burnt so badly that she makes her was supposed to be the true ter- pect – for viscerality, even dan- carers ill. ror of the era. Indeed, it’s shock- ger. Conspicuous inclusions It’s not the kind of subject mat- ing how much more dangerous cross the lines of genre. Liturgy’s Nine Inch Nails ter that is often addressed in song, yowling rock dirge Aesthetica and deranged Throbbing Gristle Pretty Hate Machine (1989) but then, neither was anything DOA: The Third and Final Report sound now when compared with broke out beyond the borders of else taken up by the band known of Throbbing Gristle bands such as the Sex Pistols, The black-metal. Goblin, by Odd Fu- as Throbbing Gristle. Formed as Industrial Records Clash, The Damned – all those ture mastermind Tyler the Crea- These days Trent Reznor is a a sort of tense standoff between classic punk bands whose frame tor, signalled a creeping strain of sought-after film soundtrack art and music in England in the of reference, however unhinged, hip-hop toward the dark and the composer, bagging himself 1970s, Throbbing Gristle were as from the ether. At work are just a was still recognisable as rock ’n’ macabre. Prurient’s Bermuda an Oscar for his score for notorious as a band could be. They few spare synthesised sounds and roll. Drain found a hitherto unchart- Facebook flick The Social aspired toward extremes of an- a voice, smeared in digital filth, In that way, Throbbing Gris- ed middle-ground between gut- Network. Back in 1989 he tagonism, lighting out against all reading back a real-life account tle classifies as a paragon of the tural noise and gleaming elec- was more into pummelling manner of convention and staging of a doctor’s letter about a patient offshoot strain known as “post- tronic music. eardrums with his band NIN, transgressive performances that whose face has been marred be- Examples abound and all of punk”. But even then, their work who combined heavy-metal prompted a prominent London yond recognition. It’s barely mu- resists communion with that or them suggest something still politician to decry them as “wreck- sical, suggestively perplexing and anything else – except, perhaps, alive within the unnerving sound guitar riffs with the deafening ers of civilisation”. Such is the stuff completely disquieting – a classic for the bands they later influenced. summoned by Throbbing Gristle din of a pneumatic drill. from which enduring musical leg- tripartite Throbbing Gristle effect. Part of the wowing effect of listen- in their prime. Historical dis- end is made. DOA is the second of the five al- ing to Throbbing Gristle anew is tance does nothing to numb the But now, on the occasion of a val- bums reissued (it was neither accounting for all the styles and effect of hearing Genesis P-Or- Marilyn Manson uable reissue campaign more than really “third” nor “final” in the sounds they seeded. Industrial ridge spew spittled poetics into a three decades later, historical no- band’s catalogue, appropriate to microphone while the rest of the The Golden Age of Grotesque music, nervy new-wave, techno, (2003) toriety matters less than another what would come to be nonsen- noise, horrorcore rap – each can band – Chris Carter, Cosey Fanni aspect of the project more closely sical tradition). First of the lot is trace its roots to Throbbing Gristle Tutti and Peter “Sleazy” Chris- at hand: each of the five primary 1977’s The Second Annual Report, in its diseased DNA. topherson – build up rickety While TG’s grotesque onstage Throbbing Gristle records that which exhibits Throbbing Gristle The group’s formula favoured jar- From left, Chris Carter, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson structures of texture and noise theatrics and quasi-Nazi and remain. Hamburger Lady was by as an enterprising upstart heavily ring variation and clashing chang- and Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle. Michael Ochs Archives / Getty designed to degenerate. There serial-killer imagery may have no means a “hit” in terms of chart in thrall to noise. The setting for es in tone. But there are sounds Images is a lot of power still in musical attracted media attention, placement, but its reverberations Slug Bait is a dirty bed mussed by of something more pop-minded, ruination, and a lot left to build their record sales barely can still be felt, even now. It serves all manner of electronic grinding or at least more approachable, on from ruins whose foundations registered. Brian Warner, aka as a centrepiece on DOA: The Third and grating, with vocalist Genesis the second album, DOA, in a track even dance to it, if not otherwise comparatively cleaner and much be better not to imagine, while its almost aching submission to remain sound. Marilyn Manson, however, and Final Report of Throbbing Gris- P-Orridge moaning a spoken fan- called AB/7A that glides over ar- frozen with fear. closer to sane, though it’s in such others march by in tight formalis- an appealing form of synthesised mimicked TG’s antics and tle, an album from 1978. Stretched tasy about the murder of a family. peggiated rhythms from an elec- By 1979’s wryly titled 20 Jazz Funk a context that the group proved tic groupings of rhythm and mel- disco. Persuasion, following right Andy Battaglia is a New York- converted this into a string over four minutes that seem to last ody. Hot on the Heels of Love is full after, returns to a distended spell Named after the poison gas used tronic synthesizer and a drum ma- Greats, Throbbing Gristle hit on both artful and abstract. Stretches based writer whose work appears of platinum-selling albums. much longer, the song is slow and in concentration camps during chine. It’s messy and mechanically the most fully realised and resil- of songs play like ambient movie of irresistible sci-fi scintillation, of slow, plodding death-speak— in The Wall Street Journal, The creepy, a haunting transmission the Holocaust, the single Zyklon raw, but only a little bit. You might ient aspects of their sound. It’s music, evocative of scenes it might dark in its shadings but bright in lest the mood grow too jubilant. Wire, Bookforum and more..