By 1981, the great Throbbing Gristle were finished. The UK quartet—electronics whiz Chris Carter, queer visionary Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, guitar hero/pocket trumpet enthusiast/sex-and-art-worker Cosey Fanni Tutti, and carnival barker-cum-cult leader Genesis P-Orridge—had swollen the boundaries between punk, psychedelia, disco, and musique concrète. Along the way they’d done what seemed like irreparable damage to each other’s ears, bodies, and hearts. They abruptly ended their tour and sent a transmission to their fan club: The mission was terminated.
Then, five years later, they briefly flickered back to life with 1986’s TGCD1. The new-fangled compact disc—the format, launched in 1982, had taken off the year before—came tucked into a typically minimalist package emblazoned with their high-voltage flash symbol and complete with a written note from each of the four players. A new edition from Mute recreates the CD and splits the 42 minutes of studio recordings made on their TEAC 8-track onto two sides of vinyl. At their core, Throbbing Gristle were a jam band, though their idea of hippie dancing might have been stubbing your toe. Much of their ample discography, including the infamous attaché case of 24 cassettes, documented their long, frenzied improvisations. TGCD1 offers a pair of exegeses into classics from their album 20 Jazz Funk Greats. At the time, they might have sounded like autopsies. Today, they sound like a dangerous séance.
The first side opens with seven minutes of noise, part cauldron and part plasma globe. There’s foam and fuzz, guitar shards invoking krautrock and Stockhausen and other brownish-gray takes on white noise. Then, with the brutal power of the slow-moving clock at the job you fucking hate, the grinding groove of “What a Day” begins. It goes on like this for the next 13 minutes, going nowhere but moving deeply, a daydream you resent yet need to carry on.
The second part launches fully into space, then settles into long orbits around another 20JFG classic, “Convincing People.” P-Orridges’s madman/ad-man vocals are absent. But its 20 minutes sell you on the notion that Throbbing Gristle could have been a dance act, putting out 12″ megamixes for queerdos to find themselves to on the dancefloor. TG could have been Moroder, shooting their sonic wads for Freddie Krueger films instead of soundtracking Derek Jarman art-house experiments. They could have been huge, instead of hugely influential.
They didn’t want to, though. They went on to bigger, often better things: Sleazy’s immortal Coil with his lover John Balance, icy-hot electro-pop outfit Chris & Cosey, P-Orridge’s trans-genre provocation engine Psychic TV. (But the former’s ill-fated Hellraiser soundtrack work and the latters’ dancefloor hits and misses proved the world would never really be ready for them.) And then, some 23 years later—and given their occult interest in numerology, that number couldn’t have been an accident—they reactivated again. Three surprisingly vital and viscous albums arrived, each recently reissued by Mute. Even more improbably, they played Coachella and New York City, the later dates with all house lights up so the crowd could be sure they weren’t imagining things. Among the T-shirts and enamel badges at the merch table, they could see something else: a compact disc called The Third Mind Movements.
