Interview with Monte Cazazza (Slash,1979)

SLASH Magazine (Vol. 2, #3) | January 1979

"From Oakland to England, from obscurity to being "very widely unknown", Monte Cazazza has a past. One of our finest investigative reporters lays it bare...

    Next record due for release from Industrial Records is from Monte Cazazza, a reclusive Oakland artist whose performances have violated the sensibilities of indignant art critics, the entire acid-damaged Bay Area Avantgarde and jaded art-cliques from Menlo Park to Venice (Italy). He's been described as a "brilliant monster," "art gangster," and "a real sick guy," but one thing is unanimous: his personal appearances really rile people up.

His detractors just don't seem to get the point. Genet says it best: "To escape the horror, bury yourself in it." Like other artists who are obsessed with violent images, Cazazza's early life was riddled with hideous events and accidents, including witnessing a necrophiliac in action. Rather than choke down those nightmares, he spat them back out at the world.

Cazazza's reputation was spawned at Oakland College of Arts and Crafts when for his first sculpture assignment he created a cement "waterfall" down the main stairway of the building, making it permanently impassable and got the boot on the second day of school.

His formal education completed, he passed quickly through a mutilated rubber doll period then disappeared among dark rumours of hospitals and jails. He resurfaced with a blatantly commercial attempt to woo the whims of the wealthy with tasteful pornographic collages of orchids sprouting penises at a San Francisco exhibit. He was contacted by an ageing countess as a possible benefactress and lunched at her famous Oakland mansion while visions of dollar signs danced drunkenly around the plates. The Contessa died two weeks later.

Shortly thereafter in 1972 he achieved infamy when he was invited to attend an arts conference weekend-in-the-woods to share transcendental conversations on perspective and grant-writing while nestling paint-spattered jeans in pine needles and toasting hand-dyed marshmallows for "S'Mores" in an ultimate artsy outdoorsy atmosphere. Cazazza arrived with an armed bodyguard and sprinkled arsenic into all the food. At lunch he dropped bricks with the word "dada" painted on them on artistic feet. At dinner he burned a partially decomposed, maggot-infested cat at the table. His bodyguard blocked the exit, and several participants fell ill due to the stench. Photos and stories of this event were published as far away as Holland.

Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti of Throbbing Gristle read of Cazazza in Vile Magazine in 1974 when he was a classic Valentine's Day cover boy holding a dripping bloody heart that looked torn out of his chest. The Gristle's and Cazazza's mutual fascination with pornography and fascism prompted the limeys to pay a call to California to view in person the 15'x15' silver screw together swastika Cazazza constructed which could be rapidly dismantled in case of police raids or guerrilla JDL attacks.

Since their visit was at the height of the Gary Gilmore furor, they all photographed each other in blindfolds as though they were in front of a firing squad, complete with a real loaded gun pointed at their hearts to get better reactions. Postcards made of the photos were mailed immediately after Gilmore's execution to the warden of the Utah penitentiary and several newspapers. Over 6,000 T-shirts with the same photo were sold in England, and a picture of one was on the front page of the Hong Kong Daily News. Their mock photo was mistakenly considered the official execution photo according to P-Orridge.

T-shirt sales financed Cazazza's 1977 trip to England where he was let loose in Industrial RecordsP.S. (PLASTIC SURGERY), BUSTED KNEECAPS, F.F.A. (FIST FUCKERS OF AMERICA), HATE, and TO MOM ON MOTHER'S DAY. A Cazazza single will be released in March. studios with an engineer, a chainsaw, the innards of a piano which was played with hammers and violin bows, and other musical instruments. Ten songs were recorded with titles like

Also soon for release from the Throbbing Gristle umbrella corporation is a movie in which Cazazza and a 14 year-old boy are electrocuted. Monte also appeared in Kerry Colonna's DECCADANCE movie in a suit he made out of rubber tubing and razor blades.

Cazazza edited a fanzine NITROUS OXIDE in 1971 (far preceding Sniffin' Glue). He co-edits WIDOWS AND ORPHANS, a colour Xerox picture magazine. He also gives shows and illustrated lectures on Siamese Twins that he researched in medical libraries.

But still his reputation is so nasty that he rarely leaves his house, although he did go out on Halloween dressed as Kearney, the trash bag murderer. He wore a cheap plastic mask and carried a green garbage bag filled with animal livers and hearts (like Hermann Nitsch) and a bloody mannequin head used by medical students for practice in giving mouth-to-mouth respiration. Definitely the life of the party.

Cazazza's pet money-making project for the future is further exploration of "murder junkies" via a double bill of the stories of Edmund Kemper (a cannibalistic necrophiliac) and Dean Coryl, the Texas "candy man" whose brutal sex murders peaked at a chronic one-a-day habit until he had killed 27 teenage boys (before authorities stopped counting).

For artists who think their work is daring, Cazazza's is a double-dare. Those avant garde artists who use sex and violence as a chic intellectual playground for "art theory" are the first to head for the exits when confronted by Cazazza's work. His scientific expose of voyeuristic urges for sex and violence is no-holds-barred. And it is all done with a comic edge that amplifies the sounds of skeletons being yanked from the most repressed closets.

Cazazza never gives personal interviews. He bought a hot Ansa-phone and keeps it hooked up 24 hours a day. When he returned my call, I asked him if he wanted to make any statements for Slash. "NO, NO, NO," he said, "I don't need to talk, I don't need to make quotes. You see, I'm already VERY WIDELY UNKNOWN."  - by JB  *This article was reproduced by Industrial Records and included with Cazazza's "To Mom on Mothers Day / Candy Man" 7-inch single)." 

((Republished here, without permission, orig. found at the Axis Archives, on Brainwashed.com ))

[technorati tags]: monte cazazza :: cazazza

ROBERT RENTAL - 1979 DEMO TAPE [MP3]

Posted over on MUTANT SOUNDS: ROBERT RENTAL/"Mental Detentions", Tape, 1979, UK

Rhythm and Noise - Naut Humon - Z'EV

Where South San Francisco ends, desolation begins. In November 1980, flyers began appearing on neighborhood telephone poles announcing an upcoming Rhythm & Noise show. "Crisis Data Transfer," the poster promised. No location was given, but a recorded phone message provided detailed directions to "The Compound."

The Compound sits among a grim terrain of decaying housing, abandoned warehouses, electrified chain-link fences and packs of wild dogs. It was R&N's first show. Upon arrival, walkie-talkie-wielding attendants drove our cars away, leaving us to warm our hands at scattered timer fires. The scheduled showtime came and went and still we waited and shivered in the damp Bay air. Finally, a huge steel grate door was raised and we entered into billowing smoke and ten channels of surround-sound. The interior was banked with video screens of all sizes and enough sound equipment with which to construct a small village, most of it with that homemade hacker's look to it. "Vaudeo" they called it: video narratives set to live and manipulated soundscapes. The music screeched, droned, undulated, and even, on occasion, harmonized -- always with some semblance of a beat. Rhythm & Noise -- a well-named ensemble. The Compound is scarier than ever now that crack kings control the territory. The video screens are gone and the cavernous interior is jammed with hanging steel drums, hollow tubes, huge springs, wires -- wires everywhere -- and a baby grand piano. A control tower houses an intimidating array of sound equipment -- analog, digital, sampling, synthesizing, hybridizing, mixing boards, keyboards. A Mac II waits in the wings.

Naut Humon, quintessential sound traffic controller began my tour slamming his arm down on a keyboard and manipulating the sustained sound for two roller-coaster minutes. Then he layered digitalized samples into an oscillating techno swamp. Synthesizers added electronic pterodactyls to the mix. Past sessions with percussionists, singers, and other musicians were called up to lend texture and spark. Finally this work in progress, "Running on Radar," treated the ears to soundwaves come full circle: noise tamed into post-modern lyricism. Naut Humon is the thread tying R&N together through the years. Z'ev, Nik Fault, Rex Probe, Michael Belfer, Comfort Control, and Diamanda Galas have been collaborators, but Humon is Rhythm and Noise:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...In the early '70s Z'EV entered the picture. He was working with all these metal assemblages. He'd tune these racks of scrap until they were welded sculptures with sound functions. I'd quit Cal Arts so I could invest my money in equipment. We formed a group called Cellar M to combine live percussion with electronic manipulation. We did some good work, but dissonance wasn't hip yet." --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: How fully did you work out the pieces you performed with Z'ev?
A: There were definite flight plans, but they had room for spontaneous combustion.
Q: When did Rhythm & Noise emerge as a distinct entity?
A: In 1976, Nik Fault, Rex Probe, and I began a heavy period of research and development. We sold a lot of what we had and began to build most of our equipment. We started to develop The Compound, though we didn't actually perform until 1980. The punk/industrial movement was strong by that time, so we got some recognition, but people still couldn't understand it emotionally. At least not the way they could understand Led Zeppelin or whatever else they were used to listening to.
Q: You hadn't recorded anything yet?
A: Right. That's where Throbbing Gristle had an edge. They had a product. We had always avoided that. It wasn't until 1984 that the Residents convince us to record on their label Ralph Records.
Q: Is it possible to point to any roots for your music?
A: Our roots are more in timbre than in rock 'n' roll. We were definitely aware of people like Stockhausen and Xenakis. I listened to Hendrix, but the thing that was interesting was that he was adding noise to the blues and making it popular. I saw a bridge between Hendrix and Stockhausen. The challenge was to understand noise in an emotional manner.
Q: What distinctions do you make between live and recorded versions of your pieces?
A: Live performance should be different from what you experience in your living room. On the one hand, you have to create links to the past, to what is familiar, but live music should offer a sense of involvement, of immediacy, of surprise. It fascinates me how many rules you can break.
Q: You've talked about the concept of "dissonant convergence."
A: These are not necessarily contrary terms. R&N is realizing-embracing more mass harmonic structure because we are working to understand the harmonic of noise as well as the dissonance. The question is, do dissonant sounds form harmonics or a larger dissonance? You have the effect and the after-effect. Each sound becomes a memory capsule that you place in your own spectrum. It meshes with each subsequent sound. You determine its esthetic. One man's noise is another man's poison. Another question is, do you always need a beat, a rhythm, a pulse to make the relationship with the timbre, to make it speak to you or to the masses? It's hard to break out of pop shells. People don't understand things that aren't part of their existing paradigms. They want to be able to hum it, to remember it from high school days. I like how hip-hop is played through jam boxes so loud that distortion becomes part of the esthetic. In Cairo, the muezzin chants through loudspeakers so tinny and loud that noise becomes part of the prayer. And boom cars -- it's no longer, "My Cadillac is bigger than yours," now it's, "My noise is bigger than yours because I have five woofers." It's an intentional misuse of the technology. It proves that attitude depends on how you listen. You might like the music you hear while inside a club, but it might sound like noise if you live across the alley. We sound like noise to a lot of people."

[MP3]: Rhythm & Noise - Remembrance
[MP3]: Z'EV: "The Invisible Man - Selection 2-18-78"

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Industrial Culture | "True Stories About True Gore", by Jack Sargeant

"Why do we watch a car accident on the freeway, or rush to see a fire, to drink in the tempestuous loveliness of terror, or simply to catch a glimpse of our destiny?" - True Gore

"That's my primary goal. To get on people's nerves. So I always try and have something in them which I'm sure will get on somebody's nerves. And it's not a success unless people...or somebody...walks out, as far as I am concerned" - Monte Cazazza.

Opening with the credit "The Gore Brothers Present..." True Gore (1986) is the logical heir to the mondo movie, that bizarre genre that welds together the freak show, anthropological curiosity, and pure, salacious voyeurism. Directed by Matthew Causey, with Monte Cazazza credited as "creative consultant", the low-budget True Gore is reminiscent of the later, more notorious, mondo movies such as Faces Of Death (Conan Le Cilaire, 1979), and its many sequels. While these now-legendary genre films were produced for box office release most were considered too extreme, even for the sleazoid crowds inhabiting the scummy cinemas of 42nd Street and Times Square, and it was on video that they found their audience, in recognition of this True Gore, like many of the mondo movies of the late eighties, was produced directly on video(1).

Divided into four sections - The World Of The Dead, The Eroticism Of Decay, Art And Death, and The Science Of Death - True Gore feigns an attempt at structural coherence, but the optical effects created using a video synthesizer and designed to mask the identity of the film's unnamed narrator, the purposefully clichéd narration, and the occasionally misspelled subtitles belay its low budget. However, this should not be used as a reason to decry the film, so much as it should be seen as a signifier to other mondo texts, which themselves are in part characterized by their less than pristine appearance, indeed the style adds to the illicit thrills offered by the genre. Like many of the later mondo films, True Gore focuses primarily on images of injury, death and decay(2), however, in addition to those images familiar to the genre, the film also contains many segments culled from Monte Cazazza's own underground filmmaking practice(3).

The first section of the film - The World Of The Dead - consists of re-photographed images culled from medical textbooks and police training manuals, forensic pathology and medical education films, and some original footage shot in a morgue. These grisly images of damaged and rotting flesh are followed with clearly faked footage of a suicide victim laying in a blood filled bathtub, casually slashed wrist dangling over the side of the bath, blood dripping onto the linoleum floor(4). Where this section becomes most disturbing is in its usage of the aural footage of Jim Jones' last speech as 956 members of the People's Temple commit suicide slurping cyanide contaminated fruit juice. The suicide soundtrack - dubbed over photographs depicting various iconographic elements of the People's Temple, including their discipline room - was culled from Cazazza's extensive archive, and was also released as a picture disc by the World Satanic Network Service(5).

As the film's second section starts the narrator states, with a showman's faux cynicism, "in the underground of the world these films are created for the sickest minds". This is followed by a collage of shots taken from the legendary First Transmission video, produced by the Temple Of Psychic Youth(6), and depicting scenes of ritualized SM sexual experimentation. These images are familiar to anybody who witnessed Psychic TV in their pre-acid house daze. Cazazza was, of course, a regular collaborator with P. Orridge and Psychic TV. The accompanying extra-diagetic soundtrack consists of Cazazza's "Sex Is No Emergency". This segment also contains images - "from Amnesty International" the narrator states - depicting a man being suspended over an oil-drum filled with water, before being dunked and beaten. For added effect a snake is thrown over the drowning man's head. The footage is fake. The victim is Cazazza. This scenes is followed by some genuinely disturbing images of vivisection: a live pig is tied down and military scientists stand over it holding a blow-torch, which is then played slowly across the squealing animals flesh which rapidly blackens, burns, and splits open. Next a cat has its scalp pealed and a chunk of its brain removed, as the narrator observes such experiments appear as senseless exercises. These images of genuine cruelty appear all the more horrific because of their juxtaposition with the fake footage.

True Gore's third section, Art And Death, focuses once more on Cazazza's underground movies, as the narrator wryly comments, "at least it was self inflicted" the sequence is culled from Cazazza's 13 minute Super 8 collaboration with Tana Emmolo Smith, SXXX-80 (1980), a film which gleefully depicts what many would consider polymorphic sexual dysfunction as home movie, and was produced as a result of equal parts ennui and mischief on Cazazza's part. The extract presented in True Gore depicts Cazazza digging at a sore on his penis with a metal scalpel, and Smith letting a gigantic black centipede scuttle over her labia. Mimicking the fake-decorum of the death film genre, Smith's vagina and Cazazza's penis, both of which are visible in the original short film, are hidden behind tastefully positioned black squares, this is after all not a sex film(7).

The extract from SXXX-80 is followed by a sequence taken from the 40 minute video Night Of The Succubus (1981) which documents a chaotic performance between Cazazza, Survival Research Laboratories and San Francisco Industrial band Factrix. From this ostensibly performance art documentation the film returns to the theme of necrophilia and lustmord. The ensuing footage, supposedly depicting two psychotic paraphyliacs, is faked, with a female necrophile played by artist Debra Valentine, and a male murder played by Cole Palme, who, despite being in shade, should be familiar to the film's audience, having just appeared in the previous scene playing bass and singing with Factrix. The performances given by these actors are convincing primarily because the scenes were shot in one take, with the actors reading from a script, the occasional stumbled words and phrases serve to create a haunting, confessional atmosphere.

The film introduces the thematic of AIDS as the latest plague threatening to annihilate humanity. Notably, given the media treatment of the virus as "gay" and "junkie plague" at the time of True Gore's production, the film draws attention to the fact that AIDS is a disease that can attack anyone "we are all victims", drawls the narrator. Genuine autopsy footage ends the section of the film.

The Science Of Death - True Gore's final section - consists primarily of stock footage depicting the shivering survivors of the Nazi Death Camps, which is intercut with images from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph Of The Will (19 ). This is followed by what the narrator describes as "our homage to the Scientific Age". To the Atom Smashers' song "A Is For Atom" the film juxtaposes images from Cold War propaganda films with scientific cartoons explaining radiation, and images of the burned and mutilated survivors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

The film closes with the narrator walking through a graveyard, and telling the audience "to live in fear of death is a waste of life". A short, sombre scene follows, depicting row-upon row of tombstones. The soundtrack consists of church bells. The camera spins through the graveyard and positions the viewer gazing out from an open grave. This cuts to the image of a laughing mechanical clown, once more suggesting the carney roots of the mondo genre, and the wound black humour of True Gore's aesthetic. End.


Notes:
(1)Other direct to video mondo film's include Nick Bougas' excellent Death Scenes (1989) and Death Scenes 2 (1992), and the Brain Damage production Traces Of Death (1993).

(2)Earlier mondo movies - produced in the sixties - whilst presenting some violent images, also luxuriated in scenes of indigenous cultures (and especially those cultures for whom nudity is a norm), nudist colonies, occult ceremonies, and safari scenes, all of which have subsequently became visual staples on television. The genre's interest in sex and sexuality boomed in the early seventies, with titles such as Alex De Rezny's Sexual Encounter Group (1970), Sex And Astrology (1970), and Sexual Freedom In Denmark (1970), as well as Pat Rocco's Sex And The Single Gay (1970), but was rapidly rendered as pointless with the explosion and subsequent availability hardcore pornography in the seventies (following the massive success of Gerard Damiano's Deep Throat which - in 1972 - served to partially legitimize hardcore, and also served to show the massive market for such movies). Finally it was the continued taboos surrounding violence and death that remained, and these have subsequently become the focal point of mondo movies. This thematic eruption is also due to the increasing availability of footage depicting violence and death, due - primarily - to the popularity of video technologies which are utilized by news gathering teams, as well as the emergency services, thus guaranteeing a virtual glut of available visceral footage.

(3)Cazazza has directed, produced, and collaborated on a string of movies, including, amongst others: Revolt 2000 (1974) in which he acts like a terrorist and builds a bomb using information from Assassin magazine, the film is now lost. Diary Of A Rubber Slave (1976) subsequently stolen, Mondo Homo (1976) - another engagement with the mondo genre, filmed in secret at the notorious gay bar The Slot, the film was one of the first to depict fist fucking - subsequently stolen. Mystery Movie (co-directed with Genesis P. Orridge, 1976, whereabouts unknown). Death Wish (1977), consisting of re-photographed tv footage. Black Cat Tea (co-directed with Mary Quayzar, 1979/80), Behind The Iron Curtain (1980), SXXX-80 (co-directed with Tana Emmolo Smith, 1980), Night Of The Succubus (co-directed with Factrix, 1981), and Catsac (with Michelle Handelman, 1989) . In addition Cazazza has produced and collaborated with Handelman on Blood Sisters (1991), and collaborated with Psychic TV on the videos Terminus and Eden Three (1987).

(4)The usage of re-constructed / fake footage is one of the central aspects of the mondo genre in its latter incarnation as a grim sideshow of annihilation.: "Although many of the sequences involving killings were fabricated, the filmmakers attempted to make distinguishing fake from fact as difficult as possible" (David Kerekes and David Slater, Killing For Culture, An Illustrated History Of Death Film From Mondo To Snuff, Creation Books, 1995 (first published 1994) p.113).

(5)The World Satanic Network Service aka Vagina Dentata Organ released a string of records documenting various extreme events, including Cold Meat, which consisted of the sound of somebody breathing - and dying - whilst on an infribulator, and came as a picture disc depicting photographs of Maralyn Monroe and Elvis Presley in death.

(6)This video depicted various rituals undertaken by members of the Temple Of Psychic Youth, and was frequently screened, in both whole and part, during the early eighties. In 19 however a copy fell into the hands of a right-wing fundamentalist group, who used the tape to `prove' Satanic abuse.

(7)It is an oddity of the mondo genre that, whilst depicting death with glee, depictions of sexual organs are less common, with producers and directors frequently choosing to hide them behind visual effects, this reaches its zenith in Death Women - a Japanese film of unspecified date and direction - which depicts extreme images of female corpses - strangled, crushed, torn, ripped, savaged, and burned - yet tastefully pixellates any images of the corpses' pubic region and vaginas.

©Jack Sargeant

Minimal Man [MP3s + Webpage]

Check out the tribute page I made for MINIMAL MAN (aka PATRICK MILLER) on mySpace, which currently has 4 tracks up for listening (not downloadable):

1. She Was A Visitor
2. Ascension
3. Show Time
4. High Why
   

*I will also be posting 1 or 2 Minimal Man mp3's sometime soon, on this blog...any requests?

1920s NOISE MACHINES - Italian Futurist's - Russolo

'Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men.' -- Luigi Russolo

Luigi Russolo was a painter determined to open our ears to the noise of the modern age. His musical vision embraced 'the coming and going of pistons, the howl of mechanical saws, the jilting of a tram on its rails' – the symphonic blending of sounds that defined life in the urban metropolis of the early 1900s.

Russolo wrote his manifesto in 1913 entitled 'The Art of Noise,' a bold treatise declaiming the end of conventional Western music, and the dawning of a new music based on the grinding, exploding, crackling and buzzing of mechanical instruments.

'Every manifestation of life is accompanied by noise. Noise is therefore familiar to our ears and has the power to remind us immediately of life itself. Musical sound, a thing extraneous to life and independent of it... has become to our ears what a too familiar face is to our eyes' – Luigi Russolo

Luigi Russolo and his assistant Ugo Piatti built one of the first mechanical orchestras, the 'intonarumori' (noise machines), 27 different types of inters, each producing a unique sound in several folloies or 'families' of instruments, including 'howlers,' 'exploders,' 'crumplers,' 'hissers,' and 'scrapers.' In the 1920s, Russolo performed numerous concerts with these outrageous instruments emitting their startling sounds.

The 'Intonarumori' ('Noise Machines'),
built by Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo circa 1920s

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~ Lifted from www.zakros.com & reprinted here without permission ~

Factrix, "Scheintot" (LP) :: Review by Julian Cope

FACTRIX: "Scheintot" LP - Review by Julian Cope
"Album of the Month, March 2005" >> Rave review, plus you can stream the whole album!!! -

http://www.headheritage.com/unsung/albumofthemonth/1307

factrix
factrix

Industrial Records Label: Official Discography

IR DISCOGRAPHY:

IR0002 THROBBING GRISTLE, "2ND ANNUAL REPORT" 1977 (LP)
IR0003 THROBBING GRISTLE, "UNITED"/"ZYKLON B ZOMBIE" 1978 (7")
IR0004 THROBBING GRISTLE, "D.O.A. THE THIRD AND FINAL REPORT" 1978 (LP)
IR0005 MONTE CAZAZZA, "TO MOM ON MOTHER'S DAY"/"CANDY MAN" 1979 (7")
IR0006 THE LEATHER NUN, "SLOW DEATH" EP 1979 (7")
IR0007 THOMAS LEER AND ROBERT RENTAL, "THE BRIDGE" 1979 (LP)
IR0008 THROBBING GRISTLE, "20 JAZZ FUNK GREATS" 1979 (LP)
IR0009 THROBBING GRISTLE, "HEATHEN EARTH: THE LIVE SOUND OF TG" 1980 (LP)
IR0010 MONTE CAZAZZA, "SOMETHING FOR NOBODY" EP 1980 (7")
IR0011 SURGICAL PENIS KLINIK, "MEAT PROCESSING SECTION" 1980 (7")
IR0012 ELISABETH WELCH, "STORMY WEATHER"/"YOU'RE BLAS�" 1980 (7")
IR0013 THROBBING GRISTLE, "SUBHUMAN"/"SOMETHING CAME OVER ME" 1980 (7")
IR0014 DOROTHY, "I CONFESS"/"SOFTNESS" 1980 (7")
IR0015 THROBBING GRISTLE, "ADRENALIN"/"DISTANT DREAMS (PART TWO) 1980 (7")
IR0016 WILLIAM BURROUGHS, "NOTHING HERE NOW BUT THE RECORDINGS" 1981 (LP)

IRC00 THROBBING GRISTLE, "BEST OF....VOLUME I" 1976
IRC01 THROBBING GRISTLE, "BEST OF....VOLUME II" 1976
IRC02 THROBBING GRISTLE, "I.C.A., LONDON" 1976
IRC03 THROBBING GRISTLE, "WINCHESTER/AIR GALLERY" 1976
IRC04 THROBBING GRISTLE, "NAGS HEAD, HIGH WYCOMBE" 1977
IRC05 THROBBING GRISTLE, "BURLINGTON POLYTECHNIC" 1977
IRC06 THROBBING GRISTLE, "NUFFIELD THEATRE, SOUTHAMPTON" 1977
IRC07 THROBBING GRISTLE, "RAT CLUB, PINDAR, LONDON" 1977
IRC08 THROBBING GRISTLE, "HIGHBURY ROUNDHOUSE, LONDON" 1977
IRC09 THROBBING GRISTLE, "WINCHESTER ART SCHOOL" 1977
IRC10 THROBBING GRISTLE, "RAT CLUB, VALENTINO ROOMS, LONDON" 1977
IRC11 THROBBING GRISTLE, "BRIGHTON POLYTECHNIC" 1978
IRC12 THROBBING GRISTLE, "ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION, LONDON" 1978
IRC13 THROBBING GRISTLE, "GOLDSMITH'S COLLEGE, LONDON" 1978
IRC14 THROBBING GRISTLE, "INDUSTRIAL TRAINING COLLEGE, WAKEFIELD" 1978
IRC15 THROBBING GRISTLE, "FILM MAKERS CO-OP, LONDON" 1978
IRC16 THROBBING GRISTLE, "CRYPTIC ONE CLUB, LONDON" 1978
IRC17 THROBBING GRISTLE, "CENTRO IBERICO, LONDON" 1979
IRC18 THROBBING GRISTLE, "AJANTA CINEMA, DERBY" 1979
IRC19 THROBBING GRISTLE, "SHEFFIELD UNIVERSITY" 1979
IRC20 THROBBING GRISTLE, "THE FACTORY, MANCHESTER" 1979
IRC21 THROBBING GRISTLE, "GUILD HALL, NORTHAMPTON" 1979
IRC22 THROBBING GRISTLE, "Y.M.C.A., LONDON" 1979
IRC23 THROBBING GRISTLE, "TG IN THE STUDIO" 1979
IRC24 THROBBING GRISTLE, "BUTLERS WHARF, LONDON" 1979
IRC25 THROBBING GRISTLE, "FAN CLUB, LEEDS" 1979
IRC26 THROBBING GRISTLE, "SCALA CINEMA, LONDON" 1979
IRC27 THE LEATHER NUN, "SCALA CINEMA"/"MUSIC PALAIS KUNGSGATAN" 1980
IRC28 MONTE CAZAZZA, "LIVE AT LEEDS FAN CLUB"/"SCALA CINEMA" 1980
IRC29 THROBBING GRISTLE, "AT GOLDSMITH'S COLLEGE" 1980
IRC30 THROBBING GRISTLE, "OUNDLE PUBLIC SCHOOL" 1980
IRC31 CLOCK DVA, "WHITE SOULS IN BLACK SUITS" 1980
IRC32 CHRIS CARTER, "THE SPACE BETWEEN" 1980
IRC33 THROBBING GRISTLE, "AT SHEFFIELD UNIVERSITY" 1980
IRC34 RICHARD H. KIRK, "DISPOSABLE HALF TRUTHS" 1981
IRC35 CABARET VOLTAIRE, "1974-1976" 1981

IRCD02 THROBBING GRISTLE, "I.C.A., LONDON" 1976
IRCD03 THROBBING GRISTLE, "WINCHESTER/AIR GALLERY" 1976
IRCD04 THROBBING GRISTLE, "NAGS HEAD, HIGH WYCOMBE" 1977
IRCD05 THROBBING GRISTLE, "BURLINGTON POLYTECHNIC" 1977
IRCD06 THROBBING GRISTLE, "NUFFIELD THEATRE, SOUTHAMPTON" 1977
IRCD07 THROBBING GRISTLE, "RAT CLUB, PINDAR, LONDON" 1977
IRCD08 THROBBING GRISTLE, "HIGHBURY ROUNDHOUSE, LONDON" 1977
IRCD09 THROBBING GRISTLE, "WINCHESTER ART SCHOOL" 1977
IRCD10 THROBBING GRISTLE, "RAT CLUB, VALENTINO ROOMS, LONDON" 1977
IRCD11 THROBBING GRISTLE, "BRIGHTON POLYTECHNIC" 1978
IRCD12 THROBBING GRISTLE, "ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION, LONDON" 1978
IRCD13 THROBBING GRISTLE, "GOLDSMITH'S COLLEGE, LONDON" 1978
IRCD14 THROBBING GRISTLE, "INDUSTRIAL TRAINING COLLEGE, WAKEFIELD" 1978
IRCD15 THROBBING GRISTLE, "FILM MAKERS CO-OP, LONDON" 1978
IRCD16 THROBBING GRISTLE, "CRYPTIC ONE CLUB, LONDON" 1978
IRCD17 THROBBING GRISTLE, "CENTRO IBERICO, LONDON" 1979
IRCD18 THROBBING GRISTLE, "AJANTA CINEMA, DERBY" 1979
IRCD19 THROBBING GRISTLE, "SHEFFIELD UNIVERSITY" 1979
IRCD20 THROBBING GRISTLE, "THE FACTORY, MANCHESTER" 1979
IRCD21 THROBBING GRISTLE, "GUILD HALL, NORTHAMPTON" 1979
IRCD22 THROBBING GRISTLE, "Y.M.C.A., LONDON" 1979
IRCD24 THROBBING GRISTLE, "BUTLERS WHARF, LONDON" 1979
IRCD25 THROBBING GRISTLE, "FAN CLUB, LEEDS" 1979
IRCD26 THROBBING GRISTLE, "SCALA CINEMA, LONDON" 1979
IRCD29 THROBBING GRISTLE, "AT GOLDSMITH'S COLLEGE" 1980
IRCD30 THROBBING GRISTLE, "OUNDLE PUBLIC SCHOOL" 1980
IRCD33 THROBBING GRISTLE, "AT SHEFFIELD UNIVERSITY" 1980
IRCD36 THROBBING GRISTLE, "S.O. 36 CLUB BERLIN 7/11/80" 1980
IRCD37 THROBBING GRISTLE, "S.O. 36 CLUB BERLIN 7/11/80" 1980
IRCD38 THROBBING GRISTLE, "KUNSTHOFSCHULE FRANKFURT" 1980
IRCD39 THROBBING GRISTLE, "RAFTERS CLUB, MANCHESTER" 1980
IRCD40 THROBBING GRISTLE, "HEAVEN, LONDON" 1980
IRCD41 THROBBING GRISTLE, "LYCEUM, LONDON" 1981
IRCD42 THROBBING GRISTLE, "VETERANS AUDITORIUM, LOS ANGELES" 1981
IRCD43 THROBBING GRISTLE, "KEZAR PAVILION, SAN FRANCISCO" 1981

"THE TAPE DECAYS" by Jon Savage, 1981 (article on Throbbing Gristle)

"...Cut-up incantations. Click. Machines hum. Silence clears. Slowly, the tape recorders start to spin: the vortex is set in motion. IBM computer tape: deprogram. Bass throb, guitar alert. Vocal incantations. The vortex, ever slowly, whirl faster; faster, faster. I awake from my dream and lazily concentrate on a group near the front of the audience. From my dream I see agitation, hatred, violence. The machines spin: the dream continues. In the past, it has encompassed boredom, fear, excitement: tonight it continues, incantations, even stronger than before, a perfect soundtrack.

I awake again. The group are scratching themselves, are rousing. Flexing their muscles. Their intent is focusing as the sound changes to a heartbeat. As they focus, so do I. I notice more things. Like whom they are, like how drunk they are. I start to sense trouble. The people on stage sing about limits, about horror, about extreme pain. The vortex winds up. Their power begins to infect the group near the front: the deprogramming takes effect. The vortex twists: the group takes shape as three/four women. They start to mutter: nothing yet coherent yet anger, disgust. I am now fully awake, being slowly drawn as the vortex extends.

They start to shout now. The noise takes shape uglier, as the vortex takes hold of the people on stage. Somewhere about this time, the vortex locks - I don't know when. Held on course, all events are now inevitable. Two of the women move towards the stage: I see that they are aggressive in their femininity, carefully disordered in their demeanor - contrasting with the control rigid on the people on the stage. Demons are waiting to be let out: the box is being pried open. The first move: the Security Guard - a callow youth - tries to usher the girls aside. This is the chance: he is surrounded, jostled. His youth, once stolid, now seems frail: the women confuse, and taunt him. Suddenly the people on the stage, their obsessive aura, become very fragile: their spell falters.

The vortex spins to suck me in: I place my body between the women and boy. Somehow, they back off. The vortex recoups. I hope that it's over. The people on the stage shriek. The women start to shout again, redoubled. Things now happen quickly: the vortex whirls in a dervish dance. The man at the front of the stage looks at the women: he throws their aggression back in their face. Purple, he fixes them with his eyes. His fist bangs his head with terrible force, in time. Whack, whack. Although the violence is self-directed; the message is clear. The women are past noticing. One of them finishes the whiskey bottle, hurls it at the stage. One of the performers' moves -- leaps instantly off the stage, floors one of the women. The vortex exults.

The noise screws up into a ball, a whorl of sound: the woman parody a tribal dance in their anger. Their naturalism masks hate, the same as the people on stage mask their explorations with terror. There is no sync. Guitars tear, voices scream. One of the women walks with childlike wonder to the very front of the stage and looks down. She picks up a bunch of wires, delicately, as though they were flowers. She looks at them. Time stops. The vortex is at its center. Careful modernity, art appreciation is stripped away -- animalism takes over. Chaotic, dangerous, real. A man screams 'You fucking wanker!' with incredible violence, to nobody in particular; a chair flies through the air, followed by shrieks, behind me. I want my dream I can't have it, feel like crying, stomach constricted. The rest dissolves into flotsam as the vortex fades, its' spell bound: hospitals, useless arguments, recriminations. A sleepless night....

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July 6th, 1978: Three and a half years later, another era, I play a tape of the concert. There is no record of the anger, the violence, the hate. Directly, that is. Perhaps you can hear the vortex in the noise. Perhaps it never happened. When the tape decays, it never will have. Memories lie. The fragile set of circumstances and people that caused the events at the London Film Makers' Co-op have now gone. A few hours later, you could go over the same spot and not know that anything had happened. I know that it happened, but then it could have been my own mounting madness -- a month later, I was quite ill.

Certainly, that time was the last that I saw Throbbing Gristle receive a reaction that was in any way hostile. Sure, to admit to liking them was still a passport to an instant, vicious argument in most circles, but during the months that followed, Throbbing Gristle started to receive a reaction which was almost worse: acceptance, worship even. As soon as that happened, they were bound to stop. It was always one paradox close to TG that although they toyed openly with the pop process and pop language - with "United" in particular - they wouldn't, nor couldn't ever have had pop success or any fan mania. Instinct and deliberation kept them carefully confined by most on the lunatic fringe. A reference point, and a shudder.

Now that the dust has settled, I think of TG in terms of a laboratory. In this laboratory many matters were poured over, researched, put into practice, and lived out: that last is quite important. The laboratory, as all research institutes, needed funding: for various reasons support from institutional sources were not forthcoming, so it was back to free enterprise - of which, as any honest person will tell you - the music industry is the final bastion.

In theory, it's quite simple: you announce that you are 'in the music industry' by placing yourself there or at least near enough. This means playing 'gigs', making the right connections with the pop press and various people, and finally - for these are the rules of this game - release a product. It is thus a grave mistake to consider TG in terms of their records alone (although "Second Annual Report" and "Heathen Earth" will do quite nicely, thank you) because they are, at the most basic level, functional -- for they are the passport to this particular arena - Pop music - which, for a brief time (1976-80) really mattered. It doesn't now of course, so please don't believe those who tell you it does, for they are serving their own (and others) vested interests.

Like the Sex Pistols, TG understood this -- although occasionally, like many others, they allowed their immersion in the medium to blind themselves to this fact-as-occupational-hazard. However, the noise, while important, was ancillary. I see Throbbing Gristle as being very absolute seekers after a particular truth and set of truths. Truths about the limits of human behavior that we are encouraged to ignore - love, despair, coercion, bestiality, repose, intense sexuality, frustration and incredible violence.

Ever present was that ultimate and final truth that is now perhaps the biggest taboo and which most of us rush headlong to deny with whatever lies to hand. DEATH. Ever present was the suggestion that there are people in the upper echelons of power society who are aware that unquestioning acceptance of this social and behavioral confusion by the majority preserved their privileges, and that these people use the mass media and consumerism to perpetuate this situation.

I've spent the last years of my life working in commercial media. That is, information packaged for consumption in order to make money for large organizations. (TG often declared they were involved in an information war.) Most of what you read and hear is produced in accordance with these "package- consume- money" conditions as we are encouraged to live not our own but others lives. This is not an entirely irrevocable fact of life in our present state.

From my work I now understand that mainstream media seeks to ignore any Truths as much as it can. This force, with such power over our lives, actually prevents us from realizing certain root facts -- we all die, and virtually everything presented to us on this material plans is one long trivial diversion and denial of that fact. There is, of course, considerable pleasure in trivia, in consumption - otherwise it wouldn't work - but it is important to realize that our life is temporary and that the way we live is a temporary state - brought on by various economic and social forces - and that, contrary to the propaganda, we needn't and won't live this way much longer. This realization is at once terrifying and liberating.

Although I will dash down to Virgin Records with the best of them (so good on Saturdays with the knifings outside), I tend to prefer noise that has some recognition and exploration of this fact: Utopia and Dystopia. I hear it in the Sex Pistols, in the Velvet Underground, in NON, in Joy Division, and in various pieces of classical music to name a few, in the same way that I hear the pleasure and ultimate futility of consumption delineated by Roxy Music. I hear it too, in Throbbing Gristle.

Our society works by pretending that ours is the only age; the past, the future do not exist except in terms of the present: the best work is that which doesn't remind you, but puts you into other, future, past, alternative present ways of thinking and being. Mind you, I wouldn't pretend to have always ever agreed with TG, individually and together: nor would I pretend that I play all their records all the way through all the time. Such would require more time than I am prepared to give to plastic, or even the seductive qualities of chrome tape, these days. Such would also pre-suppose a harmony with the product that I don't always feel. Apart from those two, perfect dream machine records that bookend TG's pre-post-humous work, the albums suffer from that intensity that makes the individual tracks so valuable as a whole.

While as game and as manic as the next person, it is difficult either to enter each state so particularly delineated on 'D.O.A' or '20 Jazz Funk Greats' or to pass over each as Muzak: perhaps everybody should be able, if they're bothered, to make up their own 'Best Of' on tape, and, well, go... (this criticism incidentally could also be applied to the Velvet Underground). And the records aren't that important, although I will cherish 'Beachy Head', 'Six Six Sixties', 'Adrenalin', and 'Weeping', among others; what are equally as important are the ideas and their execution. The list is long, but worth detailing; for this, as much as the search to define and capture various truths, was also the aim of the laboratory.

__________________________________________________

A Summary :

The end of 'Rock-n-Roll' as an attitude, as a way of knowledge, and as a way of making noise, kindly called music. Rock-n-Roll is for Arse Lickers. Rock and Roll, and now Pop, are infected with a creeping and terminal disease: the inevitability of obsolescence as a form.

The impossibility of running a truly independent record and tape company: Most Indies - although apparently shifting the emphasis 'away' from the majors - actually worked for them as unpaid A&R departments. Most of the brave new wave only ever wanted one thing: money, and to get their mug on 'Top of the Pops'. This, although possibly venal, is not a particularly ignoble ambition given the state of things -- what is ignoble, is to pretend otherwise. I will now watch with amusement the ideological U-turns of such as Rough Trade, in the same way as I have watched the U-turns of most Pop commentators. Industrial Records - a zingy catch phrase also thereby introduced - was determinedly independent. This caused problems with pressing plants, bootleggers and cash flow, but it allowed the freedom to release whatever (and who else, Monte Cazazza?) and to pack it in at the right time.

The proper assimilation of electronics into pop and youth culture: and this is where TG come nearest to being assimilated by the mainstream, and like all of us, nearest to prolonging its active life.

A sense that, after punk, four boys pouting and banging away on electric guitars had to stop, that the chill winds starting to blow outside pop's ivory tower had to be admitted. Jane Suck, Sandy Robertson and I all realized this with a start -- the first TG LP arrived exactly to confirm the suspicions and prophecies we made with 'New Musick', and then took them further. The result is, on the one hand, artists such as NON; on the other, Gary Numan and synthed up oldies like 'It's My Party'. Heigh-ho.

The use of different media: Pre-dating the 'Indie tape boom', Industrial Records were the first of the then current crop of independents to organize a proper system of producing and selling tape-recorded and video-recorded material. This was organized with the care and attention that we came to expect: the TG Tape Box Set is an obsessional fetish of considerable power. I don't come over it...but nearly. TG also made everything available. I prefer to regard this not as a piece of self-indulgence, but as an impressive effort at equality of access, deconstruction and making money. Malcolm McLaren later got in on that act and did it rather well. Many people thought he had invented the idea.

Many minor fashions and teases, witness by the fact that TG were just as fascinated by the trappings of consumption, kitsch and packaging as the rest of us. Their presentation of products was never more than immaculate graphic design: they used camo-chic before Miss Selfridge and Echo & the Bunnymen got in on the act. They used it as packaging (of "Adrenalin" and "Subhuman" singles), clothing and research, eventually having an entire TG camouflage uniform made by Lawrence Dupre in Paris as part of her "Avant Guerre" clothing project.

The Martin Denny Revival: Predating the current obsession with 1940's Muzak and the Specials' mood hi-fi. TG finished almost every gig with Martin Denny tapes, did the track "Exotica" in honor of his styles on "Jazz Funk Greats" and dedicated their "Greatest Hits" to Denny. TG were a little late on this one. The Screamers, Skot Armst, the Residents and Boyd Rice got there first. However, P-Orridge now has 23 Martin Denny platters. Eat your heart out!

The championing of cassette tapes as a valid ALTERNATIVE to records: Produced on high-quality tape and run off laboriously by them and a few close friends until the Last Few Days. As well as releasing every TG live gig on cassette they also released cassettes by Cabaret Voltaire, Clock DVA, Richard H. Kirk, Monte Cazazza, Leather Nun, and Chris Carter. All artists they had admired before their later success, of course now three years later cassettes are at last being recognized as viable commercially and creatively. Ironically, as TG stopped producing anymore. They saw having other groups and individuals on their cassettes as evidence of a new and non-competitive alliances that demonstrated the lie of big company rivalry.

Contrary to recent claims in some music papers, TG released the first music video cassettes for sale. Totally filmed, produced, mixed and packaged by themselves in 1979 and sold at £18 including postage to demonstrate that independent labels and groups can compete at every level and make every kind of information available.

A serious and conscious continuation of the work of William S. Burroughs, (whose LP "Nothing Here Now But The Recordings" is still available on Industrial Records), Brion Gysin (the inventor of "Cut-Ups"), and The Velvet Underground: Of course TG are not quite the same, as this is a self-conscious, synthetic, intensely referential age, but they do quite well in dealing with control, collage, and the subculture of street life in fairly equal quantities. Anyway, they've met most of their heroes by now. I suppose you could whine about the "Beat Revival" being prophesied but I wouldn't bother.

An uncanny premonition of the Sex Pistols scandal, when as Coum Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle various parts of their "PROSTITUTION" exhibition were besieged in the I.C.A. for being pornography. Front-page headlines, outraged editorials in the dailies, M.P.'s calling them the "Wreckers of Civilization" -- they even appeared in a live TV special on Thames on October 22nd, 1976. Fab and Kinky, and McLaren (who'd already commissioned Peter of TG to do Sex Pistols publicity shots) was watching again.

_________________________________________

But that'll be quite enough. I'm sure you get the picture. Front line cultural guerrillas whose research was pillaged and diluted by all manner of incompatible characters perhaps...their eyes must be burning but it doesn't do to be nice and TG weren't nice anyway so I'll say that they were a bunch of evil scumbags with a nasty line in vicious humour which nobody ever quite got. I see P-Orridge as the 10-year-old outsider: runny nose, spots, hanging on the other kid's coat tails and whining forever so you wanted to smash him, 'Zyklon! Zyklon! Zyklon! Zyklon! Bee Zombiees!'. And then he smiled and you forgave him all, such a sweet boy Neil. I will spare the others my indelicate imaginings, for they have enough problems.

The laboratory is now locked -- the camo' overalls, and the people inside them have moved office and moved power focus. Naturally, the week that TG ceased to exist they received the first in what has become a regular series of apologies and eulogies in the established music press - whose ignorance and muffled hate, if they only knew it, gave them a great deal of strength. Now, their recantation, however sincere, gives mirth; such is ever the price of cultural deviancy: to be ignored and reviled while active and when finished, to be lauded to the skies. Only these days, things being what they are, all accelerating and cracking up, it's happened rather faster. Like INSTANTLY.

I wish them all luck with their analysis: TG are now part of the "rock canon", they have left a "significant body of work" behind. The only problem, and the last laugh, is that it's all junk really - as serious or as meaningful as you want to make it. Which leaves TG exactly where I suspect they'd like to be -- just kicking around a corpse.

~ London & JON SAVAGE (Manchester, 1981)