By 1981, the great were finished. The UK quartet—electronics whiz , queer visionary Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, guitar hero/pocket trumpet enthusiast/sex-and-art-worker , and carnival barker-cum-cult leader —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: . Then, five years later, they briefly flickered back to life with 1986’s . 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 , documented their long, frenzied improvisations.
offers a pair of exegeses into classics from their album 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 .