Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) (16 page)

Swallowed in one gulp, the lyrics to “Persuasion” tell a simple story: power saturates all relationships, power is everywhere, and therefore any human situation can simply be boiled down to the question of whose orders are being carried out. But TG don’t—or won’t—actually follow through on such paranoid oversimplifications. Far from confirming the absolutist vision that Gen’s narrator chants to himself and the listener, the song itself constitutes an ongoing battle for mastery between the band’s sound and Gen’s lyric, and neither party quite succeeds in dominating the other. Intolerably enough, the song models conflict, and neither party gets to be “master.” What reads on the lyric sheet like a hymn to the will to power comes through the speakers sounding like a cautionary tale about the messy human consequences of fantasy. TG’s perversion lies not in their lyrical frankness about kinky goings on but in their relentless eagerness for formal self-sabotage, and in “Persuasion” that self-sabotage makes for a peculiarly sticky listening experience: you have to work to make it through this song, and you have to work out for yourself exactly where you stand in relation to the pleasures
and cruelties the song makes available. To risk a certain rockist shorthand, “Persuasion” is Throbbing Gristle’s “Sympathy for the Devil”: faced with a choice between pretending to critique what it actually celebrates and pretending to celebrate what it actually critiques, it swings both ways.

“Arise and walk about in the land, in the length of it and in the breadth, for I will give it unto thee.”

Genesis 13:17 (Tndale Translation)

Bookended by tiny, granular clouds of chirping noises that wrongfoot the listener into expecting another tentative ambient murkscape, “Walkabout” quickly bursts into bloom as a florid, faintly Kraftwerkian fantasia for synths. Stripped of any dance-floor-oriented rhythmic underpinning from drum machines, its arpeggiating keyboard parts serve as flying buttresses in support of a soaring tower of major synthetic chords: C-sharp major, B major, A major, B major. It is simple but beautiful and, because of that, rather wrenching as the follow-up to the absolute depths of “Persuasion.” As the “happiest” moment on the record, its placement both continues and exacerbates the sensation of musical and emotional inconsistency in place as the pendulum
of
20 Jazz Funk Greats
swings in increasingly erratic directions. Presenting the listener with a tightly executed, no-nonsense synth instrumental, “Walkabout” is one of the most sharply realized tracks on the album, and yet also the one most redolent of a genre exercise: its palette recalls the German Kosmische music of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream, but its compressed form signals a tactical allegiance to the starvation diet metabolism of pop. In a sense, electronic composition as a utopian futurist gesture was already a dead metaphor by the late seventies and had already been seamlessly integrated into the standard musical production modes used in film and television soundtracks, radio production and mass media. Consider the example of
The Scientific Mind
, a collection of production music generated by the Omni Music Corporation in Washington, D.C., in 1978: described as “Light industrial moods with an electronic feel,” titles such as “Futuristic,” “Lab Work,” “Memory Circuit” and “Ice Blue” promise the listeners “quick tempo, bright computer-type sounds” and “bubbling synthesizer sounds with rhythm.” A work of immaculate sequencer bonsai that clocks in at under three minutes, “Walkabout” would sit comfortably in such a context, conjuring up a frictionless glide across a neon-drenched, nonspecific urban nightscape, were it not for its curious title.

Drew:
Is “Walkabout” a solo Chris Carter composition?

Chris:
It is. It wasn’t meant to be. It’s just the way it turned out. It became so dense that we couldn’t figure out what to put in there. It’s just loads of sequencers going.

Cosey:
We said, “Chris, you’ve not left us any room to do anything.”

Chris:
So I said, “Oh, okay then, we’ll just leave it like it is then.” And everyone was happy to just do that. That was part of the reason that it was left as it was, because it was like nothing else on the album. It’s the only thing like that.

Drew:
Were you fan of the Nicholas Roeg film
Walkabout?
Is that the source of the song’s title?

Chris:
I was pretty obsessive about early/mid-1970s Nic Roeg films, and still am, specifically the period of
Performance, Don’t Look Now, Walkabout
. I know the rest of TG were aware of this so there are bound to be some connections, tenuous, direct or otherwise. I also used samples and snippets of sound from those three movies in some of the TG performances. Also, my synths and SFX on “Walkabout” and “Exotica” were definitely “influenced” by the soundtrack of
Walkabout
the movie.

With the caveat that title references may be impulsive red herrings, I cannot resist pursuing the possibilities generated by overlaying Roeg’s film onto TG’s album. The film’s title credits provide a curt synopsis: “In Australia, when an Aboriginal man-child reaches sixteen, he is sent out into the land. For months he must live from it. Eat of its fruit and flesh. Stay alive. Even if it means killing his fellow creatures. The Aborigines call it the WALKABOUT.” The film stars Jenny Agutter, Lucien John and David Gumpilil, whose stark identification as Girl, White Boy and Black Boy in the closing credits telegraphs the high stakes of Roeg’s parable of innocence, experience and race. Getting things going with a bang, Girl and White Boy’s father bizarrely fires a gun at his children in the middle of a picnic; his self-immolating death at the beginning of the film is staged as a surrealist farce that creates
a festal world without parents. Commencing their meandering, careless jaunt across the parched bush country, the unattended, increasingly sunburnt Girl and White Boy at first stand alone; like Milton’s Adam and Eve, “the world was all before them.” Spoiler alert: their near death from dehydration is averted through the miraculous intervention of Black Boy, who rescues them and teaches them how to survive in the bush; the three form a tentative utopian community until the lure of a return to (white) “civilization” proves too strong for the recidivist Girl, who is spooked by Black Boy’s puberty rituals and courtly advances. As we see in his shots of Aborigines creating hideous plaster lawn sculptures of kangaroos and of themselves in idealized “primitive” form, Roeg’s film is, at least in part, about the problem of kitsch that lies at the heart of any representation of “otherness.” This caustic awareness contaminates equally the shots of Black Boy’s feathered and painted body doing a skeleton dance, and Girl’s speech about her desire for “clean sheets and records and my own clothes.” Society is a place of primness, propriety and property ownership, but Girl, now safe from harm amid watered lawns and locked doors, remains haunted by utopian memories of an encounter with a racial and cultural other who she both fetishized and disavowed. After noting in passing that Chris Carter listed Jenny Agutter as his “favorite actress” in
Industrial News
, what’s all this got to do with his synth ditty?

At the macro level, there are particular aesthetic tics and habits within the TG playbook that find antecedents in Roeg’s work. Roeg’s films frequently have a kind of surreptitious syllabus of avant-garde and occult references hiding in plain sight within certain shots and sounds:
Performance
(1970), with its alternately blatant and buried nods to Artaud, Burroughs and
Borges, uses the popular medium of film as a way to encrypt references to arcana that clearly find analogues in Throbbing Gristle’s approach toward the insertion of esoteric content into the framework of pop music. It’s a short step from the scene in which Mick Jagger didactically reads aloud the hashish/assassin mythos of Hassan I Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountains, and drawls, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted,” to TG’s wink wink nudge nudge use of Crowley’s “Love is the law” as a chorus to their pop single “United.” Beyond such fellow traveling, there are obvious overlaps between
Walkabout
as a narrative about the pathos and impossibility of successfully “going native” and the track record of TG’s members. If we recall that Chris and Cosey later released an album called
Techno-Primitiv
(1985), and that Genesis and Paula P-Orridge were in the original RE/
Search
issue number twelve on
Modern Primitives
, which arguably spearheaded a widespread resurgence of subcultural interest in tattooing, body-piercing and body modification, or note that Sleazy has just released a DVD as the Threshold House Boys Choir of traditional Thai trance-induced piercing rituals, we can see that these kinds of cross-identifications and risky performances of willful, self-consciously constructed “primitivism” are part of the continuing legacy of the TG ethos.

What about Chris Carter’s claim to have been specifically influenced by the sound design of
Walkabout?
The film is unusually kinetic and inclusive in its range of gestures, and its score bears close examination. The sound editing of “Walkabout” commences with a fever dream collage, offering the viewer a deliberately jarring series of audiovisual hard cuts that are as much sonic as visual: the film starts with searing radio noise, then a French voice, then didgeridoo, then the
uncanny breathing exercises of student girls, then the stomping march of soldiers’ boots, watched by a little boy, and then a humming exercise of girl students again. Montage becomes an aggressive act of crosscultural suture, and this prepares the viewer for Roeg’s more argumentative edits later in the film, such as the infamous intercut between the Aboriginal slaughter of a kangaroo and a “civilized” butcher’s stroke. At first blush, John Barry’s syrupy and lush orchestral score doesn’t seem like a plausible touchstone for TG’s musical aesthetic. But it is treacherous and perhaps ironically marked in the context of a film that uses Jenny Agutter’s naked body to re-create Hedy Lamarr’s classic erotic swimming sequence in
Ecstasy
, only to garnish it with the killing and roasting of live animals—surely an enactment of Cosey’s observation that “nasty things happen in beautiful spots” if ever there was one. One could say that Roeg’s use of this “beautiful” orchestral score in the midst of matter-of-fact killing offers a cinematic analogue to the relationship between music and meaning that TG’s album also sets up and knocks down.

Pop music and conventionally “beautiful” orchestral scores act as camouflage, as ideological decoys, as an escapist oasis of pleasurable distraction that compensates for, or falsifies, a grim world of violent predation that is never far from view. Soft rock songs by Rod Stewart and Bob Denver-soundalike Warren Marley call out from Girl’s
AM
radio as they stagger across a hostile, forbidding landscape. Punctuated by shots of bleached bones and animal carcasses writhing with maggots, these chance transmissions of pop music, instead of offering reassurance or a reminder of community, become increasingly estranged and implausible. It’s not all sweeping strings and pop tones, however: from the synthetic beeps
that occasionally interrupt the narrative, to the use in the film’s “snake dream” sequence of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Hymnen,” a musique concrète composition that collages together a polyglot cluster of national anthems into a disorienting stew, to the radio noise and static symphony that accompanies the flaming red images of the sun burning through desert clouds, which comes complete with a clearly audible announcer’s voice intoning the Aleister Crowley slogan that “Every man and every woman is a star,” there are also monstrous, harsh elements to the sound world of “Walkabout.” Loosely, one could correlate the separate zones of Chris Carter’s composition with the discreet ingredients of Roeg’s film: the introductory chirping noises that begin TG’s song align with Stockhausen’s concrete collage (noisy, harsh), while the central, sequenced section stands in for John Barry’s score (melodic, beautiful). But instead of simply reversing the conventional shorthand associations of underground aesthetics (beauty is phony, therefore garish, therefore “ugly”; ugliness is real, therefore true, therefore “beautiful”), a move that would negatively reinforce the hold of the prevailing divisions, the overall dialectical argument between noise and music, beauty and ugliness, within the sound design of
Walkabout
becomes one of mutual contamination and indifference: the beautiful John Barry score seems to wilt and wither in the sun, while the crispy filters and fragments of Stockhausen seem to light up with an eerie desert glow. Such a dissolve enacts sonically the visual dissolves within Roeg’s cinematography: as urban views of towerblocks are intercut with natural tracking shots of trees and parks, downtown Sydney gets naturalized, and its palm trees start to look like skyscrapers. The nature vs. culture division doesn’t just wiggle, it melts. Similarly, in titling
his ultrafuturistic sequencer hymn “Walkabout,” Chris Carter goes beyond a simple gesture of namedropping homage and torques his synthesizer music’s sleek urban modernism off message, pulling away from the ready to hand clichés of the Tokyo–Berlin–London circuitboard metropolis and toward a lush, primeval imaginary. In the context of a Throbbing Gristle album in which form always feels jerryrigged for imminent collapse, the simplicity of this simple, melodic song, well wrought and tidily executed, becomes all the more uncanny. It is music out of place.

The churn of stale words in the heart again
Love love love thud of the old plunger

Samuel Beckett, “Cascando”

The song consists of a brutally repetitive loop, which fades in and fades out but never changes, its clipped, harsh snare defining the cyclic turnover of some vast machine. Gen is in lager lout mode. Dedicated listeners may detect a few additional elements in the mix: tiny synth spritzes and an offset tremoloed noise flare out of the right speaker, and, over the course of the song, shivering synths and guitar textures on top gradually secrete their way into the proceedings. But these frills must fight their way through the din of the grinding, mechanical rhythm and an attention-seeking vocal. Sounding alternately masculine and campily feminine, but in either case resolutely, intentionally “idiotic,” Gen jumps up and down octaves, howling through delay, blaring like
someone who is slightly deaf. Like P.i.L.’s “Fodderstompf” or the crude glam-stomp-alongs of Slade, TG create not so much a song as an alienating trudge in rote lockstep; the vocal functions like a the drill sergeant, molding the group. Yet, paradoxically, the endless repetition of the exact same rhythm begins to play tricks on the ear: the loop seems to torque and shift in its accent, and to reveal a kind of oblique funk, even though one can’t be sure whether this is happening within the rhythm itself or emerging in the friction of Gen’s shifting cadences as his voice trampolines upon it. It is the most “industrial” song on the record, and flags TG’s operative sense that their own aesthetic could be deployed in a formulaic manner, and that “industrial” now constituted another style, another section of the record store, another inhabitable generic domain.