Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) (7 page)

Without intending to signify any particular affiliation with the wellsprings of jazz and funk traditions, Throbbing Gristle’s contribution to jazz funk thus becomes both ersatz
and
echt. In the place of fusion’s florid, almost obscene
busyness, the song “20 Jazz Funk Greats” is spare, nearly empty—yet, perversely, this restraint brings Throbbing Gristle closer to the original roots of instrumental funk bands such as the Meters, whose bassist George Porter Jr. insisted in a 1994 interview that “There was holes in the music, there was always space. . . . It’s not what you say, it’s what you don’t say” (Vincent, p. 67). Similarly, the understatement and restraint of “20 Jazz Funk Greats” is the paradoxical secret of its inherent funkiness. TG risk a close call with kitsch, but their album begins with something more than a cheap shot. What could have been merely a sarcastic air-kiss to a dying genre takes on a more tentative, ambiguous and risky valence, and sets in motion the agenda for the entire album to come: an esoteric populism that deliberately blows hot and cold; a series of vampiric simulations that both betray and extend the musical traditions they feed upon. Nice.

Dreams I had, including suicide,
Puff out the hot-air balloon now.

John Ashbery, “A Mood of Quiet Beauty”

What is going on here? Where are we? There is an opening guitar strum through some kind of processing, but that’s both too vague and too straightforward. The guitar is not exactly strummed, for that implies a decisive impact; instead, we hear a kind of agitated, ongoing friction involving a guitar, a movement somewhere between grinding, scraping and scrabbling. A dip toward silence lets in the far-off tone of gulls, more scrabbling, and then a kind of curdled cry emerges. Violin through effects of some kind? On “Beachy Head,” Throbbing Gristle loom at the listener, implying a presence from within a fog of murky low fidelity. These cotton-wool sonics recall the quieter moments on the second
side of
Second Annual Report
, or the band’s gauzy soundtrack to Derek Jarman’s reprocessed Super-8 film
In the Shadow of the Sun
. Though some might be tempted to regard the murk of early TG recordings as a function of their limited budget and home-recording techniques, Throbbing Gristle’s ability to make electronics sound
vague
is in fact a distinctive, and uncommon, torquing away from the bright, hyperreal tendency of electronic sound. In a conversation with Paul Griffiths, minimalist composer Morton Feldman flagged this difficulty: “I’m not happy with electronic sound—the physical impact to me is like neon lights, like plastic paint, it’s right on top, whereas I like my paint to seep in a bit” (Villars, p. 48). Because of the subtractive possibilities of the filters and effects in Throbbing Gristle’s signal chains, initially “full” and “rich” instrumental tones can be progressively stripped of their tone color and acoustic properties can be masked as entire frequency ranges are notched out. The result is a certain perceptual fuzziness, a quality of mystery within the sound field that mobilizes the curiosity (and dread) of listeners as they try to hear
through
the filters toward the unintelligible origin of the sound.

A thin scrim of seagull noise hangs across the mix, but this ambient environmental recording, far from pulling us closer to the reality of any particular experience of wildlife, feels misty, unfocused. For all the geographical insistence of its title, the sonic effect is
dis
locating. “Beachy Head” is a bit like the Shadow Morton production job on the Shangri-Las hit “Remember (Walkin’ in the Sand),” but with the ratios inversed: instead of a pop song with a sprinkling of seaside audio to add atmosphere, Throbbing Gristle create audio that is
all
atmosphere, no song required. One minute in,
some extra elements do emerge: discreet synth figures peep through the gloom, but there are no riffs, no musical motifs, no “development.” Improvisation is here engaged to generate material, but not to embody a dialogue or model some virtual mode of community. No one is patiently waiting for their turn to take a solo
or
interrupting another in a competitive display of chops. Rather, improvisation becomes the collective pursuit of an intuitive, organic outcome. On “Beachy Head,” TG pursue song as place, sound as space, not as the expression of affect (suicidal or otherwise). In his exhaustive compendium of local lore
Beachy Head
, John Surtees notes that “It is said that the height of Beachy Head is perceived not so much from contemplating the cliffs, as by listening to the indistinct murmur of the waves from the cliff top” (Surtees, 14). Indistinct murmuring pretty much nails it, and indirectly cashes out the casual sublimity of Throbbing Gristle’s achievement here. If the Burkean recipe for the sublime called for equal measures of beauty and terror, “Beachy Head” delivers both, combining the soft caress of a distant wave with the imminent threat of a killer drop.

Drew:
There are some signature sounds in TG’s musical vocabulary, and I can’t quite figure out how they’re made. Can we listen to “Beachy Head” together as a family and maybe you can tell me what’s going on?

[weird guitar tone]

Cosey:
That’s my Gizmo guitar.

Chris:
Through his work with Hipgnosis, Sleazy knew Godley & Crème, who were in 10cc. They invented this thing called a Gizmo which was a . . .

Cosey:
. . . a device with these little plastic wheels with teeth
on, six of them. It sits on your strings and plucks them for you.

Chris:
Battery-operated. It’s like a box about this big, with rubber wheels, and you push it down . . .

Drew:
. . . and the serrations produce a kind of rubbing tone?

Chris:
Yeah, but you have to really push down on the box. You have to drill holes in the guitar and stuff.

Drew:
So it’s like a mechanical EBow. [bird calls] Those seagulls—did you record them yourself?

Chris:
They’re from a BBC sound effects record.

Drew:
Is that your modular synth?

Chris:
That would be the modular synth. I’ve got the feeling there might be violin as well.

Cosey:
Where?

Drew:
There are sounds where I can’t figure out if they are made by a cornet or violin or guitar.

Chris:
That could have been Gen’s violin through that weird fuzzbox he had.

Drew:
I hear a kind of squawking sound but I can’t tell if it’s a real bird or a manipulated violin.

Perched more than five hundred feet above the English Channel, the scenic white cliffs of Beachy Head chalk the broken edges of the Sussex coastline. Formed in the ocean’s ooze over millennia, the cliff faces are highly unstable, with pinnacled “fingers” breaking off from the mainland and erosion eating inward from the Channel waters toward the crumbling remains of the nineteenth-century beacons and lighthouses that still stud the perimeter. It is a site rich with resonance in English history: barrows, swords and circlets attest to Bronze Age settlement, the Spanish Armada was sighted from its
ridge in 1588, and its Victorian visitors included Charles Darwin and Lewis Carroll. In his chapter on Eastbourne in
The English Landscape in the Twentieth Century
, Trevor Rowley describes the social engineering that preserved this pristine jewel of seaside tourism. The Duke of Devonshire secured “the banning of donkeys on the beach and the Sunday marches of the Salvation Army [and] also restricted the number of public houses and other developments which might bring in ‘the wrong sort’ of visitor, such as fairgrounds on vacant lots and stalls in front gardens” (Rowley, p. 350). Luckily, “the wrong sort” did arrive all the same: “The finest climb at Beachy Head was said to be the ascent of Devil’s Chimney, from its base to a gap between it and the top of the cliff. Aleister Crowley (later of strange and unsavory reputation) and his companion Gregor Grant climbed it in 1894 the other way round from the gap” (Surtees, p. 85). A keen young Crowley described his adventure with obvious relish in the
Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal
, and his description of the motions necessary to navigate his way across the crumbling chalk only hint at the danger he faced when the cliff face partially collapsed in mid-ascent: “A convulsive series of amoeboid movements enabled me to get out over the debris, when it immediately thundered down, leaving me in a very comfortable gap. I was soon on the ridge” (Surtees, p. 87). The poetic image of Aleister Crowley convulsing like an amoeba while ascending the Devil’s Chimney is a serendipitous gift from history, which seems entirely appropriate to Throbbing Gristle’s musical evocation of this beautiful, troubled place.

The effects of a prayer are real because one part of the universe is in sympathy with another part, as one may observe in a properly tuned string on a lyre.

Plotinus,
Enneads

In certain ways, “Still Walking” is the shrillest, most difficult track on the album and bears a certain family resemblance to harsher TG songs, such as “D.o.A.” and “Hit by a Rock.” It is dominated by a drum machine pattern snarled into a textural traffic jam by Chris Carter’s Gristle-izer. The rhythm evokes a martial polka, but doubles back upon itself at odd times, suggesting dance floor mutiny, or ischemic distress. The pronounced flanging makes the snare runs cast metallic, distorted shadows across the beat. Reinforcing this sense of processing run amok, numerous elements in the mix are run through constant panning, modeling the titular walk as a nervous side-to-side hopscotch across the stereo field.
Inside this pattern-prison, Cosey’s guitar-through-processing and Gen’s violin-through-processing surface as the sonic main characters still walking through the halls of flanged rhythm in search of escape. Cosey’s guitar alternates between rifflike figures and firework trails of noise, with squeals and scrapes from Gen’s violin occasionally caulking the gaps. The spoken vocals, which sidle into the mix at the one-minute mark, are the least distinct of any Throbbing Gristle song, and that’s saying something: one can almost always detect Gen’s signature keening through even the thickest soup of tape hiss and amp abuse, but here the four separate personalities of the members of TG dissolve into an indistinct crowd of deadpan mutterers, a nonspecific gathering of males and females intoning staggered versions of what is gradually revealed to be the same text. Occasionally, certain words recur and interlock at random, muffled and just audible beneath the chaos and scree that surrounds them: “that’s the whole problem,” “each time he said,” “all of us do it,” “spell of semen,” but without the lyric sheet it is unlikely that the full text would be discernible (nor is it clear that the lyric sheet is entirely accurate). The oblique lyrical snippets hint at a resolution, a domestic, occult scenario kept just out of sight, and the panning of the voices and noises adds to this sense that you are only catching momentary, partial glimpses of a greater whole. The overall effect is a tease: one is being given too much information, and yet the band is also holding something back.

Drew:
Who did what on “Still Walking”? Gen has said in previous interviews that you wrote the lyrics with him.

Sleazy:
Have you got the lyric there?

Drew:
Yes. [reads lyrics] Do you remember coming up with particular lines or images?

Sleazy:
The second half of it is more of a cut-up. Cosey and I used to do this sort of thing spontaneously. It was almost like we were both having a separate conversation with somebody else, but the combination of alternating lines between us produced a third mind.

Drew:
Sort of like automatic writing, but instead done through rhythmic speech? Each of you taking turns with rapid-fire phrases, one after the other?

Sleazy:
Right, and the two together would resonate. Individually the conversations we were having in our minds were with somebody else, but [we would speak in] combination. The lyric you just read me, it strikes me now that the first half is basically all Gen, but the phrases that have a banal aspect to them, that’s more likely to be me. [laughs] The point is that it’s the combination of all of them that is interesting, not any phrase in particular.

Drew:
Do you remember what the book was that keeps falling open at the same ritual?

Sleazy:
I don’t remember in particular. Gen at this time had an interest in the occult and was starting to investigate Austin Osman Spare. I know that by 1980 he had an [artwork] by Spare. The occult aspect was always something that was around in the background, though much less so with TG than with Coil. There was an occult sensibility.

Drew:
I was wondering about “spell of semen,” if it was a reference to sexual magic?

Sleazy:
Yes, I’m sure it is. The ideas and the practice of sexual magic and all of the things that became more developed in the first two Psychic TV albums were already beginning to
be present and were beginning to interest us. But TG was so anchored in the banal aspect of popular culture that at that time those things still seemed very exotic and obscure. Not totally on message as it were. This is the first time that strand really became apparent.

Drew:
I notice that in “Still Walking” there is a line, “share of thee water,” with the “thee” spelling. That’s something that you’d been using throughout the Coum era; it predates TG.

Gen:
And before. I started using “Thee” and “E” (for I) in 1966 for a book that I wrote called
Mrs. Askwith
. And one of the characters was talking in that way, with that spelling. To immerse myself in the character I began using it all the time, so that I could find out what the character was like, what her opinions were. It’s very much like method acting. There are characters that I meet at other levels of consciousness and I try to give them a voice.