Albums/artists you just DON'T GET.

[Gabba Flamenco Crossover]

What are you talking about? Throbbing Gristle is industrial. Comparing it to "contemporary disco" (do mean contemporary as in now, or contemporaneous as in TG's contemporaries?) seems a strange way to evaluate industrial pioneers sonically.

Yeah, I was talking about disco being made at the time TG were around - sorry should have made that more clear.

I've got two problems with TG. They're lame sonically compared with other late 70s electronic music - Kraftwerk, Moroder, progressive disco, the Sheffield axis of post punk, etc. If the treble-y thinness of thier sound is a deliberate stance, then I'm afraid it's over my head, because it just sounds insubstantial to me.

I also don't get the shock value - it amazes me how anyone can take Genesis P. Orridge seriously. If i didn't know differently, I'd say that Persuasion and Discipline were being played for laughs. In an era of genuinely shamanic performers who were filled with bile and darkness (Rotton/Lydon, Curtis, Mark E Smith, Lydia Lunch), he sounds like the nerdy attention seeking kid in class who's always trying far too hard. No one apart from the tory press ever hated TG (and the tory press, like jazz funk, aren't exactly the most difficult of targets) - the emotion the seemed to generate most was a kind of mild irritation, and these days Genesis is warmly tolerated as a great english eccentric. Which isn't exactly going to wreck civilisation as we know it.

So put both of those together, and you have things like that Dee D Jackson record that got mentioned in the other thread - which is a song about a vibrator, that got to #4 in the charts, sounds amazing, and you can dance to it. Seems way more subversive than anything on 20 Jazz Funk Greats.

I like the idea of TG, and the COUM stuff sounds like good fun, but I'm seriously underwhelmed by the records I've heard from them - 20 Jazz Funk Greats, some tracks on comps and later Chris & Cosey stuff. But if there's anything else I ought to try out, point me at it.

 

[zhao]

yeah I personally didn't get jazz at all until I was 28 or so... now I'm an obsessive fanatic all the way -- from 1910s dixieland to the furthest reaches of improvisation.

 

[nomadologist]

who cares if it's not actually shocking? and i don't think it's trying to be subversive--it fits pretty well within an aesthetic tradition, actually. de sade, bataille, mirbeau. i don't think anything TG said was new or that they thought it was. their music sounds damn good to me, and that's more important than being "subversive"--i think the real point were their innovation w/r/t their use of electronic equipment and instruments. they're trying to be psychedelic and they're way over the top about it, but the whole of TG's music is greater than the sum of some of their less amazing parts. they're playing with the idea of "evil" as unfettered sadism, and the 20th century as a BDSM orgy WWII, Hitler, thrill killings, rape. their imagery is pretty raw if not "subversive."

ever read about COUM performances? i'm pretty sure they would have turned your stomach, Gabba. nobody goes that far out there anymore, even people who ARE trying to be subversive. they were more in a performance art mode, which yeah, is a medium that no one cares about anymore, at the time it seems to have suited their purposes..

try D.O.A. love that one. Second Annual Report is good. i think Chris & Cosey gets boring, what's the album with "Re-Education" on it? bleh.

PS Agree with you about Nirvana

 

[nomadologist]

Where did you read about a -"negative ionizer", being used at Throbbing Gristle performances?

trying to remember, dub-u. i used to do PR for mute records so maybe there? i think there was a 7-page article on them a few years ago in XLR8R or something? i'll try to look it up...

 

[dubble-u-c]

trying to remember, dub-u. i used to do PR for mute records so maybe there? i think there was a 7-page article on them a few years ago in XLR8R or something? i'll try to look it up...

Cool. I am curious.

 

[Parson]

ting about tg is you really can't try to analyze them in this vacuum where their past (COUM) and context ("post"punk england) don't exist and you're studying studio techniques. the comparison to tangerine dream earlier is what i'm talking about. thats about as missing the point as you can get.

3rd and final report isn't an album. its a snapshot of a zeitgeist.

 

[Gabba Flamenco Crossover]

ting about tg is you really can't try to analyze them in this vacuum where their past (COUM) and context ("post"punk england) don't exist and you're studying studio techniques. the comparison to tangerine dream earlier is what i'm talking about. thats about as missing the point as you can get.

Bit of confusion here, parson. 'TG' in my post upthread is an abbreviation of Throbbing Gristle, cos I'm too lazy to keep typing it out. I wasn't mentioning Tangerine Dream.

 

[baboon2004]

faust has not been mentioned yet.

i do get (and love) Can
i do get (and kind of like) Neu
i get Ash Ra Tempel, Harmonia, Cluster.

BUT i totally don't get Faust. To me it just sounds like Zappa in his worst days, i cant find anything worthwhile on their first 2 albums, which are supposed to be legendary and life changing.

I can't vouch for the first two albums as much, but try Faust IV as an entry point. For the opening track 'Krautrock' alone, they deserve respect.

 

[nomadologist]

"Jennifer" is one of my favorite songs of all time. "Krautrock" is amazing, so is "Just a Second."

 

[Parson]

i was talking about throbbing gristle too

 

[Parson]

sorry i was high and drunk last night when i typed that and was responding to a post i'd read hours earlier

you didn't say tangerine dream you said electronic music

I've got two problems with TG. They're lame sonically compared with other late 70s electronic music - Kraftwerk, Moroder, progressive disco, the Sheffield axis of post punk, etc. If the treble-y thinness of thier sound is a deliberate stance, then I'm afraid it's over my head, because it just sounds insubstantial to me.

anyway my point was that throbbing gristle was much more than electronic music. and that their medium was always secondary to motive.

 

[zhao]

faust has not been mentioned yet.

i do get (and love) Can
i do get (and kind of like) Neu
i get Ash Ra Tempel, Harmonia, Cluster.

BUT i totally don't get Faust. To me it just sounds like Zappa in his worst days, i cant find anything worthwhile on their first 2 albums, which are supposed to be legendary and life changing.

I don't get those first 2 albums either. feel the same way - sound like short attention span doodles to me? but loads of amazing "life-changing" music after those... 71 minutes, Faust IV, etc, etc... astounding.

while we're on the subject... I'm not sure that I get the faust/conrad collaboartion...

 

[childrentalking]

Thanks so much for this - great post, and a brilliant link.

But where does one go to hear this stuff played out ,outside of Berlin? I live in London and I'm not even sure where to go there (aside from Fabric, which as a club space is appallingly overcrowded and miserable).

Fabric post 4.30AM is a totally different club. all the Bazzas and Shazzas clear out and there's a lot of room on the main dancefloor. if you notice, everytime Luciano or Villalobos plays they extend closing from 7 to 8.30/9.30 -- they don't go on until 4.30 AM at the very earliest. buy a ticket in advance, have a nap beforehand, make it down there for 3ish. trust me.

 

[michael]

By contrast, surely not getting something involves acknowledging that there might be something about it that you haven't yet heard.

In this light, I'd have to say I don't get Arthur Russell. His disco tracks are OK but I don't really hear what's supposed to be so avant about them, and the cello and lots of echoes stuff under his own name really does nothing for me. I don't dislike it at all and I do generally quite enjoy a lot of sparse, repetitious, muttery stuff, but I just can't hear what might inspire enthusiastic praise. Anyone want to wax lyrical at me?

 

[Sick Boy]

This whole thread has made me aware of the frightening idea that the hipsters' regular taste for irony, i.e. liking things in jest that they sort of look down on, might be turning into seriously hating shit that all the hipsters formally liked out of irony (e.g. Zepellin, AC/DC, etc.), and seriously liking stuff everyone likes now, but that you'd EXPECT the hipsters to like out of irony (e.g. Justin Timberlake etc.) because they used to seriously HATE this shit.

Could it be that hipsters are now becoming ironic about their OWN FORMER TASTES? God help us all.

I swear, "Hipster Psychology" should be something you should be able to take academically. They are a bunch of really fucked up postmodern culturally lost insecure people.

I apologize to all wrongfully incriminated hipsters.

 

[Parson]

something i don't get is how in this day and age with what hipsterdom has become how somebody could still identify themself with this image and still consider themself actually hip.

 

[nomadologist]

Sickboy, what does "postmodernism" mean to you? Because I've read Lyotard's "On the Postmodern Condition" and I can't make any sense of your statement. In fact, some people would say "postmodern" used adjectivally is a buzzword most frequently used by hipsters.

Also, I hate to break it to you, but as a DJ in your 20s, many people would probably call you a hipster.

The whole point is that you should like whatever you like for whatever reasons you like it. Who cares about designations like "hipster"? It's just something hipsters use to describe other hipsters, and it takes one to know one, I'm sure.

where did hipsters come up here? i thought that was in the Joanna Newsom thread.

 

[nomadologist]

By the way: Dub-U, I read about the negative ionizer thing in the liner notes to "Early" the soul jazz compilation of A Certain Ratio's early funky stuff.

Here's what it says:

Jez: We did the Scala Cinema in London with Throbbing Gristle. That was a really strange gig. They used an Ioniser at the front of the stage, and they must have had it turned up to full.

Interviewer: What's an Ioniser?

Jez: It changes the positive ions to negative-- or negative ions to positive ions. In the air. And they must have had it on fucking override. Because it was really fucking weird in this cinema!

 

[Sef]

Everyone on this forum's a hipster except Logan and Poisondart.

 

[Parson]

yr mama's a hipster