Clasificación de Uso Actual y Determinantes

Prologue:  Resurgent  Rumori    

After the official dissolution of Throbbing Gristle in 1981, the chthonic beast known as Industrial music splintered into a variety of sub-genres, each of them expanding upon some key element of the founding quartet’s radical agenda of cultural deprogramming. Not the least of these phenotypes were the follow-up projects formed by the actual members of TG themselves, although the influence of the factory foursome was, come the mid-‘80s, just one piece in an increasingly complex puzzle of creative approaches. Newer artists at this time, already emancipated by TG’s suggestion that it was the whole nature of music which needed re-assessing, and not just rock ‘n roll, were free to tap the potentialities of non-linear noise, new technologies and a much broader palette of subject matter than courtship rituals. Few have ever succeeded on the same level as TG did- and despite the anarchic encouragement for others do whatever they pleased sound-wise, a certain amount of homogeneity and cloning was bound to become a contagion in the nascent genre.

One of the most heavily borrowed elements of the Throbbing Gristle program was the predilection for fetishizing the universally ugly, dutifully following Genet’s sage advice “to escape the horror, bury yourself in it”. This particular quote was appropriated by Industrial arch-transgressor Monte Cazazza, a man who, with his sneering anti-music and faked snuff films, created more than his fair share of aesthetic horror for people to immerse themselves in. A survey of the young, restless, post-TG cadre of noisemakers shows that they largely did not have the same grounding in media theory or as varied an aesthetic sensibility as their forebears, and attempted to compensate with a pure lust for negation. This tendency is best exemplified by the exhausting sleeve notes of the New Blockaders 7”

single Epater Les Bourgeois:

Let us demolish these fetid blocks of security, of tradition, of certainty, of unquestioning worship…let us be murderors [sic] of the past! The obscene progression of regression shall be halted by us, The New Blockaders! Let us be anonymous. O brothers and sisters, let us work in subtle ways, and then at dawn our hour of glory shall come! Let us be chameleons, let us enter their ranks unnoticed…only attacks from behind ever succeed! Let us sever this parasite called history, it has nothing to do with us…this is the future! This is now!¹

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The New Blockaders were not alone among the noise community in their insistence that the ‘future,’ whatever that was imagined to be, would come about by spontaneous, atavistic acts of destruction- although their official statements were some of the most hyperbolic (and consequently, some of the most entertaining). The New Blockaders would bolster their claims that “even anti-art is art…that is why we reject it!” with a shopping list of negation, again to be found on the notes to their ‘Epater…’ single.

Sparing virtually no communications or entertainment apparatus, the Blockaders claim to be “books, newspapers, magazines, anti-poetry, anti-music, anti-clubs, anti communications!”,² then delivering the blackly funny coup de grace: “we will make anti-statements about everything….we will make a point of being pointless!”³ It seemed that only the previous enfants terribles of the European art world, Throbbing Gristle’s spiritual predecessors in the Viennese Aktionists, trumpeted nihilism to such all-pervasive levels: provocateurs like Otto Mühl stated that his

‘ZOCK’⁴ order “has no dread of chaos…rather it fears forgetting to annihilate something,”⁵ and laid out a brusque 5-point plan for ZOCK culminating in blowing up the Earth from space, and the subsequent

“attempt to cave in the universe”. In 1963, Mühl would exclaim that "I can imagine nothing significant where nothing is sacrificed, destroyed, dismembered, burnt, pierced, tormented, harassed, tortured, massacred..,stabbed, destroyed, or annihilated,"⁶ a statement so blunt that it cannot have helped him during the legal proceedings brought to bear on him later in his life.⁷

With such attitudes of cultural leveling running strongly through it, the rising noise underground of the ‘80s seemed to be heir apparent to the Italian Futurists of the 1920s, who, in a concerted effort to clear away the sentimental debris of history, exhibited plenty of their own destructive streaks. The open support that some noise-based acts voiced for the Futurists would not make it any easier for the new underground to repudiate claims that it glorified fascismas well- an allegation that dogged it throughout the genre’s halcyon days of the 1980s. Whether they were aware of it or not, The New Blockaders were endorsing a type of

‘rebuilding by leveling’ which had led to the rise of fascism in the first place: take, for example, the actions of April 15, 1919, when the Italian socialist newspaper Avanti! had its offices and its communications apparatus (linotype machinery) wrecked by an unholy alliance of Futurists and arditi [the former frontline soldiers who would become so useful in furthering fascist policies of the ‘20s]. The poet / figurehead F.T. Marinetti and his Futurist coterie would become disillusioned with fascist politics soon enough, while Benito Mussolini would eventually seek an artistic movement that better combined Italian traditionalism with more progressive tendencies (and, of course, would find armed marauders like

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the arditi infinitely more useful in accomplishing his aims than the abstractions of poets and cultural theorists). Marinetti’s true acceptance by the overlords of the fascist political system was also called into question when Hitler, hosting an exhibit of Nazi-denounced ‘degenerate art’ in 1938, included a selection of Italian Futurist works in the show.

Truth be told, though, Marinetti’s influence on the noise movement, despite his founding of the Futurists and subsequent penning of The Futurist Manifesto, is not as widely felt today as that of another Futurist luminary, Luigi Russolo- and his own seminal manifesto L'arte di Rumori [The Art Of Noises.] No educational narrative on radical modern sound, let alone an assessment of post-Industrial musicians, can be totally complete without some acknowledgement of Russolo. His short but essential broadside against traditionalism is reverently quoted in at least one CD retrospective of post-Industrial sound (Z’ev’s One Foot In The Grave compilation, released on Touch in 1991) and the number of sound artists now paying homage to Russolo, whether aware of it or not, is manifold.

Marinetti’s insistence that extreme violence was an aesthetic device (since, after all, life and art were indistinct concepts) was taken to heart by more than a few of the genre’s more confrontational performers: early live performances could devolve into chaotic situations requiring police intervention, while the demanding physicality of performances by Z’ev and Einstürzende Neubauten localized this violence to within the performers’ own bodies. Still, the credit for truly drafting up any kind of a sonic blueprint for a more apolitical kind of Futurist music belongs to Russolo (even though he does quote at length from Marinetti’s battlefield poetry in The Art Of Noises.) And it is also worth noting that Russolo considered himself a Futurist painter with some novel ideas about music, not a trained musician or composer in any sense of the word- through this alone he has a special kinship with the ‘non-specialist’, artistically omnivorous tradition of Throbbing Gristle and beyond.

If nothing else from the Futurist history of polemics and agitations goes uncontested, it can't be denied their role in shaping the sound interfaces of the subsequent century: Rodney Payton confirms this by claiming their instrumental innovations were "the spiritual ancestors to the very latest synthesizers."⁸ One quote from The Art Of Noises stands out as not only relevant to the makers of post-Industrial and noise music, but to many of the transient musicians of the 21^st century who would attempt to compact a huge, dynamic sound into a small box operable by just a single person:

It is hardly possible to consider the enormous mobilization of energy that a modern orchestra requires without concluding that the acoustic results are pitiful. Is there anything more ridiculous in the world than twenty men

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slaving to increase the plaintive meowing of violins?⁹

It may have taken seven decades for a street-level, non-academic movement to finally create an economical live music more pleasing to Russolo’s sensibilities- but with the post-Industrial avant-garde, Russolo’s wishes were made flesh in a dramatic, unequivocal way. Giant stacks of amplification equipment were already de rigeur for the arena rock-n-roll of the 1970s, a fact that critic Lester Bangs attempted to make mirth of by

"defending Richard Nixon's energy crisis of the time, which [Emerson, Lake and Palmer] flouted grossly with their truckloads of volume-enhancing, electricity wasting gear."¹⁰ So it could be argued that the personnel required to prepare these lumbering dinosaurs for performance was at least equal to the ‘mobilization of energy’ spent on an orchestra in Russolo’s day. An entourage of stagehands, instrument ‘techs’ and

‘doctors’, drivers, caterers and other assorted hangers-on, all arriving in town with extravagant contract rider demands, did not make for an economical music show. It would take the dawn of the digital age, and all its attendant innovations (ADAT machines, laptops etc.) before the ratio of human input to instrumental output could truly be maximized, but Russolo should still be lauded for his early attempts to help this process along. His co-invention of the intonarumori, which Payton alludes to above (i.e. waist-high acoustic boxes connected to bullhorns and operated by hand-cranks or electric buttons), was a step in the direction of making a transducer that didn’t require either athleticism or extreme agility to operate. The intonarumori had only about a one-octave range, adjustable in tones or semi-tones, but 27 different types were created according to the type of sound they were meant to generate: there were howlers, cracklers, exploders, thunderers, crumplers etc. The instruments were built in collaboration with another painter, Ugo Piatti, confirming that Russolo was not the only artist looking to liberate organized sound from

‘musicians’- reining music back into the organic whole of art and life.

Music  For  Monochrome  Men    

The voluntary termination of Throbbing Gristle in the early 1980s may have prevented the band from being pinned to the ‘pop’ status that it purported to abhor (at least until the group's 21^st century reincarnation), but the template they created had already become quite useful to other marginalized individuals in dire need of catharsis. Genesis P. Orridge lamented the waning days of Throbbing Gristle, and the rise of their

‘stereotypical Industrial fan’, as follows:

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They wear Doctor Martens and military trousers and black leather jackets, semi-Nazi regalia, skinhead haircuts or black hair, they are mainly male. They make cassette tapes of their Industrial music, which are mostly just feedback, and they bemoan the non-existence of TG. They feel that we betrayed something wonderful.¹¹

Other members of Throbbing Gristle would be less dismissive of their successors- both Cosey Fanni Tutti and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson insisted that the ‘scene’ was formed out of (in Christopherson’s reckoning)

“the lack of a response by the music business to the changing needs of the audience”¹², rather than as a blanket emulation of TG. Still, P. Orridge continued, naming names this time:

We’d left a rather unhealthy residue of people and ideas, albeit because people had chosen to misunderstand what we were saying. It got into this thing of who could shock each other the most, SPK doing videos of dead bodies [and] Whitehouse for example, who I instantly and totally despised. Making a hole for those people to crawl through was quite scary.¹³

The people who were ‘instantly and totally despised’ by P. Orridge are best described as ‘power electronics’ artists, the coinage of the ‘totally despised’ Whitehouse: this was a markedly sinister, cauterizing offshoot of Industrial music characterized by its apparent glorification of anti-social behavior, pathology, and the nihilistic fringe elements within post-industrial society, with no shortage of disregard for that society’s plethora of sexual inhibitions. For the literary-minded music consumer, the ‘power’

prefix instantly brings to mind Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous proclamation of the ‘will to power’- and while no members of any power electronics act have attained any degree of political power, they did try to make good on attaining some of the more easily attainable qualities of Nietzsche’s übermensch: liberal democratic and/or Christian values of humility and charity were mocked, while these systems’ egalitarian trappings were unceremoniously swept aside- neither was there any place for, say, Rousseau’s Enlightenment admission of the ‘good in man’. The

‘libertinage’ of the Marquis DeSade was a vastly more influential idea from that period in European history (Juliette, the anti-heroine in Sade’s similarly-titled novel, is even suspected to be a parody of Rousseau’s heroine Julie.)

The songs of Throbbing Gristle, which covered every aspect of social deviance from voyeuristic obsession (“Persuasion,”) to serial killing (“Urge To Kill,” “Dead Ed”) did give the power electronics generation a potent

Whitehouse:  Asceticists  or  Libertines?  |  57   cocktail to imbibe- although, as Orridge has already touched upon, one of the intoxicating effects of this cocktail was a propensity for creating art totally devoid of subtlety and variance. Cheap cassette reproduction provided an outlet for the power electronics market to become immediately flooded with artists who reveled in Thanatos, discarding TG’s concessions to popular music forms (subversive as they might have been), and unloading a deluge of recorded material onto a comparatively limited audience- it would not be unheard of for a housebound power electronics artist to release 5-10 tapes in a year to match a professional studio recording artist’s single album. In this respect, at least, the patronizing declaration of “my week beats your year”, on Lou Reed’s feted noise album Metal Machine Music, held true. And while it may not have been intended as such, the endless underground flow of brutal power electronics releases was something of an indirect comment on such modern institutions as the evening news- could power electronics artists really be counted on to produce wildly varying and constantly innovative releases, in a culture whose mass media seemed to be either reflecting or initiating a state of social stagnation? Local news reports from the period were, by all accounts, virtually no different than the ones being broadcast now, with their blank, clinical assessments of extreme social mayhem and their inability to really convey any message more cogent than ‘it’s dangerous out there.’ Much of the power electronics genre simply transposed the indifferent reportage of televised news onto an audio format, occasionally even using unaltered snatches of nightly news monologues to drive home the point of otherwise abstract and anonymous noise assaults. These noise assaults themselves were like the significantly more bloody-minded cousin of minimalist composition, featuring single notes on a synthesizer held down for indeterminate periods of time while being oscillated, modulated and tonally mangled. This would form the backdrop for similarly modulated, heavily effected shrieks, shouts and vocal tantrums, all coming together in an effort to simulate the deranged thought processes of an incurable sociopath.

Ironically, the most well-publicized mass slayers have shown a taste for music considerably gentler than power electronics- British serial killer Dennis ‘Monochrome Man’ Nilsen, to whom the pièce de résistance of power electronics (Whitehouse's 1983 LP Right To Kill) is dedicated, enjoyed more contemplative electronic music- Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’ in particular. Charles Manson, whose influence is felt in all areas of the post-industrial music community (his friendship with Boyd Rice of NON, and the inclusion of his song ‘Always Is Always’ on Psychic TV’s Dreams Less Sweet LP are just two of the more obvious examples), has always preferred and even performed American folk music, and sharply refuted allegations that the influence of the Beatles influenced his ‘Family’

to kill- “Bing Crosby was my idol”,¹⁴ he protests.

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For all its flirtation with the aesthetics of fascism and lustmord / thrill killing, the power electronics genre has turned out to be, on average, fairly conservative in the subjects it chooses to portray. One of the major shortcomings of the genre is its tendency to cherry-pick only those controversial subjects which have been firmly entrenched in the mass consciousness for generations: most power electronics bands would be just resourceful enough to dig up a Heinrich Himmler speech to use as an intro to one of their electrified acid baths, yet would sidestep the activities of the Croatian Ustaše, who revulsed even Himmler’s elite S.S. troops with their gleeful throat-slitting contests. It also doesn’t look as if any contemporary power electronics artists have delved into the grisly specifics of the more recent genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur etc.- making one wonder if these purveyors of brutality truly have a sense of history beyond Anglophone and Western European spheres of influence (recent additions like Dominick Fernow's Vatican Shadow project are more informed by Middle Eastern despotism and political intrigue, but here they are the exception that proves the rule.) By wielding such utter predictability, there is a vast underground which sadly commits the cardinal sin of any subversive art movement: failing to move an audience beyond a purely neutral reaction when "provocation" is the intent (alternately, if the reactions are not neutral, their precise content is at least as predictable as the provocation itself.)

Yet we have to remember that this genre was effectively birthed by Whitehouse, a band that sent even Genesis P. Orridge reeling, and whose conspicuous absence in the academic treatments of "noise music"¹⁵ (which will invariably mention Throbbing Gristle's own forays into transgressive art) invites intense speculation as to why the group is seen as canonical by other underground artists but not by the critical community. It is also interesting to consider those instances in which said group, upon making numerous stylistic and thematic transformations, is not allowed to adopt these changes without suspicion of ulterior motives (and if it seems I belabor this point for longer than necessary, it is because this intolerance of stylistic and thematic re-assessment applies to many other unfortunate artists besides the one under investigation.)

“Deliver  The  Goods…That  People  Want  To  Receive

”

Whitehouse was formed on the cusp of the 1980s by a teenaged William Bennett, a soft-spoken, Edinburgh-based bon vivant and classically trained guitarist. The band’s moniker was meant as an ironic jab at puritanical anti-pornography crusader Mary Whitehouse, who was unfortunate enough to share her surname with the particularly lowbrow

Whitehouse:  Asceticists  or  Libertines?  |  59   Whitehouse porn magazine. Bennett served a brief stint in the new wave outfit Essential Logic before the dawn of Industrial music sparked a

Whitehouse:  Asceticists  or  Libertines?  |  59   Whitehouse porn magazine. Bennett served a brief stint in the new wave outfit Essential Logic before the dawn of Industrial music sparked a