1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 422. Throbbing Gristle – D.O.A: The Third And Final Report Of (1978)

 

It looks like we’re on a run of experimental albums. It also feels like for each step over the past three albums we’ve gone deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of weirdness. Pere Ubu used odd elements but fundamentally had decent underlying tunes. The Residents had some musical parts, but were more fragmented. This one is almost entirely based around making music from things that aren’t music.

The opening track, for example, called IBM, uses a modem dial-up noise as the basis. More than Penguin Cafe’s Telephone and Rubber Band, the modem sound, although used as a repetitive element, has little inherent musicality to it and is only very slightly turned into what we might call “music”. Dead on Arrival is a prime example of the genre that Throbbing Gristle inhabit known as “industrial” - it’s got a kind of mechanised trip-hop feel, and you get the sense that this is the music of the sterile de-humanised world that Poly Styrene was warning about.

Throbbing Gristle, like The Residents, is an art collective of which the music is only part. The members explore the more transgressive or fringe parts of society – Vocalist and bassist Genesis P-Orridge explored becoming one person with their partner Lady Jaye, adopting Jaye’s persona as part of their own to become a gestalt entity when Jaye died. Guitarist Cosi Fanny Tutti explored themes of sex work and pornography using her own body as an instrument in the art. These two and other members are credited with “effects”, and this is more in the sound than guitar and bass. They explore other dark themes – there is a track on the album that a 16 second compression of another one of their tracks United/Zyklon B Zombie, visually utilising disturbing Holocaust imagery.

Many of the tracks utilise spoken word and recorded fragments – Valley Of The Shadow Of Death is basically an expletive laden conversation, Hometime has a child’s narration like they are recounting a fractured explanation of an experience.

This little run of experimental oddness could be broken down into three levels. If Pere Ubu was level one, The Residents level two, and Throbbing Gristle level three, my limit is definitely level two. While once again I’m glad that such extreme strangeness exists in the world, to me it felt like this was just *too* willfully transgressive, that the artists were not so much using their art to explore difficult ideas and to challenge the audience’s preconceptions, and more just seeing what they can get away with.

But maybe that’s the point. Like conceptual art, it’s not the work itself that is the art, it’s the act of creating the work and displaying it as art that is the art. Well, anyway, it’s a very odd album and if nothing else the sense of discomfort, of having experienced a mental breakdown for 40 minutes, is in some ways pleasant in an unpleasant kind of way.