Throbbing Gristle
At The Art School Winchester

THE REVIEW

Released by the English band in '77, "At The Art School Winchester" represents yet another testament to the life of the monstrous creature Throbbing Gristle. This live-recorded cassette is nothing but a live performance of the industrial-electronic collective led by Genesis P Orridge and Peter Christopherson, assisted by Cosey Fanni Tutti and Chris Carter.

Every live date of the band was promptly recorded and released on cassette via Industrial Records, the group's personal label. The live dimension was indeed the ideal territory for this mutable and extreme creature. Every performance was recorded because it represented a unique and unrepeatable event in the life of the group. The pieces presented took on a different form at each performance, often improvised on stage. It often happened that the same piece played on two different evenings would become unrecognizable and completely distorted. It's no coincidence that the first official full-length album, the historic "Second Annual Report," is the result of various live snippets and fragments played over those early years of the band.

The Throbbing Gristle of the '70s were simply the most musically extreme thing ever to appear in the underground. In years when a weakened punk movement was quickly swallowed by the masses, a new avant-garde of artists was born and thrived in the underbelly of English metropolises. The industrial-style electronics of the TG described and praised the aesthetics of the ugly, obscenity, alienation, an absolute and totalitarian rejection of modern times that would create followers and provide vital energy to many musical currents up to the present day. The sonic cataclysm raised by the band was accompanied in live settings by projections of porn films and atrocious footage from Nazi concentration camps. The aesthetics of ugliness and provocation reached their peak. The hallucinatory proclamations of Genesis P Orridge were submerged by dissonant waves of synthetic noises, voices, screams, and all sorts of disturbing sounds. The sadistic progression of impure and exacerbated electronics, the noise was crowned as the undisputed master of the scene, amidst droning chasms of ultrasounds and magmatic swathes of white noise. But once past the initial impact, a sort of musicality begins to emerge from the chaos based on sonic electroshock, musicality still very latent that mainly comes out thanks to the mastery of Christopherson on synthesizers and electronic equipment.

The live albums of Throbbing Gristle represent therefore not only the crystallization of a specific moment in the group's artistic life but also the main and most exhaustive way to get closer to this creature that elevated noise to an art form, showing the ugliness and neuroses of modern dark times.