Throbbing Gristle
Part Two: The Endless Not

Premise number one: although a review of this album is already available on the site, I believe that my contribution can offer added value for Debaser readers. Indeed, while the existing review excellently describes the perspective of someone encountering TG's music for the first time, mine aims to illustrate the significance of the work for those who already know and love TG.
Premise number two: more than exaltation, reunions, which are so fashionable these days, provoke distrust and extreme caution in me. Experience teaches us, in fact, that such operations, rather than being forges of true joys, have over time become regular appointments to besmirch a myth.
Premise number three: giving 5 stars to a 2007 album is quite unusual for me, given that I belong to that group of unfriendly people not inclined to exaltation, thinking that the best in music has already been done.

Well, now that the necessary premises have been made, I can say it: this album is a fucking masterpiece!
What, in fact, was reasonable to expect from a band that more than thirty years ago conducted a real revolution, laid the foundations of a new genre, industrial, and now returns to the music market when, in the meantime, everything and its opposite has been said within the industrial realm? In all sincerity, one could expect nothing more than an honest update of the glorious music that was, possibly weakened by old age and minds no longer in step with the times. Instead, with eyes wide open and trembling jaw, we find ourselves with a fresh, very fresh work in our hands, not forward, but certainly beyond, outside the genres and sad revivals. An album that candidly positions itself as a contender for Album of the Year (come on, all right, we'll wait to see what the Neurosis managed to do...).
The strength of "The Endless Not" perhaps lies in being a false return, in not constituting a new start, but a point of arrival: there is no need to warm up the engines, we could say, because the engines (and the minds) have never stopped. Like a fearsome octopus, the TG entity has over the years extended its tentacles in different directions through the admirable feats of its members, who have continued their insane path by creating remarkable projects and continuing to produce works of great quality. The TG entity has thus continued operating over the years under false pretenses, under the names of Coil, Psychic TV, and Chris & Cosey, and these experiences today converge into a unicum which, despite bearing the TG brand in capital letters, sounds like TG never did before.
The fact that TG were great innovators is not a fortuitous case. Creation doesn't occur solely with genius, but also and especially thanks to knowledge: those who know, those who have a wide perception of things, those who understand the logic underlying them, are ahead. And "The Endless Not," which will certainly not have the destabilizing and innovative impact that the seminal "The Second Annual Report of Throbbing Gristle" had, far from being an easy recycling, presents us with artists who not only show that they haven't lost the curiosity, the desire to update, and the spirit of initiative that has always distinguished them, but who have been able, with interest and humility, to metabolize the lessons of their disciples, and more generally, the progress of electronics, which from '81 to today has made its way, thanks to the likes of Aphex Twin, Autechre, Matmos, Black Dice, Wolf Eyes, and so on.

Damn, speaking personally, I haven't enjoyed this much since "Kid A," an album which, although in other areas, represents the evolution present here. The TG's past stands to "The Endless Not" as the Radiohead's past stands to "Kid A," a fresh and inspired product that disintegrates and recomposes what was done before, annexing new elements and rereading everything with a renewed awareness of their means. Less caustic and improvisational than they used to be, TG "return" with attention to detail and a clear understanding of what they are doing. The creative process seems to develop along two opposite and perfectly complementary dimensions.
Peter Christopherson and Chris Carter form what we can define as the axis of clarity: the surgical manipulation and sampling work of the former and the piercing explorations of the synthesizers of the latter (also rhythmic engine and responsible for production aspects) intertwine and overlap in a perfect symbiosis of pounding rhythms and sound ejaculations, revealing careful and meticulous work, aimed at the reasoned control of every single detail.

Cosey Fanni Tutti and Genesis P-Orridge (today Genesis Breyer P-Orridge) instead are two perfect fools and form the axis of mental imbalance. Cosey, now an attractive alcoholic in her fifties and utterly frittered due to excesses (see live to believe!), seems more a victim than a maker of collective delirium: her guitar gets chopped and blended by the crazy companions behind the machinery, while her commendable guitar work settles on the plane of a mere noise-psychedelic refinement. P-Orridge, who deserves a separate discussion (I haven't yet figured out if he has changed gender or simply had a nice pair of boobs implanted!), continues, as yesterday, to be a non-singer, but behind his performance, you undeniably feel the weight of the experience gained with the eight thousand records released under the name Psychic TV: his shrill and trembling voice settles on the fatal tones of a night-club slut, at times reminding us of the good Balance (R.I.P.), at times launching into disturbing esoteric lullabies (the delirious "Lyre Liar"), thus elevating the entire work’s illness rate to the skies.

"The Endless Not" evolves with eclecticism, a bit like what happened with the various "20 Jazz Funk Greats". And after a dutiful tribute to the most lethal chaos with the opening track, the excellent "Vow of Silence," a formidable ear-splitting crescendo where P-Orridge's chopped barking sounds like the hysterical howl of a laughing hyena, it is a real surprise to encounter the jazz piano opening the formidable "Rabbit Snare," a Lynchian nightmare with a hypnotic stride, animated by Cosey's outlandish trumpet and the always very sick P-Orridge, who moves awkwardly like a bloodshot-eyed Thom Yorke with an ax in hand: "Do you love me?, Why are you scarred?," he asks, lost and desolate in an inconclusive soliloquy of love with ominous noir shades.
The discussion will continue in a continuous alternation of jarring assaults of insane noise in typical TG style (the monumental 10 minutes of "Greasy Spoon"!) and crepuscular pieces that call to mind the Coil of the two grand volumes of "Musick to Play in the Dark" and the Psychic TV of their unmissable debut "Force the Hand of Chance" from 1982 (how can one not mention the horrid ballad "Almost a Kiss"!). All of it spiced with the electro-trance atmospheres already found in Chris & Cosey's works and with a mystical aura hovering over the entire album (it is evident that the esotericism of Coil has become an essential component of the sound of the new TG). A catastrophic Via Crucis that will extinguish in the catharsis of the concluding "After the Fall," whose reverberations leave us, besides shaken, with the impression of having come into contact with something great.

The post-industrial of the 2007 TG is something indefinable, it is as if our musicians' music had undergone a process of dematerialization, a process that goes to retrace the involutive path of our world, now headed towards a sterile, indomitable, and deleterious complexity in its dehumanizing effects: the physical aspect of the past is no longer necessary because the world has crumbled and lost its consistency. To the heaviness of the machinery, the monumentality of the factories, the tangibility of bolts, enters the ICT era, a strange and ethereal time, menacing and elusive, no longer dominated by "good old" whippings on the back but by financial speculation, globalization processes, information losing consistency, the impossibility of constructing the Real, whose planes multiply and confuse in a collective and unconscious psychic collapse. And in a society where the workplace becomes your laptop, where interpersonal relationships are established through the Network, where your interlocutor is only a voice with no face or simple words scrolling on a monitor, TG's music becomes more stupefying, relevant, and penetrating than ever.

The process of internalization is now triggered: the Factory of Death is inside us!