Throbbing Gristle
Second Annual Report: Music from the Death Factory

THE REVIEW

Noise as a form of melody, noise as a song, noise as an art form.

In '77, Throbbing Gristle debut with this album forging the industrial sound, already active since the early years of that decade under the name COUM Transmissions, the band led by Genesis P Orridge together with Cosey Fanni Tutti, Chris Carter, and Peter Christopherson, hurl onto the emerging English post-punk scene a terrifying and violent album, ruthless and prophetic.

Music from the death factory claims a part of the title, the mechanized sonic nightmare takes shape, filled with electronic and synthetic atonal and destabilizing noise in its continuous oscillation between pre-recorded tapes of conversations, voices, screams, and enormous waves of dirty, relentless, and gruesome electronic sounds. In "Slug Bait" Genesis P Orridge's neurotic and delirious voice proclaims words of horror that disperse into radioactive clouds of obsessive and sick sound, a "non-sound" cold, detached, and noisy that stretches throughout the work. The annihilation of the human soul through a hell of steel and iron, the human being enslaved by machines, "Maggot Death": the effect of an industrial press on a living body, the 20 tortured minutes of "After Cease To Exist" burst in distorting everything, mental and physical deconstruction, the formless and dissonant sound mass of the work is the very sound of metropolises, factories, construction sites, the desperate and suffocated scream of a man in chains, industrialized civilization was born... beyond there was only delirium.

There are no noises but only sounds.