Throbbing Gristle
Music From The Death Factory, The Second Annual Report

THE REVIEW

You cannot talk about what you don't know, least of all can you do it with Throbbing Gristle.

Pornographers of art, explicit and fierce desecrators of the classicism of rock: it's impossible to understand "in words" the dark melancholy and the brazen provocation of these four genuine sound fetishists.

This 1977 production, partly recorded live, offers a sound that has ceased to become music, or rather that was never music, and that seems to want to demolish it from the ground up, favoring raw and bare communication over perfect tonality and harmony.

Everything (or almost everything) is improvised, generated from the orbits of chaos, in an absolutely elusive way. Furthermore, the original booklet included a questionnaire with questions like "What is your greatest ambition?" or "Do you have a very special obsession/fetish?"(!), which gives an idea of how they prioritized what to express over how to do it.
It must be said, the "music(?) of the death factory" cannot simply be defined with an overused "sound terrorism": it is true that here you will hear sirens, reverse tapes, rumbles, screams.

But chaos takes shape, the TG capture a snapshot of what happens in the modern world, overlapping and blending results in search of pure degeneration. The courage to go in a direction perhaps known to some, but that no one (or very few) had the courage to fully undertake. And, once there, the TG make everything implode, compressing it into 3 tracks divided disorganizedly, in addition to the splendid and alienating "After Cease To Exist". The latter, perhaps the best track on the CD, presents the sound nightmares of keyboardist Chris Carter and guitarist Christine Carol Newby ("Cosey Fanny Tutti"!), who bursts in at moments in a piece that proceeds, inexorably, for over 20 minutes, while you can hear in the background the sick voice of a genuine murderer.

I recommend getting the version that also includes the singles "United" and "Zyclon B Zombie", and maybe start your "delirium" from here. The first is a crazy electronic experiment that seems to express, through a "catchy" rhythm, a relationship of delirious symbiosis ("United United, You become me, And I become you, She is she, And she is you too"), the second furiously narrates the thoughts of a woman about to be killed by the infamous gas, while her anger leads her towards a feeling of total bewilderment and alienation.