Whitehouse
Birthdeath Experience

I want to know
How many of you people out there
Want to rock and roll
Say it - rock and roll!

Say it louder!

William Bennett's Whitehouse are considered the fathers of what we call power electronics.

Bennett, already active in the British post-punk scene with Essential Logic and an electronic experimenter with Come, founded Whitehouse in 1980 with the intent to fill a void, to forge that music he would define as "the most extreme music ever made."

And it's fair to say that his definition isn't too far from reality.

Among Bennett's major influences are John Cage, Steven Stapleton, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, early Tangerine Dream, Cromagnon, Yoko Ono, Robert Ashley, and Alvin Lucier: but Bennett goes further, he creates the Come Organisation label to give voice to the artist's libertine instinct, beyond any censorship and decency. Through the Come Organisation, the first albums of the new sound terrorists, champions of extremism tout-court, are released with great fanfare. A violent and deafening music, obscene in form as in message: the incredible wall of sound actually becomes the stage for Bennett's indecent speeches, often focusing on themes of sex and domination (let's remember that Whitehouse is the name of a well-known English pornographic magazine, and at the same time the surname of Mary Whitehouse, a fervent Christian political activist, famous for her "moralizing" campaigns starting from the sixties, and therefore targeted by Bennett and company).

With their third album, "Elevator," Whitehouse set the standards for the new genre, while, undaunted by criticism, censorship threats, and public decency lawsuits, they would release even more terrifying albums, among which we can highlight "Right to Kill" and "Great White Death," probably to be counted among the most significant works of the English band.

Today I will talk instead about "Birthdeath Experience," released in 1980 with a three-member lineup that, besides Bennett (vocals and synthesizers), includes Paul Reuter on synthesizers, and Peter McKay credited as sound engineer: "Birthdeath Experience" is the first album, the one from which the so-called "second coming" originates ("The Second Coming," as a track on the album is titled), the second shockwave (the first was led by Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire) that was supposed to sweep away the electronic pop that was starting to spread at the time.

In truth, "Birthdeath Experience" is not Whitehouse's most extreme album, nor the best: it contains the seeds of those flowers of chaos that would only fully blossom later. Whitehouse's career would be an increasing agony, and Bennett’s voice in this album almost evokes tenderness compared to what he would offer in the future.

Regurgitations of synthesizers, low and high frequencies mix with feedback, delay, and reverbs, granting very little to melody: whereas rock, punk, and the first wave of industrial bands equate extreme with deafening rhythmic pounding, Whitehouse is a boiling magma of shapeless and dissonant electronics (do you remember the sound of connecting to the internet?).

The pulsing bass in the irreverent "Rock and Roll" is an exception, while Bennett’s shrill cries (like a drunk with a megaphone in hand) praise sex, extreme pleasure, violence, sadism, in a sort of shrieked mass where a mad and drooling priest tries to break the inhibitions of the listening crowd so that instincts are released and finally expressed in a bloody orgy. The lyrics are simple and direct, they are phrases and words repeated to exhaustion, following a declamatory style, having a cathartic, hypnotic, subliminal power, aiming to break inhibitions and draw the listener out of their lethargy (what else to expect from a track titled "Coitus"?).

The technical limitations are, however, evident, while Bennett's awkward howls do not yet have that strength and incisiveness that justify a non-singer being behind a microphone: all elements that poorly lend themselves to the impulse to cause chaos at all costs (chaos, indeed, still owing to the iconoclasm inherited from the punk and post-punk tradition); thus, in its scant thirty-three minutes (of which the three minutes of the title track are playfully silent), Whitehouse's debut is disturbing, but it does not traumatize, does not shock, does not hit the mark because it lacks that charm, depth, and irrepressible fierceness that their subsequent albums will have.

"Birthdeath Experience" thus remains the domain of genre enthusiasts and the charisma of William Bennett (who will remain the only stable member of the project over the years), and for those, in particular, who are interested in probing the early uncertain steps of a leviathan destined to set the whole world on fire.  

And I want to know
Do you believe in rock and roll
Why don’t you stand up for what you believe in
You wankers!