“Turning six Walkmen into a keyboard”: Genesis P-Orridge and the lo-fi origins of industrial music
Revolution was the name of the game when it came to the British music scene of the 1970s. If it wasn’t the androgynous revolution of David Bowie and glam rock, it was the cultural revolution of punk and new wave. However, few artists could compare to the all-encompassing rejection of normality that came with the formation of Throbbing Gristle in 1975. During their tenure, the collective would question and subvert the very methods in which music is constructed, leading to incredibly innovative avant-garde sounds and an entirely new genre known as industrial music.
Throbbing Gristle have their origins in the performance art collective COUM Transmissions, formed by Genesis P-Orridge in Hull during the late 1960s. With that group, P-Orridge, along with Cosey Fanni Tutti, would tackle a vast array of social and political issues, from drug addiction to menstruation, through the medium of performance art. By the time the mid-1970s rolled around, however, the group yearned for something more and so began to construct music. In fact, ‘music’ might not be the most apt word to use.
Given their origins in performance art, Throbbing Gristle were never going to revert to singing typical pop songs or even abrasive punk rock music. No, if COUM was going to become Throbbing Gristle, the collective needed to reflect their interest in Dadaism, surrealism, and the world of avant-garde. As such, Throbbing Gristle were formed with a radical manifesto of independence and a subversion of typical rock music.
“What’s the thing that holds down rock music the most?” P-Orridge questioned, during a BBC documentary, explaining their concept for the band. “The drumming, get rid of the drummer. What else? Lead guitarists are trying to show off and do long solos, so the guitarist has to not be able to play. What else? No fancy music of any kind; anything that makes a sound is an instrument – a kitchen fork, an old tin, a piece of wood, anything.”
With this innovative, avant-garde approach to music making, taking inspiration from the world of musique concrète, P-Orridge and the band began to experiment with new technologies and sounds which had never been heard before. A favourite method of creating electronic sounds for the band was hooking up multiple portable cassette players together, something P-Orridge later referred to as “alchemy”: “If you were going to be an alchemist now, it should include a Walkman, or a Holophonic recorder, or whatever is the most cutting-edge equipment,” they said.
Seemingly, the band were questioning what they could get away with and what they could achieve with these innovative lo-fi approaches to instrumentation – “Turning six Walkmen into a keyboard and seeing what happens when you have random sounds from 12 places happening simultaneously,” as P-Orridge put it. As it turns out, the result of those experiments was an entirely new era for independent music, reflected by the band’s DIY record label Industrial Records, which lent its name to the newfound genre of industrial music.
Using harsh, mechanical sounds to construct music, industrial music captured the attention of artists from the very first release of Throbbing Gristle, 1977’s The Second Annual Report. That album, along with its follow-ups, were unlike anything that had been heard by UK audiences before; its abrasive, sometimes frightening nature challenged the very idea of what could be considered music.
Industrial music has developed tenfold since the heyday of Throbbing Gristle, but it has always retained that haunting atmosphere and harsh, mechanical noises that had been pioneered by the Hull outfit. Their radically subversive, DIY approach to music making typified the revolutionary spirit of that era, and inspired countless future artists to challenge the ways in which music is thought of and constructed. Very few groups can claim to have inspired an entire movement in music, but Throbbing Gristle did that and so much more.
