Read Online Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) by Drew Daniel - Free Book Online
Authors: Drew Daniel
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seems entirely appropriate to Throbbing Gristle’s musical evocation of this beautiful, troubled place.
Still Walking
The effects of a prayer are real because one part of the universe is in sympathy with another part, as one may observe in a properly tuned string on a lyre.
Plotinus,
Enneads
In certain ways, “Still Walking” is the shrillest, most difficult track on the album and bears a certain family resemblance to harsher TG songs, such as “D.o.A.” and “Hit by a Rock.” It is dominated by a drum machine pattern snarled into a textural traffic jam by Chris Carter’s Gristle-izer. The rhythm evokes a martial polka, but doubles back upon itself at odd times, suggesting dance floor mutiny, or ischemic distress. The pronounced flanging makes the snare runs cast metallic, distorted shadows across the beat. Reinforcing this sense of processing run amok, numerous elements in the mix are run through constant panning, modeling the titular walk as a nervous side-to-side hopscotch across the stereo field.Inside this pattern-prison, Cosey’s guitar-through-processing and Gen’s violin-through-processing surface as the sonic main characters still walking through the halls of flanged rhythm in search of escape. Cosey’s guitar alternates between rifflike figures and firework trails of noise, with squeals and scrapes from Gen’s violin occasionally caulking the gaps. The spoken vocals, which sidle into the mix at the one-minute mark, are the least distinct of any Throbbing Gristle song, and that’s saying something: one can almost always detect Gen’s signature keening through even the thickest soup of tape hiss and amp abuse, but here the four separate personalities of the members of TG dissolve into an indistinct crowd of deadpan mutterers, a nonspecific gathering of males and females intoning staggered versions of what is gradually revealed to be the same text. Occasionally, certain words recur and interlock at random, muffled and just audible beneath the chaos and scree that surrounds them: “that’s the whole problem,” “each time he said,” “all of us do it,” “spell of semen,” but without the lyric sheet it is unlikely that the full text would be discernible (nor is it clear that the lyric sheet is entirely accurate). The oblique lyrical snippets hint at a resolution, a domestic, occult scenario kept just out of sight, and the panning of the voices and noises adds to this sense that you are only catching momentary, partial glimpses of a greater whole. The overall effect is a tease: one is being given too much information, and yet the band is also holding something back.
Drew: Who did what on “Still Walking”? Gen has said in previous interviews that you wrote the lyrics with him.
Sleazy: Have you got the lyric there?
Drew: Yes. [reads lyrics] Do you remember coming up with particular lines or images?
Sleazy: The second half of it is more of a cut-up. Cosey and I used to do this sort of thing spontaneously. It was almost like we were both having a separate conversation with somebody else, but the combination of alternating lines between us produced a third mind.
Drew: Sort of like automatic writing, but instead done through rhythmic speech? Each of you taking turns with rapid-fire phrases, one after the other?
Sleazy: Right, and the two together would resonate. Individually the conversations we were having in our minds were with somebody else, but [we would speak in] combination. The lyric you just read me, it strikes me now that the first half is basically all Gen, but the phrases that have a banal aspect to them, that’s more likely to be me. [laughs] The point is that it’s the combination of all of them that is interesting, not any phrase in particular.
Drew: Do you remember what the book was that keeps falling open at the same ritual?
Sleazy: I don’t remember in particular. Gen at this time had an interest in the occult and was starting to investigate Austin Osman Spare. I know
Still Walking
The effects of a prayer are real because one part of the universe is in sympathy with another part, as one may observe in a properly tuned string on a lyre.
Plotinus,
Enneads
In certain ways, “Still Walking” is the shrillest, most difficult track on the album and bears a certain family resemblance to harsher TG songs, such as “D.o.A.” and “Hit by a Rock.” It is dominated by a drum machine pattern snarled into a textural traffic jam by Chris Carter’s Gristle-izer. The rhythm evokes a martial polka, but doubles back upon itself at odd times, suggesting dance floor mutiny, or ischemic distress. The pronounced flanging makes the snare runs cast metallic, distorted shadows across the beat. Reinforcing this sense of processing run amok, numerous elements in the mix are run through constant panning, modeling the titular walk as a nervous side-to-side hopscotch across the stereo field.Inside this pattern-prison, Cosey’s guitar-through-processing and Gen’s violin-through-processing surface as the sonic main characters still walking through the halls of flanged rhythm in search of escape. Cosey’s guitar alternates between rifflike figures and firework trails of noise, with squeals and scrapes from Gen’s violin occasionally caulking the gaps. The spoken vocals, which sidle into the mix at the one-minute mark, are the least distinct of any Throbbing Gristle song, and that’s saying something: one can almost always detect Gen’s signature keening through even the thickest soup of tape hiss and amp abuse, but here the four separate personalities of the members of TG dissolve into an indistinct crowd of deadpan mutterers, a nonspecific gathering of males and females intoning staggered versions of what is gradually revealed to be the same text. Occasionally, certain words recur and interlock at random, muffled and just audible beneath the chaos and scree that surrounds them: “that’s the whole problem,” “each time he said,” “all of us do it,” “spell of semen,” but without the lyric sheet it is unlikely that the full text would be discernible (nor is it clear that the lyric sheet is entirely accurate). The oblique lyrical snippets hint at a resolution, a domestic, occult scenario kept just out of sight, and the panning of the voices and noises adds to this sense that you are only catching momentary, partial glimpses of a greater whole. The overall effect is a tease: one is being given too much information, and yet the band is also holding something back.
Drew: Who did what on “Still Walking”? Gen has said in previous interviews that you wrote the lyrics with him.
Sleazy: Have you got the lyric there?
Drew: Yes. [reads lyrics] Do you remember coming up with particular lines or images?
Sleazy: The second half of it is more of a cut-up. Cosey and I used to do this sort of thing spontaneously. It was almost like we were both having a separate conversation with somebody else, but the combination of alternating lines between us produced a third mind.
Drew: Sort of like automatic writing, but instead done through rhythmic speech? Each of you taking turns with rapid-fire phrases, one after the other?
Sleazy: Right, and the two together would resonate. Individually the conversations we were having in our minds were with somebody else, but [we would speak in] combination. The lyric you just read me, it strikes me now that the first half is basically all Gen, but the phrases that have a banal aspect to them, that’s more likely to be me. [laughs] The point is that it’s the combination of all of them that is interesting, not any phrase in particular.
Drew: Do you remember what the book was that keeps falling open at the same ritual?
Sleazy: I don’t remember in particular. Gen at this time had an interest in the occult and was starting to investigate Austin Osman Spare. I know
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