Read Online Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) by Drew Daniel - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Drew Daniel
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manifestation of that desire in the form of writing, collage or artwork, which one fashioned into a magical “sigil” by marking it with one’s blood, semen or other bodily fluid. The resultingsigil was then mailed to the T.O.P.Y. headquarters, where it entered a vast and sticky archive of thaumaturgic souvenirs.
Inevitably sensationalized and mocked in the mainstream music press, the “sigils” in fact connect directly to the historical example set by the English artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare, who developed a highly idiosyncratic ritual practice of meditation upon graphic images that he termed “sigils,” talismanic emblems that allowed him to consecrate his desires in linear form. Spare pursued automatic drawing as a means of both depicting and invoking elemental spirits; his spiraling pen functioning like a Ouija board’s planchette, his hand would dance out the forms dictated by summoned entities even as he attempted to represent their shape and character (though some evidence has recently emerged to suggest that he revised and reworked certain key motifs from seventeenth-century calligraphic sources). The resulting drawings are both “by” and “of” their nonhuman subjects. Spare is also said to have practiced a form of occult onanism in which a particularly powerful wish would be meditated upon while engaged in prolonged acts of “self-love”; Spare described these states of “magical obsession” in
The Book of Pleasure: The Psychology of Ecstasy
(1913). Though it would not be formalized in an explicit manner until the Psychic TV era, there is already a nascent connection between Spare’s magical inscriptions and obsessive masturbation and Throbbing Gristle’s hallucinatory improvisations: the doodling, the diddling and the noodling are linked. At once ritualized and antirational, “Still Walking” was constructed in sympathy with Spare’s poetics. Letting their cut-up words and distorted sounds ferment and recombine and overwhelm the listener, TG’s overdetermined scribbles of synthesis and language are consciously designed tobypass consciousness. Songcraft becomes spellcraft through a magically motivated attack on rationality.
Drew: So you took a group-writing exercise and then had the final say in editing it down to the text recited in the song?
Gen: Yes. If you notice, each person says the full permutation. I was obviously influenced at that point by Brion Gysin’s work with permutation, and the idea of the magic square. You write one calligraphic spell and then you turn it, and then you write it again and you turn it, and you keep doing this so that it goes in all four directions. To do that sonically we had to have four voices; I wanted four voices to represent a magic square, because it was a magical text. All of us speak the same words.
Crowding the landscape of influence already populated by Austin Osman Spare, Gen’s reference to Brion Gysin’s occult calligraphy sets up a compelling synaesthetic analogy between the visual results that Gysin achieved by forcing competing inscriptions to overwhelm each other upon a page and the textural results that TG achieved by talking over and past each other within a mix: an overlay of multiple streams of information produces a new space that is not merely additive. The friction created by too much meaning is not simply a frustration at the sense that one is missing something, but a syncretic effect of organic complexity. Simply put, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Gysin’s description of his technique explains this effect:
As you know, if you see Japanese writing it hangs like vines, pinned at the top of the page and sort of dangling down at different lengths across, and not to my mind at that time satisfactorily employing the Occidental picture space, whichis essentially a page as a picture is a page, and when I went to Morocco I was immediately interested in the movement of Arab writing which goes, as Japanese does,
Inevitably sensationalized and mocked in the mainstream music press, the “sigils” in fact connect directly to the historical example set by the English artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare, who developed a highly idiosyncratic ritual practice of meditation upon graphic images that he termed “sigils,” talismanic emblems that allowed him to consecrate his desires in linear form. Spare pursued automatic drawing as a means of both depicting and invoking elemental spirits; his spiraling pen functioning like a Ouija board’s planchette, his hand would dance out the forms dictated by summoned entities even as he attempted to represent their shape and character (though some evidence has recently emerged to suggest that he revised and reworked certain key motifs from seventeenth-century calligraphic sources). The resulting drawings are both “by” and “of” their nonhuman subjects. Spare is also said to have practiced a form of occult onanism in which a particularly powerful wish would be meditated upon while engaged in prolonged acts of “self-love”; Spare described these states of “magical obsession” in
The Book of Pleasure: The Psychology of Ecstasy
(1913). Though it would not be formalized in an explicit manner until the Psychic TV era, there is already a nascent connection between Spare’s magical inscriptions and obsessive masturbation and Throbbing Gristle’s hallucinatory improvisations: the doodling, the diddling and the noodling are linked. At once ritualized and antirational, “Still Walking” was constructed in sympathy with Spare’s poetics. Letting their cut-up words and distorted sounds ferment and recombine and overwhelm the listener, TG’s overdetermined scribbles of synthesis and language are consciously designed tobypass consciousness. Songcraft becomes spellcraft through a magically motivated attack on rationality.
Drew: So you took a group-writing exercise and then had the final say in editing it down to the text recited in the song?
Gen: Yes. If you notice, each person says the full permutation. I was obviously influenced at that point by Brion Gysin’s work with permutation, and the idea of the magic square. You write one calligraphic spell and then you turn it, and then you write it again and you turn it, and you keep doing this so that it goes in all four directions. To do that sonically we had to have four voices; I wanted four voices to represent a magic square, because it was a magical text. All of us speak the same words.
Crowding the landscape of influence already populated by Austin Osman Spare, Gen’s reference to Brion Gysin’s occult calligraphy sets up a compelling synaesthetic analogy between the visual results that Gysin achieved by forcing competing inscriptions to overwhelm each other upon a page and the textural results that TG achieved by talking over and past each other within a mix: an overlay of multiple streams of information produces a new space that is not merely additive. The friction created by too much meaning is not simply a frustration at the sense that one is missing something, but a syncretic effect of organic complexity. Simply put, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Gysin’s description of his technique explains this effect:
As you know, if you see Japanese writing it hangs like vines, pinned at the top of the page and sort of dangling down at different lengths across, and not to my mind at that time satisfactorily employing the Occidental picture space, whichis essentially a page as a picture is a page, and when I went to Morocco I was immediately interested in the movement of Arab writing which goes, as Japanese does,
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