Why oh why do I remain so infatuated with Throbbing Gristle? Why do I feel a visceral thrill when I run across one of their albums in the wild that I don’t have… and why can’t I resist the urge to buy it? Is it evidence of some underlying psychological or emotional problem buried deep in my psyche, a dark sticky mass hidden in the most primitive part of my brain, the place where fight-or-flight battle it out for control? I hate horror movies – I don’t like things that generate a fear response, nor do I like gore. But Throbbing Gristle is something else. Something… unsettling. It’s the thing that goes bump in the night. It’s the feelings of imposter syndrome. It’s the fear of the unknown.
Which brings us to the 1983 live recording Éditions… Frankfurt… Berlin… I came across this at a local shop the other day along with a handful of other TG titles, part of a broader collection of electronic music that had belonged to a collector who recently passed, a fact I learned when a woman came in and asked if they’d put out this person’s stuff yet. He’d be a friend and she wanted to buy some of his records. Which just adds to that unsettling feeling that TG invokes in and of itself. I’m sure any number of records in my collection made their way to me because the previous owner died. But I’d never encountered it so directly. A record collection can be very personal in a lot of ways, and as a fellow collector that makes me feel a certain reverence for this record.
As I understand it the two shows collected on Éditions… Frankfurt… Berlin… were both performed in 1980. I actually tracked down an interesting blurb about these shows:
This new mystical emphasis was confirmed during TG’s performances on 7 and 8 November at the SO 36 Club in Berlin and on 10
November at the Kunsthofschule, Frankfurt. Along with the new sound the group also had a new image, complete with its [Laurence] Dupré designed camouflage uniforms and its new streamlined live equipment (which fitted neatly into minimalist brown cases designed and constructed by [Chris] Carter). The first gig at the SO 36 Club was particularly significant because “Discipline” – probably the most representative of TG’s “songs” – was invented live on stage.1
The pulsing electro-percussion of “Discipline” is enthralling, trance-inducing, like a journey to some cyberpunk version of Morocco, the beat pattern something not quite standard, its exoticness overshadowed by the machine-generated nature of the sound. And the beat is unrelenting, pulsing, throbbing, incessant, propelling the song down the rails as it careens wildly from side-to-side, threatening to but not quite going off the tracks. The locomotive-like quality continues with the other A side track, “Strangers in the Night”, which is most definitely not a Frank Sinatra cover. Like its predecessor it offers no reprieve, its inexorable pulsations like a vein throbbing in your head during a migraine.
The B side sees TG move in a more psychedelic direction with “The Old Man Smiled,” another hypno-inducing trip-fest. “Something Came Over Me” is perhaps as close as TG get to something with a song-like structure, though even here the vocals are moans and shouts, the stringed instruments having something dragged across their surfaces. “N Point Zero” closes us out, another play in repetition, though this one a bit more muted, as if the performers themselves are running out of gas, slowing down as their energy ebbs away…
This is definitely one of the better live Throbbing Gristle records I’ve heard and is well worth your time.
- Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of COUM Transmissions & Throbbing Gristle by Simon Ford (Black Dog Publishing: London, 1999) p. 10.25 ↩︎