Randall RobertsWe've acknowledged our excitement at Throbbing Gristle's return to Southern California already, but we figured that since the legendary band is closing out the festival on Sunday night, it might be a good opportunity to convince you to stick around (if you're not familiar with them).
LA Weekly art critic Doug Harvey writes about the band in tomorrow's issue. Here's a little excerpt.
Like many of their immediate punk predecessors, TG booked their own gigs, produced, manufactured and distributed their own product, and invented their own distinctive and original graphic design and promotional copy. Unlike the punks, TG produced audio that most would be hard-pressed to identify as pop music — or music at all. Their grinding, echo-laden mélange of found-sound tape loops, homemade synthesizers and electronic treatments, unskilled live instrumentation (“Why not start with no chords?”) topped off with appropriated medical forensic reports or P-Orridge's screams and nasal, deadpan recitations of war crimes and serial killings, sounded vaguely like a nightmarish version of the most outré psychedelic music of the previous decade, and slightly like the experimental noise of avant-garde classicists like Cage, Stockhausen and Kagel. But “Rock the Casbah” it was not.
Here's something incredibly influential, an early synth-pop ditty that's a far cry from the band's more incendiary works:
Hot On The Heels Of Love – Throbbing Gristle
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