Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3)

by Daniel, Drew

  Drew: What was your relationship to funk and jazz as genres? Because I could see people saying that live you were—a bit—related to jazz ideas about form, and that there were elements of funk in your approach to both programming rhythms, and to the meaning of “funk” as something nasty.

  Cosey: But “being funky” at that time had turned into Shaft kind of stuff, that kitschy funky stuff going wah wah wah. [imitates chickenscratch guitar riff]

  Drew: But listen to that bassline on “Tanith.” I mean, that is wah bass.

  Chris: With the whole “20 Jazz Funk Greats” song, me and Sleazy had a lot of influence on how that track came about. With the synth that sounds like a guitar, that’s Sleazy and I both playing parts on that thing.

  Drew: Are you both on the same synth and adjusting different parameters?

  Chris: No, actually it’s two different synths and he’s doing one and I’m doing another.

  Drew: The same one that is playing the bassline on “20 Jazz Funk Greats”?

  Chris: Yeah, the modular system.

  Drew: How do you do the fast little fill, the “dooda-dooda-dooda-dooda” part?

  Chris: Adjusting the speed of the sequencer; you could also adjust the step, shortening or lengthening the step by feeding the CV out back into the CV in. It had two channels running down, and you could use one for pitch and one for gate time.

  Drew: Cosey, you’re playing cornet; what is Gen up to?

  Chris: That’s just the three of us on that one.

  Drew: You don’t see any link between jazz and your playing there? Or are you deliberately trying to be somewhat “jazzy”?

  Chris: Sleazy and I both . . . don’t mind jazz. There’s some jazz I quite like, but Cosey hates all jazz.

  Cosey: No, I hate free-form jazz; all it is is a battle for one person to be the star. But I like jazz that’s melodic, where you’re playing together, not against one another, getting a cool thing, getting a mood.

  Drew: What’s your history with the cornet?

  Cosey: Nothing. My history is Sleazy not being able to blow it and get a note. Him saying, “Would you do it? All I get is a fart. I dare not blow into it because I’ll look silly.” So I said I’ll try and I got a note straight away. I quite liked it. I still love playing it now; I love it.

  Chris: You got really good over the years.

  Cosey: I get a bit pissed off because when we go onstage Gen’s got his lipstick on and I can’t wear it because it’ll get smeared all over from the cornet. I end up with stinging numb lips.

  Chris: Gen’s got this habit, as soon as he sees you pick up your cornet he goes to the microphone.

  Both anachronistic and forward-looking, the numbed, askew jazz funk Throbbing Gristle delivered to their fans in 1979 was untimely in several senses. Jazz funk as a commercially credible genre had arguably peaked financially and artistically six years earlier with Herbie Hancock’s 1973 Head Hunters LP, the withering ARP Odyssey synthesizer solos of which were oft imitated in the wake of the album’s astonishing status as the greatest selling jazz LP of all time. But by the close of the seventies, Hancock’s potent combination of extended solos, synth freakouts, funk rhythms and pop hooks had ossified into a new cliché as this mutant strain of crossbred genres was decisively watered down and smoothed out by an army of studio hack clones. With the quasi-academic fussiness of jazz fusion degenerating into an arms race mentality of chops-heavy technical playing, and Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good” waiting in the wings to provide a suitably Jacuzzi-ready soundtrack to usher out the Me Decade, jazz funk was still ringing the cash register, but wasn’t actually such a funky proposition anymore. As funk scholar Ricky Vincent puts it, “By 1977 the jazz-funk field had thinned out, as a new flavor of over-the-top pop jazz was going strong, led by the likes of George Benson and Chuck Mangione” (Vincent, p. 146). What began with the anarchistic and interstellar explorations of the “new thing” and the psychedelic excesses of jazz funk blowouts like “Vein Melter” was doomed to end in the drivetime narcotic of the Quiet Storm radio format.

  The song “20 Jazz Funk Greats” responds to this historical slide into decadence by deliberately exaggerating the process of deracination already underway in the surrounding culture. Performing a kind of stereotyped gesture of musical “whiteness” by stiffening the slink of funky music into a sequenced grid, the lawnsprinkler hissing of the hi hats and the tricksy drum machine kicks and rolls in the song accent the control freak aspect of electronic funk, advancing a kind of machine-music aesthetic that would ultimately blossom into techno. And yet Chris Carter’s use of CV (controlled voltage) “feedback” within modular systems and his hand-cranked tempo changes on the drum machine fills add an undeniably “funky” quality of looseness and unpredictability to the sequenced material. Just as it slides in and out of alignment with the liquid ideal of “real” funk music, TG’s track toggles both forward and backward in its temporal positioning in music history; the modular synth sweeps and squeals that Chris and Sleazy take turns laying down could conceivably be regarded as “futuristic” signifiers, but they also pay homage to the fluorescent ugliness of the solos from the original jazz funk class of ’73. In particular, one could compare the tones TG generate with the detuned, slightly sour synth motif in Roy Ayers’s fuzak chestnut “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” a song with a curiously tenacious hold on the English musical imagination; strands of its musical DNA can be found in acid jazz (the piano riff), downtempo (the drums and vibes) and drum-n-bass (the keening, constant string tone sawing away on the horizon), among others. If this feeling of curdled tonality binds together the synthesizer lines with Cosey’s comet, it also comically undercuts the seductive energies of Sleazy’s vocal—there’s nothing “nice” about the sounds the synth is making.

  There is an “untimely” quality to TG’s choice of brass instrument as well. The cornet is, as Sibyl Marcuse’s Encyclopedia of Musical Instruments informs us, a “valved brass instrument of medium conical bore, played with a cup mouthpiece, usually built in trumpet form, formerly also in helicon form”; an instrument with old roots in English folk forms and in hunting tradition, the cornet is based upon the coiled “post horn” or rustic horn used from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries (Marcuse, p. 127). Its rustic, clamorous connotations led the Spanish golden age playwright Pedro Calderon de la Barca to denounce the “vile cornet” as unfit for courtly ears, but in fact its tone is considered quieter and mellower than its more popular cousin, the trumpet. The cornet was a staple component of New Orleans jazz bands and was played by Joe “King” Oliver, Leon “Bix” Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong (before he made the switch to trumpet). Ironically, in using a cornet rather than a trumpet, Throbbing Gristle wound up returning anachronistically to a specific instrumental tone found at the very beginning of jazz.

  Without intending to signify any particular affiliation with the wellsprings of jazz and funk traditions, Throbbing Gristle’s contribution to jazz funk thus becomes both ersatz and echt. In the place of fusion’s florid, almost obscene busyness, the song “20 Jazz Funk Greats” is spare, nearly empty—yet, perversely, this restraint brings Throbbing Gristle closer to the original roots of instrumental funk bands such as the Meters, whose bassist George Porter Jr. insisted in a 1994 interview that “There was holes in the music, there was always space. . . . It’s not what you say, it’s what you don’t say” (Vincent, p. 67). Similarly, the understatement and restraint of “20 Jazz Funk Greats” is the paradoxical secret of its inherent funkiness. TG risk a close call with kitsch, but their album begins with something more than a cheap shot. What could have been merely a sarcastic air-kiss to a dying genre takes on a more tentative, ambiguous and risky valence, and sets in motion the agenda for the entire album to come: an esoteric populism that deliberately blows hot and cold; a series of vampiric simulations that both betray and extend the musical traditions they feed upon. Nice.

  Beachy Head

  Dreams I had, including suicide
,

  Puff out the hot-air balloon now.

  John Ashbery, “A Mood of Quiet Beauty”

  What is going on here? Where are we? There is an opening guitar strum through some kind of processing, but that’s both too vague and too straightforward. The guitar is not exactly strummed, for that implies a decisive impact; instead, we hear a kind of agitated, ongoing friction involving a guitar, a movement somewhere between grinding, scraping and scrabbling. A dip toward silence lets in the far-off tone of gulls, more scrabbling, and then a kind of curdled cry emerges. Violin through effects of some kind? On “Beachy Head,” Throbbing Gristle loom at the listener, implying a presence from within a fog of murky low fidelity. These cotton-wool sonics recall the quieter moments on the second side of Second Annual Report, or the band’s gauzy soundtrack to Derek Jarman’s reprocessed Super-8 film In the Shadow of the Sun. Though some might be tempted to regard the murk of early TG recordings as a function of their limited budget and home-recording techniques, Throbbing Gristle’s ability to make electronics sound vague is in fact a distinctive, and uncommon, torquing away from the bright, hyperreal tendency of electronic sound. In a conversation with Paul Griffiths, minimalist composer Morton Feldman flagged this difficulty: “I’m not happy with electronic sound—the physical impact to me is like neon lights, like plastic paint, it’s right on top, whereas I like my paint to seep in a bit” (Villars, p. 48). Because of the subtractive possibilities of the filters and effects in Throbbing Gristle’s signal chains, initially “full” and “rich” instrumental tones can be progressively stripped of their tone color and acoustic properties can be masked as entire frequency ranges are notched out. The result is a certain perceptual fuzziness, a quality of mystery within the sound field that mobilizes the curiosity (and dread) of listeners as they try to hear through the filters toward the unintelligible origin of the sound.

  A thin scrim of seagull noise hangs across the mix, but this ambient environmental recording, far from pulling us closer to the reality of any particular experience of wildlife, feels misty, unfocused. For all the geographical insistence of its title, the sonic effect is dislocating. “Beachy Head” is a bit like the Shadow Morton production job on the Shangri-Las hit “Remember (Walkin’ in the Sand),” but with the ratios inversed: instead of a pop song with a sprinkling of seaside audio to add atmosphere, Throbbing Gristle create audio that is all atmosphere, no song required. One minute in, some extra elements do emerge: discreet synth figures peep through the gloom, but there are no riffs, no musical motifs, no “development.” Improvisation is here engaged to generate material, but not to embody a dialogue or model some virtual mode of community. No one is patiently waiting for their turn to take a solo or interrupting another in a competitive display of chops. Rather, improvisation becomes the collective pursuit of an intuitive, organic outcome. On “Beachy Head,” TG pursue song as place, sound as space, not as the expression of affect (suicidal or otherwise). In his exhaustive compendium of local lore Beachy Head, John Surtees notes that “It is said that the height of Beachy Head is perceived not so much from contemplating the cliffs, as by listening to the indistinct murmur of the waves from the cliff top” (Surtees, 14). Indistinct murmuring pretty much nails it, and indirectly cashes out the casual sublimity of Throbbing Gristle’s achievement here. If the Burkean recipe for the sublime called for equal measures of beauty and terror, “Beachy Head” delivers both, combining the soft caress of a distant wave with the imminent threat of a killer drop.

  Drew: There are some signature sounds in TG’s musical vocabulary, and I can’t quite figure out how they’re made. Can we listen to “Beachy Head” together as a family and maybe you can tell me what’s going on?

  [weird guitar tone]

  Cosey: That’s my Gizmo guitar.

  Chris: Through his work with Hipgnosis, Sleazy knew Godley & Crème, who were in 10cc. They invented this thing called a Gizmo which was a . . .

  Cosey: . . . a device with these little plastic wheels with teeth on, six of them. It sits on your strings and plucks them for you.

  Chris: Battery-operated. It’s like a box about this big, with rubber wheels, and you push it down . . .

  Drew: . . . and the serrations produce a kind of rubbing tone?

  Chris: Yeah, but you have to really push down on the box. You have to drill holes in the guitar and stuff.

  Drew: So it’s like a mechanical EBow. [bird calls] Those seagulls—did you record them yourself?

  Chris: They’re from a BBC sound effects record.

  Drew: Is that your modular synth?

  Chris: That would be the modular synth. I’ve got the feeling there might be violin as well.

  Cosey: Where?

  Drew: There are sounds where I can’t figure out if they are made by a cornet or violin or guitar.

  Chris: That could have been Gen’s violin through that weird fuzzbox he had.

  Drew: I hear a kind of squawking sound but I can’t tell if it’s a real bird or a manipulated violin.

  Perched more than five hundred feet above the English Channel, the scenic white cliffs of Beachy Head chalk the broken edges of the Sussex coastline. Formed in the ocean’s ooze over millennia, the cliff faces are highly unstable, with pinnacled “fingers” breaking off from the mainland and erosion eating inward from the Channel waters toward the crumbling remains of the nineteenth-century beacons and lighthouses that still stud the perimeter. It is a site rich with resonance in English history: barrows, swords and circlets attest to Bronze Age settlement, the Spanish Armada was sighted from its ridge in 1588, and its Victorian visitors included Charles Darwin and Lewis Carroll. In his chapter on Eastbourne in The English Landscape in the Twentieth Century, Trevor Rowley describes the social engineering that preserved this pristine jewel of seaside tourism. The Duke of Devonshire secured “the banning of donkeys on the beach and the Sunday marches of the Salvation Army [and] also restricted the number of public houses and other developments which might bring in ‘the wrong sort’ of visitor, such as fairgrounds on vacant lots and stalls in front gardens” (Rowley, p. 350). Luckily, “the wrong sort” did arrive all the same: “The finest climb at Beachy Head was said to be the ascent of Devil’s Chimney, from its base to a gap between it and the top of the cliff. Aleister Crowley (later of strange and unsavory reputation) and his companion Gregor Grant climbed it in 1894 the other way round from the gap” (Surtees, p. 85). A keen young Crowley described his adventure with obvious relish in the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal, and his description of the motions necessary to navigate his way across the crumbling chalk only hint at the danger he faced when the cliff face partially collapsed in mid-ascent: “A convulsive series of amoeboid movements enabled me to get out over the debris, when it immediately thundered down, leaving me in a very comfortable gap. I was soon on the ridge” (Surtees, p. 87). The poetic image of Aleister Crowley convulsing like an amoeba while ascending the Devil’s Chimney is a serendipitous gift from history, which 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.