Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard

by Roni Sarig

  Lou Barlow, Sebadoh / Folk Implosion:

  Stuff like Throbbing Gristle made me want to make my own music more than it made me want to listen to theirs. I just thought it was really exciting that they were exploring these really intense themes, like autopsies and all these horrible things that seemed really exciting to me at 13 or 14.

  Throbbing Gristle’s first show, in 1976, was clearly an outgrowth of Coum’s antics. The performance, a “live demonstration” that included the display of used tampons among other items, created such an uproar that it led a member of parliament to publicly brand Throbbing Gristle “the Wreckers of Civilization” (this, incidentally, came only weeks before the Sex Pistols unleashed punk’s anarchy on the world). P-Orridge described TG’s goal as “confounding the norm more or less for its own sake, a tried and tested subversive cultural technique.”

  With the formation of their Industrial Records label (which would later put out records by other important TG-inspired acts such as Cabaret Voltaire, SPK, and Clock DVA), Throbbing Gristle began releasing its series of willfully perverse, exceedingly low-fi cassette recordings. After a barely heard debut EP called The Best of Throbbing Gristle Vol. 2, the group made their first album, called Second Annual Report. A parody of the corporate music business, the cassette – of which only 785 copies were initially made – featured a black-and-white typeset cover designed to resemble a business report (a market research questionnaire was included as well). A tape collage of noise, effects, talking, electronic pulsations, and Charles Manson references, Second is often difficult to identify as music. “When we finished that first record, we went outside,” P-Orridge told Re/Search, “and we suddenly heard trains going past, and little workshops under the railway arches, and the lathes going, and electric saws, and we suddenly thought, ‘We haven’t actually created anything at all, we’ve just taken it in subconsciously and re-created it.’”

  Tony Lee, Railroad Jerk:

  I first got a four track after I had listened to [Throbbing Gristle] for about a year. I worked in a factory on the midnight shift, so I got the idea to bring my tape recorder and make this sound collage. I learned a lot about recording from that music. From the beginning with Railroad Jerk, we didn’t talk about music. We just talked about sounds. We had a list of sounds – like a bottle rolling down the street or sand paper scratching together – that we drew from. That was our aesthetic.

  United, the flipside to the single Zyclon B Zombie (named in “deliberate bad taste” after Nazi nerve gas) offered a rare taste of musicality, albeit a typically twisted one; though its lyrics were derived from the writings of occultist Aleister (the Great Beast) Crowley, the track sounded like a sweet electro-pop ditty. A second album, called D.o.A.: The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle, refined the group’s approach by adding shades of color. A more direct brand of humor came through with Death Threats, which featured angry messages pulled from the group’s answering machine, as well as an ABBA tribute and a new 17-second version of United that consisted of the song being fast-forwarded. The inclusion of a solo track by each member of Throbbing Gristle lent further diversity to the record.

  John McEntire, Tortoise / Sea and Cake:

  It was a total shock, when I first heard it. I was like 15 years old, and I didn’t know you could do things like that. It was a real departure from the straight ahead fast 4/4 punk rock stuff. It was so much more extreme than any of that shit. Their use of electronics was so far ahead of its time.

  20 Jazz Funk Greats followed shortly after D.o.A. and brought TG’s love affair with misinformation to a climax. Along with the dreadfully misleading title, the cover art – a photo of the well-groomed, conservatively dressed group standing amid green grass and flowers – offered few clues for the uninitiated as to what was contained inside. But to confound even those who expected the worst from the group, Jazz Funk was their most accessible effort, often melodic and playful.

  1980’s Heathen Earth, recorded live in studio with a small crowd present, would be their last studio album. Following some soundtrack work for British cult film director Derek Jarman, Throbbing Gristle splintered into two groups: Chris and Cosey formed CTI (Creative Technology Institute) and also recorded synth pop under their own names. Genesis and Sleazy’s Psychic TV more or less continued Throbbing Gristle’s dark journey, though with increasingly musical results. Sleazy soon left to form Coil, and they are all active musicians today.

  Mark Hosier, Negativland:

  Every project we’ve done since 1983 has been a conceptual project, everything has some bigger concept to it, and all the packaging and the graphics, and even the press releases or ads, is all thought of as part of the art. I think that was something I got out of hearing Throbbing Gristle.

  DISCOGRAPHY

  2nd Annual Report (Industrial, 1977; Mute, 1991); the earliest release still available, a low-fi sound collage.

  D.o.A. – The Third and Final Report (Industrial, 1978; Mute, 1991); a varied collection of solo works, tape pieces, noise, and songs.

  20 Jazz Funk Greats (Industrial, 1978; Mute, 1991); the group’s most accessible release, that injects bits of melody and definable songs between the noise.

  Heathen Earth (Industrial, 1980; Mute, 1991); the final studio release, recorded live in front of a small audience.

  Throbbing Gristle’s Greatest Hits (Rough Trade, 1980); a compilation taken from the four albums.

  Funeral in Berlin (Zensor [Germany] 1980; Mute, 1981); a live recording, featuring previously unreleased material.

  24 Hours (Industrial [cassette], 1981); a “box set” of 24 one-hour live cassettes, later bolstered to 33 tapes and sold separately.

  Mission of Dead Souls (Fetish, 1981; Mute, 1991); a live recording of the band’s final show.

  Journey through a Body (1981; Mute, 1993) features the group’s final studio recordings from 1981.

  Very Friendly, the First Annual Report (Spurt, 1987; Genetic Terrorists, 1993); includes the group’s earliest recordings, from 1975-76.

  TG CD1 (Mute, 1988); a collection of instrumental studio experiments from 1979.

  EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN

  Chris Cornell, Soundgarden:

  Growing up in Seattle was a heavy metal experience all the way. At like 16, I decided I just hated it – so much bravado and showing oft – there was just nothing about it I could relate to. But there was a strong influence musically, in terms of the aggression and the starkness. And Einstürzende got me to realize there were things about heavy metal I loved, that had to be part of any band I was in. I realized you could include elements you like without having all the bullshit – the guitar solos and the four-octave range. I saw them do a free show in this park in Seattle. There were a lot of yuppies walking their dogs. All of a sudden they kicked into a song and I’ve never seen so many people’s mouths drop at the same time. It was the most amazing show I’ve ever seen. They were hitting metal sheets with microphoned sticks and it sounded like the best industrial record with samples you could ever hear.

  Where Throbbing Gristle invented industrial music as a concept and image, it was German ensemble Einstürzende Neubauten – which means “collapsing new buildings,” an apt description of their sound – who made industrial a very real element in musical terms. They accomplished this by using industrial tools as percussive instruments, introducing a whole set of new sounds – made by pneumatic drills, metal sheets, hammers, chains, industrial springs, air-conditioning ducts, glass, garbage cans, metal cutters, cement mixers – and forging a revolutionary postapocalyptic tribal music. Today, these sounds are the standard aural elements in the music of Depeche Mode (who sampled the group), Nine Inch Nails (whose Trent Reznor recently signed the band to his Nothing record label), Marilyn Manson, and countless other bands, though most of these groups have taken the rather un-industrial approach of reproducing the sounds through digital sampling.

  With Russolo’s “The Art of Noises” and John Cage’s idea that “any sound is musical”
as starting points, Einstürzende Neubauten set about creating new music out of the sounds that permeate our 20th-century urban environment. The visual impact of seeing Neubauten on stage with power tools and banging on metal made them as much of a performance group as they were a band, and much of their most compelling work – such as the site-specific concerts in which they “played” bridges and sides of buildings – cannot be fully appreciated on record. Einstürzende Neubauten were the ultimate do-it-yourself band, making music without even the need for musical instruments.

  Marcellus Hall, Railroad Jerk:

  It opened up my world in helping me to realize you didn’t need money to buy instruments, you didn’t need to have instruments. They were exhibiting that you could just pick up anything and make music. I didn’t have any obvious musical talent or training, but I always wanted to do it, so examples like that were inspiring. The way Railroad Jerk use various types of percussion – banging on metal things and stuff – would be subtly influenced by Einstürzende Neubauten.

  Einstürzende Neubauten were formed by guitarist Blixa Bargeld (Christian Emmerich) and American-born bassist N. U. Unruh (Andrew Chudy) in 1979, out of Berlin’s thriving Dadaist art and music movement. Gudun Gut and Beate Bartel joined the group for a short while, but they were soon replaced by industrial percussionist F. M Einheit (Frank Martin Strauss) from the group Abwarts. A strange coincidence brought the group to national attention (and controversy) early on: Just weeks after the release of their first single, the brand new German Congress Center building collapsed. It seemed a fitting introduction to a band whose slogan became: “Destruction is not negative, you must destroy to build.”

  Neubauten’s debut album, 1981’s Kollaps, mixed post-punk guitar sounds and Bargeld’s dark and guttural German vocals with layers of thrashing and grinding industrial noise to produce something that was unlike anything before it. They followed it with Thirsty Animal, a single featuring Lydia Lunch and the Birthday Party’s Rowland Howard, that made the music’s extreme physicality and aggression even more corporeal by using the percussive sounds of Bargeld’s microphoned rib cage being beaten by other band members.

  Mark Robinson, Unrest:

  They displayed all their instruments on the back cover [of Kollaps]. Drills and hammers and a big cage they would bang on. I thought that was pretty amazing, incorporating metal and different things. At the first public Unrest concert we were banging on a Yield sign, and there’s a song on our first album where we bang on metal the whole time. It was our ode to Einstürzende Neubauten.

  With their 1983 album, Drawings of Patient O.T., Neubauten expanded to include bassist Mark Chung (from Einheit’s Abwarts) and guitarist Alexander Hacke (a.k.a Alex von Borsig), who had been the group’s sound technician early on. With the expanded personnel, the group ventured into more conventional territory; material such as Armenia (based on an Armenian folk tune) sounded liked real songs. With 1985’s Halber Mensch, they moved even further toward accessibility with a stronger concentration on vocals (even including a capella), dance beats (with an Adrian Sherwood remix), and a Lee Hazlewood cover. At the same time Neubauten’s live act was as trangressive as ever. Their most celebrated show came at a 1984 performance of their Concerto for Voices and Machinery at London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts. Members of the group (along with Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis P-Orridge and others) began digging up the stage with their chainsaws and pneumatic drills until theater management cut the power off.

  By the late ‘80s, Einstürzende Neubauten had defied all odds and become an accepted part of the German art – and even pop – scene. They were commissioned to compose theater work as well as Jordache jeans commercials, and were chosen to represent their country at the 1986 Expo in Montreal. Having established themselves at home, the group offered Fünf auf der nach oben offenen Richterskala (Five on the Open-Ended Richter Scale), their first record to offer original material in English, as well as string orchestration and a quieter overall sound.

  Alec Empire, Atari Teenage Riot:

  Einstürzende Neubauten were so important in Germany, or in Berlin especially. Every band had to sound like them in the ‘80s, and I didn’t like that. Then I discovered the stuff later on in the ‘90s.

  Though they’ve cut down on activity in the ‘90s, Neubauten remains an active and viable band. The majority of their recent work, with the exception of 1993’s Tabula Rasa, has been tied to the theater. They’ve even set up a label, Ego, to release film- and stage-related work, as well as solo projects. Their recent Faustmusik was written for an opera, based on the Faust tale, that featured Bargeld in the role of Mephistopheles. Increasingly, outside projects have consumed the time of individual members. Since 1983, Bargeld has been a member of Nick Cave’s band, the Bad Seeds. Hacke was a member of another Birthday Party offshoot, Crime and the City Solution, while Einheit has explored the further devolution of environmental music with his side band Stein (stone), which uses rocks to create percussive music.

  DISCOGRAPHY

  Kollaps (ZickZack [Germany], 1981; 1988); their dark and transgressive debut.

  Drawings of Patient O.T. (Some Bizarre / Ze, 1983; Thirsty Ear, 1995); a more melodic album, with an expanded lineup.

  80-83 Strategies against Architecture (Mute, 1983; 1994); a compilation of early material, including many of the tracks from Kollaps.

  2x4 (ROIR, 1984); a live recording made in 1982.

  Halber Mensch (Some Bizarre / Rough Trade, 1985; Thirsty Ear, 1995); their best amalgamation of industrial percussion with song structure.

  Fünf auf der nach oben offenen Richterskala (Some Bizarre, 1987; Thirsty Ear, 1995); a record with some original music in English.

  Haus der Lüge (Some Bizarre / Relativity, 1989; Thirsty Ear, 1995).

  Strategies against Architecture II (Mute, 1991); a second compilation, with a mix of album tracks and previously unreleased material from 1984-1990.

  Die Hamletmaschine (Ego / Rough Trade, 1991); their first effort in theater music, and the first release on their Ego label.

  Tabula Rasa (Mute, 1993); a conceptual work dealing with German unification.

  Faustmusik (Mute, 1996); music composed for a theater production of Faust that starred Bargeld.

  Ende neu (Mute, 1996); featuring a streamlined group with Bargeld, Unruh, and Hacke, this was issued in Remix form the following year, with contributions from Jon Spencer, Alec Empire, Barry Adamson, and others.

  CHROME

  Helios Creed, Chrome:

  We wanted to make scary-funny music, if you can imagine that. We were definitely trying to twist it to the ends of human imagination at the time.

  By marrying the two seemingly incompatible sounds of ‘60s acid rock and ‘70s punk and adding bits of the latest technology, Chrome pioneered its own dark and twisted brand of freak rock, a kind of psychedelic cyberpunk. Though their music was of limited commercial appeal, the band managed to connect with a rather varied crew of new-wave rejects. Their bad-trip sci-fi rock has inspired post-hardcore maniacs like Jesus Lizard (who recorded a Chrome medley) and the Butthole Surfers (on whose records Chrome members have played), as well as goth and industrial acts from Ministry to Nine Inch Nails to Marilyn Manson. Now, younger groups like Pigeonhead and Six Finger Satellite are incorporating elements of Chrome’s sound to bring the group’s acid punk into the next century.

  Chris Cornell, Soundgarden:

  I was a big Chrome fan. It was just like walking through a shopping mall on acid. Sounds came at you from every direction, kind of like industrial before anyone knew what that was. I’ve played Chrome for people who never heard them and they can’t believe it came out in 1979. It sounds so much like what people are doing today. A certain amount of rhythmic, atonal guitar is probably how it translated to our band, where you didn’t have to have riffs that sound like Black Sabbath. You could use the guitar as a rhythmic instrument without any melody at all.

  After studying music and art in Los Angeles with an associate of e
xperimental composer John Cage, Thomas Edward Wisse headed north to San Francisco, where he assumed the name Damon Edge and formed Chrome in the mid-‘70s. With bassist/violinist Gary Spain, guitarist John Lambdin and others, Edge played drums and produced Chrome’s 1978 debut, The Visitation, on his own Siren label. It wasn’t until guitarist Helios Creed (B. Johnson) joined later that year, though, that Chrome began to assert a distinctive sound and personality. Edge and Creed entered into a songwriting and producing partnership that incorporated Creed’s love for Jimi Hendrix and folk music, Edge’s avant-garde past, and the group’s recent discovery of bands like the Sex Pistols and Throbbing Gristle, as well as nonmusical influences like science fiction books and horror movies, from Philip K. Dick to Invasion of the Body Snatchers to A Clockwork Orange. “I took all that stuff, put it in a bowl and mixed it up, and what came out was quite different than any of it,” Creed says of Chrome’s early sound.

  David Yow, Jesus Lizard:

  Chrome was very important. I remember many, many nights of getting really drunk and taking a good bit of acid and just listening to the Chrome Box over and over. It would take us places we didn’t know existed. I liked the funkiness – not in a James Brown way, but in a dirty, screwy way. Some of the songs were really high-tech and clean, and some sound like a ghetto-blaster in the bathroom with a drum set.