Cosey left Gen for Chris. Gen took every pill he could find and woke up in Casualty. All of them played on this.
A hammered dulcimer plonks hesitantly until it finds the melodic figure and then repeats it with mutations until the end. Under this a squeaky atonal violin drones inconsistently. Gen's vocal comes into a room that sounds like its bare stipped boards lit by a single incandescent bulb. The voice hangs in the yellow light, hovering above as it describes the body on the floor, draining. "You didn't see me on the floor weeping..."
Once past the intentional irritants of the arrangement we know we've all been here. This is the room where rejection presents as a physical pain. The chest tightens, the throat constricts and the self negation spreads into the system. The floor feels like home but even that is temporary as the universe itself, element by element falling away, soon declares its hostility and activates its anitbodies against you. You do not belong here.
A surprisingly little time later the memory of it is only painful to recall aloud because it's embarrassing. Time enough after that we know what we felt was real for those hours and days, all that self-punishing shock. We don't learn that much from it (we'll get there more than one more time each) but we'll remember it.
Throbbing Gristle began as an anarchoperformanceart collective blasting their installations with musique concrete that really sounded like it was made of concrete. The innocuous buildings on their label art were from photos of the death camp gas chambers. Noise and disturbance. Confrontation. So why this visit to the same place that Frankie Valli and Miley Cyrus went? Couldn't have been the money.
Actually, it's just more of that noise and confrontation. If they are going to go on about Zyklon B Zombies then they are almost duty bound to turn the cameras on themselves. When I say duty I really do mean something like military compulsion. The air when politics meets art on a speed date gets severely rigid very rapidly. The sense of mission, suddenly engorged, is compulsive and unstoppable. But here beneath the artless clomping and mosquito drones is something that really does sound like tenderness. What mission now? Well, there are a few things happening at once.
First, the wracking of self-annihilation is clear and supported by every sound we hear. The report back from a moment of desolate loneliness is form-perfect; not a semi-colon out of place, foolscap pages typed and carbon-ed and presented in a spotless manila folder: Effects of "Romantic" Rejection Upon Collective Staff and Recommendations.
Then there's the confrontation of the fans or at least any who expect the stone face of the agit-prop-ers to remain unshattered. There is no escaping the plain vulnerability of it. Even We! You won't hear anything like it from fellow Mr Nasty of the North Mark E. Smith from the same era. And it isn't a matter of this-is-as-close-to-tender-as-they-got, it's tender. Eerie and frozen, yes, but tender. There is no accident that the great disturbers themselves offered this. In context, it could not fail to unsettle the hardest of fans and wipe the sneer off the face of the tartest detractor.
Finally the stillness. It's knocked around by words or sounds always returns to inertia. Each increasingly pathetic wish for his rejector to witness him cries out as though the futility of it might be changed by this, as though the sight of his tears might draw some of her own, alter her body chemistry at the molecular level and supply her cells with saturated love again. Not only can this never happen but it shouldn't. He's not thinking that, though, the withdrawal is too still strong and he (and we with him) doesn't see that the closest he could get would be staged and lifeless. For now, he's on repeat, looping the same distress signal until the battery drains. They'll sweep what's left of him out when the neighbours complain about the stench and Cosey will hear of it and hurl herself off an obsidian cliff into the crashing breakers below.
Except that he'll just wake up and get on with it like we all do. Now, that's confrontation. And, fuck, does it haunt us.
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