Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) by Drew Daniel Page A

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 secondside 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
dis
locating. “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