Throbbing Gristle

Throbbing Gristle's endgame voyage is finally available on vinyl, 15 years after it was issued on CD as exclusive merch for their last ever US tour. A slow-burning, delirious swansong to their none-more-influential and peerless legacy of counter-cultural actions.

‘The Third Mind Movements’ is the last Throbbing Gristle album to feature all original members - Chris Carter, Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson (1955-2010), Cosey Fanni Tutti, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (1950-2020) - on board. The notoriously tempestuous gang, known for internecine fallouts, would reform in 2004 after decades spent focussed on solo and duo projects (Chris & Cosey, Psychic TV, Coil), and proceeded to record a remake of Nico’s ‘Desertshore’ - a major touchstone for all involved, issued in 2007 - for the ICA, London in the following years.

The eight parts to ’The Third Mind Movements’ derive from jams conceived for the installation, and depicts the quartet at their most elusive and quease-inducing, departing their more overt extremities for a sort of slimier, more psychedelic nuance that marked distance travelled since they fomented a sound in the late ‘70s that arguably changed the face of contemporary music, and which Mute astutely describe as fully delivering on “punk’s failed promise to explore extreme culture as a way of sabotaging systems of control.”

Between the disturbed dream-pop choral drift, sloshing pulses and scything noises of ‘The Man From Nowhere’, and guttural churn of its title piece, they get right under the skin with a stealthier approach that consolidatesand gels their respective energies with a sublime tension; variously revealing a shapeshifting morass of Coil-ed breakbeat undertow in ‘PreMature’, whilst Gen’s incandescent poetry flickers from the chamber-like ‘Secluded’, and comes wraithlike in ‘Not That I Am’, before the final incursion into stygian dankness with the three final movements.