26. Force the Hand of Chance - Psychic TV [1982]

Suffusing dread, ritual, drama and tenderness to coalesce themed meditations on nature of being and Will.


Not, then, hit parade material, steeped as it be in Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis reorganised around the Law of Thelema: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law / Love is the law, love under will. Often misinterpreted as carte blanche for all kinds of psycho-sexual carry-on and to indulge emotional impulses, however transgressive. A subtler reading is about seeking out and following one's own True Will rather than the ego's desires - thereby, if you will, forcing the hand of chance.

Music ideologically freighted at the expense of the thrills? Not so. Assisted by the more than able Fergusson and Christopherson, Genesis P-Orridge conjures a  collection of powerful soundscapes and some oddly captivating "pop". Agit-prop ontological soundtrack....and arguably PTV's most fully realised work.

GP-O confounds expectations from the get go. A pastoral, string-driven melody to baby daughter, Just Drifting (for Caresse) flows pleasantly like the country streams and rural breezes it eulogizes. Tender and sincere yet of a thematic piece: the child's pre-verbal state of being, drifting, following it's own will and under a "simple love".

It can't last of course. Things quickly get as dark as the devil's nutting bag. Terminus X-tul, a deeply unsettling account of a young man journeying toward initiation (?), derailed by a - fantasy or actual - suicide  jump from a railway bridge into a passing train. Morricone twang and strang ups the drama and cheekily references the time-stetching opening scene of Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. The first lines of spoken lyric: 

Quiet and hooded, his eyes stared out, small hands make patterns on the window.

Body shifting on wood, dog outside the door, flickering memories as trains manoeuvre in the old men's eyes.

Forever part of a sleeping world, waiting for him to come.

Lost dreams of childhood forgotten like hope.

These lives are stones made for cemeteries.

This time the victim is desired, like misery.

He stepped down from the train, dust on road and clothes.

Across the way a boy was grinning, hard-on obvious in torn grey trousers inherited from an earlier victim of the white horse.

The shade of Old Bill Lee hovers in Western Lands. A crisis is upon the lad - cue demonic howl of heavily distorted guitar. Time slows, a mystery is arrived at, a secret coda fulfilled.

   
Leavening the gloom, in swoons Marc Almond like the winsome nephew of Macbeth's Porter, offering Stolen Kisses and Doug Yule VU bubble-gum pop. Though, as "dark suns of sunlight flower", we seem to be talking about the oblivion of smack by way of light relief.


And so the album unfolds. Central themes unfurling like a sickly rose; moments of light made pungent by pervasive dark. Marc crops up again on Guiltless, exhorting us - with, it must be said, more than a soupçon of lascivity -   to "see it and go for it". Do what thou wilt.


Sex magick and Genet (Querelle / Queer Hell) combine in New Order-ish dance number Ov Power. In the parlance of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, Ov = comingled male-female sexual fluids. Shouty chanting validates the bestial in us all.


Message from Thee Temple dogmatically lays out the Law of Thelema, delivered by a vaguely creepy if authoritatively warm voice (think Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers). A re-statement of Crowley's road map for discovering one’s True Will:

The temple strives to end personal laziness and engender discipline.
To focus the Will on one's true desires in the belief, gathered from experience, that this maximises and makes happen all those things one wants in every area of life.


Explore daily your deepest desires, fantasies -
Gradually focusing on what you would really like to happen in a perfect world,
Picking away all restrictions and practical considerations.

An unsettling doubling effect is discernable by the closely listening ear; uneasy.

Counterpoint to Terminus X-tul is jackal-snarling Thee Full Pack (for Bachir Attar). Equally cinematic in feel, this time evoking the disorientation and lurking fear that stalks Max Von Sydow through the souk at the beginning of The Exorcist. O.T.O., ceremony and fraternal bonding through ritual is captured in the name check for Bachir Attar, leader of The Master Musicians of Jajouka. The song invokes a great threatening force, surrounding us, and from which there is no escape.


Oddi wrth y brawd


[Bonus Themes in Comments]

A Night In Fear - Deutsch Nepal & The Moon Lay Hidden Beneath A Cloud [1996]

Lina (Der Baby Doll General) [Deutsch Nepal] and Albin Julius & Alzbeth [TMLHBAC] conspire in dank invocations.

Oddi wrth y brawd

Sexmagick Ritual - Sleep Chamber [1987]

As soundtracks to seduction go, none more leftfield (nor less likely to succeed in this parish...).

Oddi wrth y brawd

Nordik Battle Signs - Mz.412 [1999]

Night sweats in satanic sheet metal factory. Power electronics, spoken word, black industrial ritual, shouts, screams and martial chant of infernal legions. An acquired taste -  and mebbe dodgy ideology (?)  - to be be ignored in lieu of some rather thrilling noise.

Oddi wrth y brawd

A Pagan Day - Psychic TV [1984/1994 re-issue]

Praise moreover the hand of Alex Fergusson. Homespun hyperdelic folk n choice covers: Translucent Carriages; As Tears Go By. Tasty.

Oddi wrth y brawd

Blood Between Her Lakes - Burial Hex [2008]

Not unlike a troop of ardent wiccans let loose in a disused scaffolding warehouse....


or as of whom M'Lud Yatesbury would have it in this month's patented enthusiastic  Address Druidion...


"work of high ritual first conjures up its own sonic pantheon, nurtures then enslaves them, then conducts them as they writhe. Stupendous. Brothers‘n’sisters, they’ll be including this fucker in the future future mysteries when the earth has returned to Goddess worship. Imagine that Wendy ‘Walter’ Carlos had composed some lost electronic soundtrack to THE WHICKER MAN [sic]. Massed vocals, analogue pulses, mucho percussion and mucho grumbling, so all of it mainly acoustically driven stuff. Indeed, should you shoehorn a baby grand into some Mediterranean rockcut tomb and perform this material therein, it’s a synch the natural echoes of those places would replicate these recordings...pulls off a low budget Carl Orff for the Igjugurjuk Generation, or I ain’t no Inuit Shaman! Mercy me"


Oddi wrth y brawd

Tetsuo: The Iron Man - Chu Ishikawa [1988]

"Inside the flesh of an ordinary salaryman terrible things have begun to take place".

And then some.


Enervating industrial hammering and skittery hyperkinetic rhythms. A nerve shredding delight.

Oddi wrth y brawd

Strange Music - Moebius & Beerbohm [1982]

Electro-industrial dubby malarkey with cheeky post-punk pop twist. Tasty.

Oddi wrth y brawd

883

Operation Hummingbird - Death In June [2000]

June 30 1934 Hitler launches the Röhm-Putsch aka Operation Hummingbird: political murder spree including liquidation of Röhm's paramilitary Sturmabteilung. Death In June...hmmmm(ing). 

Under-rated entry in Douglas P.'s martial oeuvre. Stirring.

Oddi wrth y brawd
behind the mask

The Triumph of Light...And Thy Thirteen Shadows of Love - Ordo Equilibrio [1997]

Kinky, overwrought and in thrall to C93-DIJ cyclic monotony n strum. Nevertheless, some tasty atmospherics created. A rubber-wrapped future beckons in the cold meat industry.

Oddi wrth y brawd

under the rose

Atavistic Fetisj - Hybryds [1994]

"The world hangs on a thin thread, and that is the psyche of man...and we know something about it and we know nothing about it..."  C.G. Jung


Hypno-cognitive rhythm loops. Growl, caw, snarl and mind scree. Inner voyaging across Pandaemonium. 


Music for rituals and other joys.


Oddi wrth y brawd
totem of revelation

Second Coming - Mater Suspiria Vision [2010]

Occult, hypnagogic electro-drone trance. Chilly industrial esoteric. Splendid.

Further visual summoning -  not on this release but renders the mystic measure.

Oddi wrth y brawd

Suspiria de Profundis

In The Studio - Pan Sonic & Keiji Haino [2010]

Looking for intense dentist drill effects, aluminium foil on fillings feedback skree, deranged vocal caterwauling and complete reality disconnect, our Finnish electro experimenters give Keiji a call. He turns up. He delivers. 

A punishingly beautiful racket. Come feel the noise.

Oddi wrth y brawd

In The Hollow Created Between The Eyebrows, What Offering Would Be Most Appropriate

Gravitoni - Pan Sonic [2010]

"the Great God Pan had become a modern icon [for] the recurrence of primal urges at the heart of the civilised world"

- Rob Young, Electric Eden

"one ov thee original meanings ov thee word pan was drowning, whilst panic can mean an unreasonable fear leading to excessive and extravagant behaviour"

- Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Godstar Thee Director's Cut [booklet]

"And I rave; and I rape and I rip and I rend
Everlasting, world without end,
Mannikin, maiden, meanad, man,
In the might of pan.
Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Io Pan!"

 - Aleister Crowley, extract from Hymn to Pan

Yo Pan Sonic! No soothing electronica or lush soundscapes. Instead, the mesmeric demiurge; raw powered primeval electric spark moulded into sound. The might of natural wavelength rhythms; ripped extremes of pitch and volume. Post-industrial (Einstürzende Neubauten, Throbbing Gristle), post-lapsarian search for primal essence in the maw electrick; hum of generators, harsh fizz of white noise; drowned in black hot metal.

Calling time on seventeen years of unadulterated electronics, Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen lay Pan Sonic to rest with Gravitoni. No softening of agenda in the finale bulletin. An arsenal of brutal beats and lucid tones; a landslide of skull basting bass hits and molten silicon slurry; sheet metal noise and punishing volume; beats that hammer the brain into pulpy mass; nightmarish drones.

But noise is only a part of the story.  Microsounds; floating eerie waves; strange clicks and creaks around cosmological silence; sustained glassy notes; subterranean drip and echo; dark ambience, and a slow slow black heartbeat.

A thrilling legacy. Fade to test tone..........................

Oddi wrth y brawd
gravitas

Force the Hand of Chance - Psychic TV

PTV's first 1982 release suffuses dread, ritual, drama and tenderness to coalesce themes meditating on being and the nature of Will. It is steeped in Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis which he reorganised around the Law of Thelema: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law, and Love is the law, love under will. Often interpreted straighforwardly as carte blanche to indulge all psycho-sexual and emotional impulses however transgressive, a subtler reading is lost: seeking out and following one's own True Will rather than the ego's desires.

Perhaps this sounds like music ideologically freighted at the expense of the music itself. Not so. Assisted by the more than able Fergusson and Christopherson, Genesis P-Orridge turns in a  collection of powerful soundscapes and some oddly captivating "pop". Stunning soundtrack to an unfolding message. Maybe, PTV's best.

GP-O confounds expectations from the get go. A pastoral, string-driven melody to his baby daughter, Just Drifting (for Caresse) flows pleasantly like the country streams and breezes it conjures up. Tender and sincere as this is, it remains nonetheless of a thematic piece. A child's pre-verbal state of just being, drifting, following it's own will and possessing a "simple love".

It can't last of course. Things quickly get very dark indeed. Terminus X-tul is a deeply unsettling account of a young man journeying toward initiation, derailed by a - fantasy or actual - suicide  jump from a railway bridge into a passing train. Morricone twang and doom heighten the drama and references the time-stetching opening scene of Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. This is carried forward in the first lines of spoken lyric: 

Quiet and hooded, his eyes stared out, small hands make patterns on the window.

Body shifting on wood, dog outside the door, flickering memories as trains manoeuvre in the old men's eyes.

Forever part of a sleeping world, waiting for him to come.

Lost dreams of childhood forgotten like hope.

These lives are stones made for cemeteries.

This time the victim is desired, like misery.

He stepped down from the train, dust on road and clothes.

Across the way a boy was grinning, hard-on obvious in torn grey trousers inherited from an earlier victim of the white horse.

The ghost of Old Bill Lee hovers in these Western Lands. A crisis is upon the boy, turmoil and the demonic howl of heavily distorted guitar. Time slows, a mystery is arrived at, a secret coda fulfilled.

   
If ever darkness needed leavening it's now. On cue, in swoons Marc Almond like the winsome nephew of Macbeth's Porter, offering Stolen Kisses and Doug Yule VU bubble-gum pop: though as "dark suns of sunlight flower"  this seems as much about the temporary oblivion of smack as light relief.

And so the album unfolds. Central themes unfurling and moments of light made sweeter by the imminent dark. Marc crops up again on Guiltless exhorting us to "see it and go for it". Do what thou wilt. Sex magick and Jean Genet combine in New Order-ish dance number Ov Power. In the parlance of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, Ov being male-female sexual fluids. Shouty chanting validates the bestial in us all.

Message from Thee Temple dogmatically lays out the Law of Thelema, delivered by a vaguely creepy if authoritatively warm voice (think Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers). A re-statement of Crowley's road map for discovering one’s True Will:

The temple strives to end personal laziness and engender discipline.
To focus the Will on one's true desires in the belief, gathered from experience, that this maximises and makes happen all those things one wants in every area of life.

Explore daily your deepest desires, fantasies -
Gradually focusing on what you would really like to happen in a perfect world,
Picking away all restrictions and practical considerations.

A strange doubling effect is discernable by the close listening ear, heightening awareness and sense of unease.

The counterpoint to Terminus X-tul is the jackal snarling Thee Full Pack (for Bachir Attar). Equally cinematic in feel, this time evoking the disorientation and lurking fear that stalks Max Von Sydow through the souk at the beginning of The Exorcist. O.T.O., ceremony and fraternal bonding through ritual is captured in the name check for Bachir Attar, leader of The Master Musicians of Jajouka. The song invokes a great force, which is threatening, surrounds us, and from which there is no escape.

By virtue of strength of vision realised and by the unrelenting focus on the TOPY liberation quest, this is one of the handful of absolutely essential PTV albums.

This is the place where all roads meet, the place where all is the secret.
The place where time stands still in the comfort of night and love becomes will
in the presence of light.
I never want to leave.
I never want to leave.
I never want to leave.

Oddi wrth y brawd
place of dead roads

A New Soldier Follows the Path of a New King: The Moon Lay Hidden Beneath a Cloud

Dark, dark industrial folk. Medievalism. Occult. Ritual. Clerical chants. Martial rhythms. Middle English, Latin. Modern electronics, tape loops, samplers cheek by jowl with shawm, hurdy gurdy, and Hexenscheit.

This Swiss (Austrian?) duo parted ways in 1998. ANSFTPOANK dates from 1995.

The obsessive picking over of Shakespeare’s Henry V is particularly rewarding:

God, and his angels, guard your sacred throne

All tracks untitled. Point of fact, no songs were ever given official titles.

You think Dead Can Dance were gloomy? You need to hear this.

Oddi wrth y brawd
durm

Sombrero Fallout - Pump

Adapted from www.boomkat.com:

From the annals of '80s tape culture Plague Records have uncovered raw gold in the form of Pump's semi-mythical Sombrero Fallout. Pump were Andrew Cox and David Elliott, a pair of like-minded electronic music fiends who met at Brighton uni in '79. After spilling five cassette albums of underground industrial strains inspired by Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Faust and Heldon, they spent the middle of the '80s largely estranged, with David writing for Sounds magazine alongside David Tibet, and Andrew working in Cornwall. In '87 they finally recorded new material, heard on The Decoration of The Duma Continues, before colluding for this, their final album which inexplicably didn't see the light of day - until now.

The untimely death of Andrew in 2009 prompted a resurgence of interest, and with the utmost respect, we're fucking blessed that it did as it's just the find of the year.

Quite interestingly the album was mixed by Colin Potter of Nurse With Wound, which goes some way to describing the close, dark ambient nature of their sound, but there are many more factors at play which make Sombrero Fallout so riveting: chugging slow drum machines and a guitar drone industrially dubbed for arcing, widescreen effects; spiraling marimbas diffused into stereo patterns with mournful, ghostly synths; claustrophobic and sickly doomscapes with over-saturated bass hum and the distant sound of groaning guitars tortured in some sadistic dungeon ritual. No shit, this is intensely dark stuff. Elsewhere we have reverb laden motorik backbeat somewhere between Stephen Morris and Klaus Dinger.

This album has really touched a nerve in our office, reminding us of our favourite Industrial, darkwave and New Beat, or all those other '80s genres whose unholy allure we've always been susceptible to, and best of all, it does it without the slightest hint of fromage or pastiche. Honestly, this is beyond essential for anyone with a darker soul.

Y brawd was, until recently, privileged to jockey a workstation alongside David E. before he decamped en famille to Beijing where he now rules China as arts supremo and cultural ambassador at large. A quiet dude and one of life's natural gents - not at all the depraved fiend he would appear to have been at the time of SF. Thus, insider knowledge draws attention to the more prosaic yet pervasive Eno influence hovering over some tracks...though never slavishly or derivatively so.

Also, it was all laid down on a 4 track machine in a bedroom apparently. Or is that recorded in bedroom and mixed on 4 track in potting shed? No doubt David will enlighten us in the comment section, Chinese firewall permitting.

Afore he went, Mr E. laid on y brawd a cracking double comp of late 70s kosmische teutonic grooves which might just end up on WB one of these days....

Oddi wrth y brawd
deebido, yoroshiku ne

The Wall of Sacrifice - Death In June

What was it about the 80s that gave rise, in certain quarters at least, to a fascination with mittel Europa ennui, industrial soundscapes, flirtations with fascist imagery, gay musings on freedom in deviancy, which then all seemed to morph into a dark neo-folk? At the silly end of the spectrum this gave us Midge Ure vamping around Vienna on a chilly evening. More credibly we had Marc Almond’s solo work, and so on until we reached the scarier climates of Coil, Current 93, and, here, Death in June. No surprise that both John Balance and David Tibet made up part of the revolving group of collaborators on this, Douglas Pearce’s ongoing project.

For some reason the hardcore frequently favoured shaved heads and the liberal application of khol eye-liner.
 

The Wall of Sacrifice bookends a set of neo-acoustic apocalyptic folk - think Dead Can Dance with added doom – with two longer experimental pieces. The opening track is a relentless barrage of martial rhythms, triumphant horn flourishes sampled from  old German marches, all driven forward by repetitive piano riffs. Not everyone’s cup of sturm und drang but music to these ears. The similarly epic closer, Death is a Drummer, conjures up more ghostly military music against a droning hypnotic pulse. The sparser acoustic pieces in-between may be a safer point of entry for the wary.

Oddi wrth y brawd
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