Throbbing Gristle were a musical group formed in the 1970’s, they were pioneers of industrial music and their aesthetics and themes were incredibly controversial and divisive, touching on subjects such as extreme political ideologies, sexuality and other underground aspects of society at the time. Within their music they made fascinating use of groundbreaking technological techniques and were also known for their idiosyncratic manipulation of language within their lyricism. Throbbing Gristle as a band evolved from COUM Transmissions, who were an experimental performance art group.
Throbbing Gristle earned quite a reputation for themselves through both their use of disturbing imagery and their innovative production techniques. Their live performances were also a point of contention, best described as confrontational. The imagery that the band incorporated ranged from pornography to Nazi symbolism and images of concentration camps to ironic fascist symbology; despite the dark nature of most of these images they maintained that their ethos was to explore the darkest, most obsessive sides of humanity and challenge the public, not simply to make attractive music. Within their music they made extensive use of sound manipulation techniques, using noise and pre recorded tape based samples and layering them with effects to produce a characteristic distorted musical background which was combined with lyrics or spoken word. Their use of tape manipulation was inspired by the work of William S. Burroughs among others. They attempted to play with traditional understandings of musical concepts, creating new and interesting textures and songs with no clear structure.
They have been called punk and though their ideologies did tend to lean more toward an anarchist punk viewpoint than anything else, in their music they were much more prone to the wild experimentation of the post punk and New Wave genres, and they were of course innovators of the industrial music genre. Their work can be seen as a fully realised electronic rock experience with its use of tapes, synthesisers, and effects; some of their music can be seen as a precursor to sound art as a form and the dawn of noise music also. They had an intense fascination with the mundaneness that makes up our world, and also the atrocities that can result from it; this can be seen in their continuous use of samples of everyday chatter such as children babbling in one song and a child murderer confessing to his crimes on another. Even the more unassuming of these samples were heightened with atmospheric backing and eerie ambience.
In my opinion their work captures a sense of cosmic horror very well and was intentionally controversial, this band was preoccupied with making a scene as much as they were with experimenting with music technology, they were also pioneers of playing with the boundaries between what is music and what is noise.