Final Muzak [Import]

1. Very Friendly

2. Dead Bait

3. 10 Pence

4. Whorle Of Sound

5. Final Muzak

6. Scars Of E

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Re-packaged version of First Annual Report at a low price! Throbbing Gristles first album originally recorded in 1979. Housed in a slipcase with 8 page booklet including pictures and sleeve notes. 6 tracks. 2001.

Tracks:

Very Friendly
Dead Bait
10 Pence
Whorle Of Sound
Final Muzak
Scars Of E

Album Description

Re-packaged version of First Annual Report at a low price! Throbbing Gristles first album originally recorded in 1979. Housed in a slipcase with 8 page booklet including pictures and sleeve notes. 6 tracks. 2001.

Customer Reviews:

Not bad..........2006-10-18

not bad for a bootleg. if you want to scare off would be trick or treaters on halloween, play this out loud, they'd think you're performing some ritual human sacrifice inside your house.

Awful, but interesting.......2005-08-07

Throbbing Gristle is a name oft mentioned in talk of Industrial music, as founders, inventors, originators, whatever. But have you ever actually listened to a Throbbing Gristle album? It's a very unpleasant experience, because Throbbing Gristle is awful.

The "band" (it pays to use the term loosely here) was actually a musical offshoot of the COUM Transmissions performance troupe. COUM was deliberately confrontational, and earned band members Genesis P. Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti notoriety with a pornographic exhibition. Throbbing Gristle was basically a musical version of their artistic nihilism. This band released early songs with titles like "Five Knuckle Shuffle" and "Hamburger Lady" back in the more innocent times of the mid-1970s. They sped up a single until it was only 16 seconds long so it would fit on an album, and they re-released their first album played backwards. This is noise as art, not music.

First track "Very Friendly" is 18 minutes of Genesis P. Orridge telling the story of Moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, drinking German wine and watching television. It is a real life horror story told over a sampled, looped, distorted soundtrack of fuzzy indistinct noises. Orridge tells the story in a monotoned, emotionless voice, like a robotic university lecturer set on maximum drone. The track goes absolutely nowhere.

"Dead Bait" is a repetitive fuzzed out electronic beep repeating the same rhythmic pattern over and over, and that's it. No variation, no vocals, nothing. "10 Pence" is so cheerless and down it makes Joy Division sound like the Osmond family. "Whorle Of Sound" takes the sounds of every day life and metamorphoses them into the unrecognisable. "Final Muzak" might be bastardized Middle Eastern style music, but then again, it might not. "Scars Of E" sounds like Orridge is drunk or tripping over a minimalist soundtrack of a kettle drum and a steel drum recorded from half a mile away while a six year old practices his violin.

It is possible to see where Throbbing Gristle influenced Electronic and Industrial music. While the six tracks here are mostly grey and amorphous, the techniques of sampling, looping, layering discordant sounds, backmasking, drones and whatever else they used, pop up in any number of musical styles. Listen to experimental Noise outfits like Whitehouse and Bastard Noise, early Techno like Cabaret Voltaire or New Order, or even latter day Industrial tryhards like Nine Inch Nails and Aphex Twin and you'll pick up faint throbbings of the Gristle.

The whole album is an exercise in futility, a musical joke. It's meaningless, made for no reason other than the band members messing about. It has little or no form most of the time, and is little more than sounds pasted together. These people had absolutely no idea what they were doing and had no musical talent whatsoever, but still became popular enough to call it a day when the band started making a profit in 1981. You could call it experimental or arty, but it's more like an enormous joke aimed at sycophantic Art-House poseurs too pretentious to say they don't like it or don't get it. I'm not pretending. I don't like it, and I don't get it, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to listen to it. You don't always have to enjoy what you listen to.

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