Reissue of the Week: Throbbing Gristle's The Third Mind Movements

Reissue of the Week: Throbbing Gristle’s The Third Mind Movements

Industrial innovators Throbbing Gristle’s reissue program wraps up by shining light on a relatively obscure title which inadvertently became the group's final official release, says Will Salmon

Will Salmon Published 8:00am 16 August 2024

Neither of the last pair of Throbbing Gristle reissues, TGCD1 or The Third Mind Movements, represent the TG of tabloid lore – the abrasive, confrontational, salacious “wreckers of civilisation”. Instead, these two albums offer a potent reminder of just how capable Cosey Fanni Tutti, Chris Carter, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson were at conjuring a deep sense of unease and luminous malevolence with their music.

CD1 (as it was originally titled) was released in 1986, intended to be the by-then-defunct band’s first and likely only foray into the futuristic world of the compact disc (in fact, a CD edition of their Greatest Hits LP arrived in 1990, with their LPs following a year later). Stitched together in a single day, CD1 is a 43-minute collage of studio sounds hailing from just before the recording of 20 Jazz Funk Greats, to which it acts as a sort of mutant companion piece. Initially intimidating and impenetrable, its first half is daubed with layers of detuned bass and sickly cornet while demonically pitched-down vocals rumble up from the bowels of Hell – it says something that it takes the surprise appearance of the Terminator production line stomp of ‘What A Day’ from 20 Jazz Funk Greats to anchor the chaos. By contrast, the album’s second half is a whirlpool of cosmic ambience, sounding at different points like a rumbling thunderstorm and the heavy thud of distantly-exploding artillery shells, before the familiar arpeggiated synthline of ‘Convincing People’ rises out of the darkness.

Partly because of that strange initial release, six years after the band had initially imploded, and partly through a lack of general availability in the decades since, TGCD1 has sometimes been seen as an inessential extra in TG’s discography. Now it feels like an intriguing coda to TG’s first act, and on its b-side, a surprisingly meditative one too.

The Third Mind Movements, released in 2009, has a similar patchwork quality to CD1, but is the more significant of the two releases. It’s also one that requires a degree of explanation so, to briefly recap: Throbbing Gristle reformed in 2004, some 23 years after their mission was first terminated. They put out TG Now, a terrific limited-release that hinted at a surprising future for the group, and embarked on a series of gigs that, going by Cosey Fanni Tutti’s memoir Art Sex Music, were a mixture of the transcendent and the traumatic as P-Orridge’s behind-the-scenes commitment to the reformed group waxed and waned. Still, TG pressed on. A comeback album proper, Part Two: The Endless Not, followed in 2007 and the gigs continued.

The same year, the four embarked on a project to complete a full-length reimagining of Nico’s Desertshore, to be recorded over three days in public at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (an auspicious location in Gristle lore as the site of pre-TG art entity COUM Transmissions’ Prostitution show in 1976). Over six two-hour sessions Throbbing Gristle, in plain view of the public, noodled around recording instrumental and vocal takes, chatted with fans, and jammed out ideas. They generated a lot of material, some of which would find a home in The Third Mind Movements, then intended as a tour-only release. When P-Orridge unexpectedly walked out of the band’s 2010 North American tour and Christopherson passed away the following month, however, The Third Mind Movements was unhappily granted the status of the final Throbbing Gristle album.

In an intriguing passage from Art Sex Music, Cosey hints at a possible meaning for the title: “Sleazy was perplexed by why and how making music just ‘worked’ so readily with us but not with anyone else. I knew what he meant. We just had that deep connection, ability and willingness to open ourselves up to collectively surrender to the ‘third mind’.”

There’s certainly a truth to that. A truly remarkable amount of great music has come out of the different poles of the TG axis, whether that’s Psychic TV’s weirdo pop, Chris & Cosey’s electronic explorations, or Coil’s many journeys into netherworlds both sonic and psychological. And yet, there was an undeniable alchemy that occurred when these four people worked together.

On The Third Mind Movements that connection manifests as a remarkably cohesive album that shakes off the overt darkness of TG’s prior incarnation while maintaining the sense of compelling menace. It’s a typically gloomy release, but there are also moments of darkly glimmering beauty here.

Opener ‘The Man From Nowhere’ is built around tinkling piano notes, a surging drone and P-Orridge’s voice, here rendered angelic rather than sinister. ‘PreMature’ lingers in serial killer cellar ambience for fully half of its eight minutes before a trip-hop groove kicks in that’s closer to latter-day Massive Attack than the TG of old. ‘Secluded’ is even more crepuscular, an ominous subterranean soundscape with P-Orridge’s multi-tracked and time-stretched vocals assailing the listener like a swarm of evil spirits.

Elsewhere, ‘Perception Is The Only Reality’ is built around a classic TG rhythm track – a gasping death rattle that’s somewhere between industrial machinery and hospital ventilator, adorned with more dislocated piano and the threatening buzz of Carter’s synthesisers, while ‘Not That I Am’ marries a lazy beat (reminiscent of the smudged out sound of Actress’s Ghettoville) with desolate electric guitar riffs.

The final suite of tracks finds TG at their most potent and psychedelic. Cosey’s cornet echoes out once more over the shifting landscape of ‘First Movement’, a stunning piece that feels like the perfect synthesis of Throbbing Gristle and Coil’s moon-lit magic. ‘Second Movement’ whirs and hums with Gristleized banks of synthesisers and feels like the most overtly Chris Carter-authored piece here (that’s not surprising – while all four members perform on the record, Carter was solely responsible for its assemblage and curation). Then, a few seconds into the closing ‘Third Movement’, what sounds like an old grandfather clock starts ticking. It’s present throughout the rest of the track, acting as both metronome and an ominous countdown, not just to the end of the album, but to the final moments of this brilliant, troubled, undeniably trailblazing group, somehow both sooner and much later than anyone could have anticipated. The Third Mind Movements is an accidental ending, then, but also a curiously fitting one.

TGCD1 and The Third Mind Movements are released on 23 August on Mute

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