Prunes are good for you

I once picked up a book in a library sale about a mysterious branch of the arts called process music. I didn’t know anything about it but it looked intriguing and it was only a couple of bucks so what the hell. It turned out to be one of the most interesting reads I’d had for a long time.

Process music, it turned out, is music that is created with a physical or experimental set up to create sounds with a minimum of human input. A primitive example is the Victorian self-playing piano, the pianola, that used punched paper rolls to activate the keys. People have recently programmed robots to physically play entire compositions using a similar principle. The logical modern equivalent of the pianola is techno, using MIDI driven processing to produce sounds with a minimum of active playing by the, umm, musicians.

Early exponents of process music were more likely to be scientists than musicians, like Leon Theremin who invented the instrument that carries his name. Later exponents were the likes of John Cage who physically manipulated conventional instruments like pianos to produce unusual and dissonant sounds. Interesting as it sounds, process music can be as dull as dishwater to listen to (did I mention techno already?). It only becomes interesting when the process used produces sounds that are so far out your mind can’t work out how it is done, or so weird they produce a physical reaction like fight or flight (have you ever seen a dog prick up its ears and sniff the air when it hears a strange noise – that’s what we are talking about). Music isn’t an intellectual exercise – it has to reach organs below the neck as well.

Technology opened up all sorts of new doors to process musicians. Drum machines and delay units, echoplex and tape manipulation. Throughout the seventies these became the tools of the avant garde. I’m sure John Cage would have loved to have got his hands on a synthesizer rather than assaulting pianos with hammers and screwdrivers, (although the synth wouldn’t have been half as much fun). Manipulating sound is now as easy as a quick download and plug in to your sound editing software, and a MIDI keyboard can be made to sound like a brass band. The possibilities are endless right? Well, yes and no. Using technology for technology’s sake is where the edge gets rubbed off. Anyone worth their salt following a process to make music knows that there has to be a human hand behind it, otherwise there is nothing to feel.

This very long intro brings me to the main subject of this post: the industrial music of the early 80’s.

Industrial music gets its name from Industrial Records – the label that was home to Throbbing Gristle in the late 70s – early 80s. Also included under this banner are groups like Clock DVA, Cabaret Voltaire, 23 Skidoo and (to a lesser extent) the Virgin Prunes, who I’ll get to later.

Throbbing Gristle are the grand daddies of industrial music (or grand trans-gender omni-sexual beings if you believe Genesis P Orridge these days). Their music basically defines the genre. Electronic rhythms splattered liberally with sound effects, warped instruments, snatches of dialogue and tortured vocals producing an overall effect like an analogue computer having a nightmare. Powerful stuff. The uninitiated should check out “20 Jazz Funk Greats” as a starting point. It’s their most accessible work (if accessible is even a word you can associate with TG) and features a few tracks you can even quietly get your groove on to. “DOA” also has its moments, particularly the uber-creepy Hamburger Lady and the almost poppy AB/7A (catchy title, eh). Serious devotees can try and track down the suitcase full of live cassettes they released that document just about every gig they did between about 1976 – 1980. If you dare.

Other industrial acts definitely have their moments, particularly Cabaret Voltaire who grew from a very noisy art assault collective into one of the gruntiest of the early house outfits (Prodigy owed their entire existence in the 90s to these guys). The Cabs largely sit outside process music, so their relevance here is limited to their first couple of albums and their love of using snatches of long wave radio dialogue in their compositions. “Mix Up” and “The Voice of America” are the ones to check out.

I could waste space talking about lesser known acts, but I want to spend the rest of this post talking about my homeboys the Virgin Prunes. My homeboys in a spiritual rather than physical sense you understand. I grew up (a while ago it has to be said) in the South Island of New Zealand. Things were pretty clear cut back then. You were a part a small population, you dressed conservatively, acted stoically and liked rugby. Or you didn’t. If you didn’t you needed to prepare yourself for a life spent on the outside looking in and being treated with the contempt that came with it. Even surviving that kind of shit was a challenge, let alone carving out a life for yourself. The Virgin Prunes came from Ireland, where you were part of a small population, you dressed conservatively, acted stoically and stuck to your creed. Notice the similarities?

For a bunch of artistic, questioning, extrovert freaks like these guys, life was always going to be a bit different. They started life as a group of outsiders that coalesced into a sort of social club, interestingly including Bono and The Edge from that other Irish group. This loose gaggle adopted new names and started a performance group to express themselves (they also came up with the names of the aforementioned individuals – how many of you knew Bono was named after a brand of hearing aid?). The Virgin Prunes (which is Irish slang for a naïve individual) developed several different faces and as such are an unclassifiable act. They sadly got lumped in with the gothic movement by lazy UK music critics based on no more than the fact that they used heaps of hair-gel and wore make up. But then so did Motley Crue, right. The Virgin Prunes were way weirder than the pretense any gothic poser could ever put on. Their stage show was a Dadaist outing complete with props, performance art and cross-dressing. They put on multi-media exhibitions in art galleries. They played a close approximation of rock music on occasion and they made some of the most interesting process music ever recorded.

It’s that process music that I always go back to with them. Their more conventional music (and some of it was reasonably straight forward it has to be said) hasn’t aged so well. It still kicks 10 shades of shite out of almost everything “alternative” these days though so don’t get me wrong. But their in-the-studio creations are adventurous in the extreme, using everything from birds to iron bars to make their indefinable sounds. And silence too. They use silence better than anyone since Philip Glass.

The tracks I’m talking about exist across all their recordings but are mixed in with the more conventional stuff, so you’ll need to make a playlist. The studio half of the “Heresie” album has some seriously ethereal music mixed in with some Irish sing-alongs, noisy primal rock and other demented ramblings. The original box set came out as two 10 inch records with a handful of pamphlets containing surrealistic writing and nasty art work. Good luck finding a copy and no, you can’t buy mine. “A New Form of Beauty” is where the rubber really hits the road. This originally came out as a set again containing a 7 inch single, 10 inch EP and a 12 inch LP with a cassette thrown in for good measure. The whole thing acts as the soundtrack for the art installation that accompanied its release. I paid an absurd amount for it on eBay (sans cassette) before it was re-released on CD a few years back. It has a similar mixture of styles to Heresie, but the overall feel is much more claustrophobic and intense. It ranges from barely-moving, cracked-ambient, inner-space explorations like Abbagal, which are vaguely unsettling, to The Beast, which is as intense as hell and just flat out terrifying. Play that at maximum volume and watch the curtains start twitching in your neighbours place. I’ve done it. It’s fun.

But getting back on topic, for their best process music you have to go to the Over the Rainbow compilation. That ties up a lot of the loose ends and rarities they did as one-offs on long deleted compilations and cassettes. The notion of a group is blown away on these pieces and the creative collective takes over. The CD re-issue excludes the sleeve notes that accompanied the original LP release, so the descriptions of the processes they followed is absent. That’s a real shame because without them the tracks loose some of their wow! factor and they become merely absorbing and interesting instead. The two key tracks are Mad Bird in the Wood and Third Secret.

Since you won’t have the sleeve notes handy, here is what they roughly say about these two. Mad Bird in the Wood was recorded in their ramshackle studio in Dublin that featured a crumbling roof that allowed pigeons in to roost. Some of the pigeons would get inside and fly around the rafters looking for an escape route. The band came up with the idea of recording their fluttering with added ambient noise. So they slung a collection of microphones over the rafters and set them swinging so they would feedback off each other. Next they chased the birds through the swinging mics and rolled the tape. The resulting sounds were then played backwards and mixed with some additional electronic effects. End result – one of the most bizarre and ethereal pieces of music ever recorded. 

Third Secret is equally spontaneous. When they were installing the artworks for the New Form of Beauty exhibition they had to set up a bunch of scaffolding in the gallery to reach the ceiling. One of them came up with the idea of blind-folding themselves and climbing the scaffolding using nothing more than iron bars to feel their way up. The clanking of the bars on the scaffolding was recorded and mixed with some piano chords and whispered prayers. End result – surrealist sacred music serving as a comment on blind devotion. Salvador Dali would have loved it.

Like my homeboys, The Hopkinsville Goblins like playing around with found sounds and processes. They give it to me as a done deal. There’s plenty of it on Posts from Planet Earth. Their favourite instrument is the steel watering can on my kitchen window. It’s the first thing you hear on the album.

Find it on Amazon, I-Tunes, Spotify, Deezer, Google Play and Bandcamp, or from any of the purveyors of fine sounds listed on this site.

Or try before you buy on Soundcloud or Youtube.