Foetus

Foetus' second album, Ache (Self Immolation, 1982), is a more mature work. Foetus explores the same stylistic range, but each point of the range is given far deeper consideration. Dying With My Boots On is a cubist voodoobilly, overflowing with metallic dissonances; JQ Murder launches in a grotesque big-band swings, a prototype for what will become a Foetus specialty; Exit The Man With Nine Lives sounds like a parody of mainstream rock;
Ferocity and savagery are Foetus' most powerful arms. He pulls them out for Gums Bleed, a drama narrated on staccato piano, syncopated drums and spastic wind instruments; for Get Our Of My House, a frantic cannibal rocker with pounding pow-wow drums, disco beats and childish piano strumming.
Some of the scores are beginning to show orchestral dexterity way beyond the abilities of the average punk of his generation. Mark Of The Ostracizor has the demeanor of a robotic/industrial ballet, but the bass and drums inject funk/disco elements while piano and vocals beat a jump-blues stomp, each metamorphosis marked by snippets of dissonant chamber music: Kraftwerk meets Rip Rig & Panic.
Unfortunately, the second half of the record sounds like filler. Wholesome Town is a vocal experiment and Kid Hate Kid is another demented jump-blues, but they add little to the overall project. Much better is the closing Instead I Became Anemone, another ripping rock and roll of Wagnerian intensity and shaken by repeated pauses and hiccups.
Foetus does not exploit completely his creative means but the result is already quite different from anything else on planet Earth.

After moving to New York, Foetus quickly established himself as a musician and performer. Forming both a personal and artistic bond with Lydia Lunch, in 1983 he composed Stinkfist for and with her, later collected on the eponymous EP (Widowspeak, 1987). The suite features Lunch’s bored vocalizations alongside an ensemble of seven percussionists, furiously striking anything that produces sound, from drum machines to sheet metal.

Still working with Lunch, Foetus composed The Drowning Of Lucy Hamilton (Widowspeak, 1984), a piece for voice, piano, saxophone, and guitar.

Hole (Self Immolation, 1984 – Some Bizarre, 2008) is his first masterpiece. Hole is a poem of excess, as would all his subsequent works be. Foetus’s style originates from the chaotic layering of punk rock (Clothes Hoist, with a breakneck thrash rhythm), world music (overwhelming, barbaric, exotic funk-swing rave-ups à la Rip Rig + Panic, as in Lust For Death and Water Torture, as well as the hysterical voodoo tribalism of Street Of Shame), “Beefheartian” blues (the dragged, cannibalistic crescendo of Sick Man), hip hop (Hot Horse, metallurgic and dissonant, and Cold Day In Hell, a chilling afterlife fresco, as well as the contemporary EP grooves Calamity Crush and Catastrophe Crunch), and Sixties sounds (the black mass with frenzied surf/beat/bubblegum rhythm and doo-wop backing vocals of Satan Place, the album’s most hilarious gag).
Everything is distorted by electronic disturbances and “concrete” inserts (from ambulance sirens to Hitler’s speeches in the violent requiem-mantra of I'll Meet You In Poland Baby) according to collage techniques mediated by Stockhausen and Varèse. The most extreme idioms of the electronic era (industrial music and hip hop) and the most violent sounds in music history (heavy metal riffs and symphonic staccato) are compressed into a ballad form of unprecedented ferocity.

Glorifying anal rape, satanism, and the Holocaust, Foetus casually demolishes millennia of conventional civil behavior. With this work of extreme desecration, he goes far beyond traditional agit-prop cabaret, even in its most risque' forms (Frank Zappa, the Fugs). The raw and vulgar nihilist aesthetic of punk finds its true messiah in him, a few of hell's circles below the antichrist Johnny Rotten (of the Sex Pistols).

Nail (Self Immolation, 1985 – Some Bizarre, 2008) is perhaps his masterpiece, and certainly one of the masterpieces of the 1980s—a work decades ahead of the rest of rock music, with a terrifying (malevolent) power, a scream of pain issued within an imposing landscape of desolation and depravity. It is also a much more personal album than his previous works. While the earlier records targeted the ills of society and history, this one focuses on inner evil and individual history. Everything is exaggerated, disorienting, percussive, and icy. With Pigdom Come, Foetus attempts to create alone the monolithic sound of a Wagnerian overture. Pigswill is a rap built on metallurgic rhythms and noises, guitar feedback, and symphonic inserts, glorifying mass murder.
These tracks are poems chiselled with a jackhammer into the marble of a funerary tombstone.
The influence of Zappa is felt both in these orchestral pieces (to which one can add the contemporary EP featuring Sick Minutes) and in the retro gags scattered throughout his brutal life ballads: the booming, solemn quasi-rockabilly of Throne Of Agony (underscored by the oppressive orchestral theme of “Mission Impossible”), the biting funk-jazz triumph of DI-1-9026, and the nightclub swing with raspy Waits-like crooning, doo-wop backing vocals, and symphonic counterpoints in Descent Into The Inferno (as well as the galactic reissue of Wash in the frenzied vaudeville style on the other EP of the year).
Everything is delivered with the emphasis of a Last Judgment and performed with manic intensity, as if every note were decisive for plunging the world into ruin. Sounds reminiscent of a Cecil DeMille epic (yet gathering the lowest garbage of kitsch) accompany the odyssey of this Underworld Odysseus.
Epic and cursed, the album turns toward a more dramatic and dangerously “serious” music, inspired by the most frenzied Artaud and Céline, and above all by Ballard’s philosophy (an encyclopedic desire to experience all forms of pain). The clownish self-parody that seeped through the sketches of previous records has transformed into a morbid self-indulgence.

At that point, however, his activity becomes somewhat scattered and certainly chaotic, spread across a series of pseudonyms.
With Wiseblood—formed with multi-instrumentalist Roli Mosimann of the Swans—he had already recorded the singles Motorslug/Death Rape 2000 in 1985 and Stumbo/Someone Drowned In My Pool in 1986, characteristic para-Nazi deliriums of lust (the piano spiritual of Someone is spectacular), as well as the EP Dirtdish (K.422, 1987). For the latter, prominent figures from the New York underground scene contributed, from Robert Quine to Norman Westberg (Swans), from Hahn Rowe (Hugo Largo) to pianist Phoebe Legere.

Foetus is, above all, a high-class producer, capable of making even the most innocuous sound devastating; let alone when the sounds are his own, unleashed by all instruments in unison and imbued with his horrifying “superhumanism”: Prime Gonzola doesn’t hesitate to exploit his wild grunts, symphonic breaks, violent guitar riffs, and hip-hop rhythms. Even when he forgoes his arsenal of atrocities, foregrounding hip-hop syncopations (as in Godbrain) or a lazy swampy blues cadence (as in The Fudge Punch), Thirlwell achieves sensational results in tension and outrage.

Meanwhile, the Foetus All-Nude Revue released the EP Bedrock (Self Immolation, 1987), featuring the drunken Tom Waits–style swing of the title track (which naturally builds in rhythmic intensity until it becomes fearsomely deafening) and, above all, the concrete poem Diabolus In Musica, one of his dadaist compositions with a frantic rhythm for assorted, meticulously crafted and staged noises (machine-gun fire, creaks, bells, drones, animal sounds, and retches), a piece worthy of entering the repertoire of avant-garde music.

In the same year, another EP, credited to Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel, Ramrod, experiments (on the title track) with the same ferocity as Prime Gonzola, blending symphonic inserts, hip hop cadences, and heavy metal at extremely high volume. Thirlwell is clearly refining a new kind of explosive. The second track, Boxhead, is already something more—horribly louder and more overwhelming—a breakneck-speed concert for platoons of percussion and tapes of electronic noise, always excessive, always pushing to the last breath. Finally, Smut, another all-electronic sonic excess, indulges in rhythms and dissonances, with half-tracked cadences and cyclopean distortions.

The Meltdown Oratorio (released on the same EP as Stinkfist) is instead a sonic testament of the depraved performance-theater of the duo, who for years have performed pieces devoted to the most squalid and degenerate forms of sexual impulse. It contains all the “unpleasant” elements of his music, from explosive tribalism to galactic distortions, rendered with a renewed Wagnerian intensity.

A new peak of his negative art was reached the following year with another industrial symphony, Thaw (Some Bizzare, 1988), perhaps the most violent of his career. Another work conceived in the spirit of vulgarity and the most vile and pathological crimes (with sadomasochistic “anthems” like Don't Hide It Provide It, a sort of degenerate voodobilly, driven by rhythm-box and detonated by bursts of electronic noise) places them at the service of some of his best “concrete” orchestral and electronic compositions (Asbestos, Fratricide Pastorale, and Barbedwire Tumbleweed), in which he continues to develop the idea of a musical staff as nothing more than a disordered accumulation of extremely exciting sonic events, without any need for overtures, “bridges,” choruses, or anything else; without any need to “build an atmosphere,” since the piece is the atmosphere.
His undeniable skill in “abusing” genres is once again evident in the hip hop of English Faggot, propelled by the usual dynamite of the rhythm-box, the gospel of Hauss-On-Fire, recited in the dark tones of Nick Cave by a choir of voices possessed like Nick Cave, the swing of Dipsomaniac Kiss, one of his most creative tracks with dissonances in every instrumental part, and the lysergic raga of Chingada, shaken by homicidal screams and deafening piano chords. Each genre is fearfully warped not by an arranging logic, but, more simply, by a psychotic (and perhaps purely infernal) drive.
Thirlwell also rediscovers the pleasure of “storytelling” in music: using his arrangement style (yet another crescendo overflowing with polyrhythms and peripheral noises, with a prominent heavy metal riff) to accompany a narrative like the one recited in A Prayer For My Death achieves an effect that is both gloomy and epic.
Thaw represents the final chapter of the trilogy begun with Hole and Nail. While it is the weakest of the three, or at least the least innovative, it retains the iconoclastic traits of his art.
Less eccentric and emphatic than Nail, this is nevertheless the album that the industrial music world could understand and digest, and therefore the one that would be most influential on the generation of Nine Inch Nails and Cop Shoot Cop.

An ensemble including members of Swans and Prong, called Foetus Corruptus, recorded the 1989 double live album, Rife, with some previously unreleased tracks. Honey I'm Home, Grab Yr Ankles, Clothes Hoist and the immense pow-wow of Private War represent different facets of Thirlwell’s multifaceted moral and sonic hell; they unravel a rosary of blasphemous prayers that hurl unbearable psychic tension onto the listener. Concerned with publicizing his own damnation as much as possible, Thirlwell, however, indulges in theatrical antics like Hate Feeler, which end up detracting from the album’s overall impact.

Foetus Eruptus released in 1990 (on the anthology album Sink) the track Lilith, a cross between a chamber orchestra piece in the style of Schoenberg and a Gregorian choir, as well as Spit On The Griddle, featuring a more “romantic” symphonic approach, though still chaotic and dissonant, where a “Brahmsian” quality blends with electronic noise; whereas Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel is credited with Anxiety Attack, a lighter experiment in industrial funk/blues, and other genre-mixing gags of traditional Black music industrial arrangements (the gospel of The Only Good Christian Is A Dead Christian and especially the jump blues of Halo Flamin Lead).

After another series of singles, including Butterfly Potion (Big Cat, 1990), Incesticide (Big Cat) and Powerhouse (Sympathy, 1991), a grotesque soundtrack for big band; and, after leaving Lydia Lunch, Foetus released Quilombo (Big Cat, 1991) under the moniker Steroid Maximus.
The all-instrumental album marks another impressive achievement within Foetus' opus of instrumental music. This time Foetus turns to jazz with an approach that resembles Arto Lindsay's "negative" deconstruction of latin music. Quilombo mocks jazz improvisation: Foetus the (one-man) bandleader couples a disjointed swing rhythm with a jazz fanfare that runs the gamut from circus music to free-jazz doodling. In another gag, Life In The Greenhouse Effect, the winds fake a horror-movie theme while pounding drums rage all around. Grotesque winds also derail the industrial dance of Powerhouse. The melancholy Miles Daves-ian Spanish trumpet-driven theme of Destino Matar ends with a marching-band fanfare. The effect is a disturbing mixture of comic and tragic.
The one song on the album best represents this unstable mood: a singer croaks the pathetic blues I Will Love You Always, his voice filtered to sound like an oldie and set against a backdrop of catastrophic steel noises and bursts of orchestral melodies.
Foetus' terrorist excursions in jazz alternate with horrible free-form pastiches, horrible because they translate his devastated moral universe into a soundtrack of individual and social agony. The nightmarish wasteland of Radio Raheem is dissonant and fragmentary, roamed by muezzin-like chanting, radio frequencies, spare beats and found noises.
Cross Double Cross is even more terrifying: a running beat, a loud and chaotic distortion, orchestral fragments... no center to hang on to.
Foetus' postmodernism is no less cruel and barbaric than his modernism.
The album contains the four-movement symphony The Bowel Of Beelzebub, the ultimate tribute by Foetus to his favorite theme: hell. The first movement is all symphonic grandeur in the usual (discordant, Nietzsche-ian, industrial) Foetus style. The second movement has little or no music, mainly gospel chanting and clapping. The third is a set of musique concrete (including a female orgasm) and the fourth is a triumphal, symphonic and choral apocalypse. While not one of his major achievements (and definitely out of context in this album), the symphony continues his personal struggle against harmony and peace.

Wiseblood too returned in 1991, releasing the EP Pedal To The Metal (Big Cat), which contains Pedal To The Metal and Hey Bop A Ree Bop, a work composed in the vein of sampling vintage music.

By now it was Steroid Maximus that dominated Thirlwell's subconscious. Gondwanaland (Big Cat, 1992), however, betrays a melancholic vein, as if the ferocious warrior was beginning to tire of the slaughter and was meditating on the meaning of such mayhem.
That said, the album is mainly a post-modernist essay in the vein of Frank Zappa's stylistic merry-go-rounds. The overture, Quilombo, is breakneck big-band swing for propulsive drums and grotesquely dueling winds that gets more and more chaotic, and, after a break of exotic percussions and thundering tribal drumming, soars with a cartoonish theme. Life In The Greenhouse Effect is another excursion into swing, exotica and ponderous drumming, but less clownish and more synthetic. One could find similarities with a less jovial Rip Rig & Panic. The cartoonish aspect of these romps is given full freedom with Powerhouse: here the big-band sound is warped and disfigured in a demented bacchanal.
The four-part suite The Bowel Of Beelzebub belongs to another genre altogether: Foetus' love affair with the avantgarde. It begins with a symphonic crescendo before delving into an African ritual for hand clapping and drums. The third movement is musique concrete and dadaism of the naive kind. The fourth movement is the orchestral apotheosis, but one full of dissonances, of bluesy harmonicas, of sinister choirs and cosmic drones. The meaning is cryptic as always, but it is clearly not even close to the blaspheme, punk aesthetics of the early days. Cross Double Cross is another symphonic interlude (albeit with hard-rock guitar messing up the tension).
The soundscape is also permeated by collages of samples and imitations. Radio Raheem juxtaposes an Arabic call to prayer, a Tibetan fanfare and white noise. Destino Matar parodies a Spanish lament for (presumably) matadores. I Will Love You Always is absurdist theater for found voices, bells and sirens, as if Samuel Beckett and Edgar Varese collaborated on a piece for the Cabaret Voltaire: at the end, a symphonic vortex sucks the music into another dimention. And the album closes with Homeo, an ancestral music-box melody for limping clockwork.
In concluding, Steroid Maximus' projects allow Foetus to explore three different styles: the jazz big-band of the 1940s, the orchestral/chamber avantgarde, and the abstract collage.