Psychic Tv

(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

Psychic TV was the name of the project launched by Genesis P-Orridge (Neil Megson) after the breakup of Throbbing Gristle. Initially it was a collaboration with Peter Christopherson (another Throbbing Gristle member and future Coil) and Alex Fergusson (formerly of Alternative TV).

In reality the project had very little in common with the wild cacophonous orgies of the parent group. With the first album Force The Hand Of Chance (Some Bizzare, 1982), Orridge retreated into a confused and wishful acid rock, albeit undoubtedly original. On the one hand there are the romantic orchestral easy listening of Just Drifting and the classical-music interlude Caresse, which suggest a redemption of Lucifer in the guise of Richard Clayderman, but No Go Go is a sort of slowed-down voodoobilly, mowed down by a “helicopter” and by guitar lashes.
The heart of the album lies in the leader’s soliloquies. Orridge is not much of a singer, but he knows how to choreograph his psychodramas: Terminus-xtul is a slow narrative over a suspenseful spaghetti-western backdrop that fades into a long psychedelic distortion; Guiltless is an even more neurotic narration over a score of crumbling notes. Message From Thee Temple overlays a gentle Donovan-like recitation onto a baroque adagio of violins and martial drum machines. The score of Thee Full Pack is entirely dissonant, with a foreground buzz of guitar distortions and a background chaos of percussive noises (the finale is almost gothic).
The scandalous track was Ov Power (disco beat, trumpet fanfare, funky bass and vapid lyrics), which updated Talking Heads and B52's to the new dance-music fashions.

The attached seven Psychic Tv Themes also made clear how great his expressive frenzy was, and how little it was matched by ideas.

Dreams Less Sweet (Some Bizzare, 1983) continued along that vein of free musical creation (classical and popular, melodic and dissonant). Two songs, The Orchids and In The Nursery, rival their esoteric anthem Roman P (Sordide Sentimental, 1984). Two live concerts from 1984 would be collected years later on Were You Ever Bullied At School (Cold Spring, 2000).

N.Y. Scum (1984) contains two live sessions by John Gosling, P. Christopherson, G. Rushton, Alex Fergusson, Paula and Genesis P-Orridge.

Then Psychic TV began churning out increasingly indecipherable and pretentious albums (about twenty between 1986 and 1987 alone, according to a plan that envisaged 23 albums released, each on the 23rd of the month). Among the many (mostly live): Those Who Do Not (Gramm, 1984), A Pagan Day (Temple, 1984), featuring the 21-minute Pirates, Descending (1985), perhaps the best of their tribal techno, the three Themes (1984, 1985, 1987), and the ballet Mouth Of The Night (1985).

The salient fact of the period, however, was the progressive adoption of danceable rhythms, sometimes in catchy form (Godstar in 1985, Hex Sex in 1986, Southern Comfort in 1987), sometimes in “acid house” form (Tune In under the pseudonym Superman, Your Body under the pseudonym Jack The Tab, Voodoo Acid, all in 1988), an event that allowed Orridge to change skin and pay the bills.

After moving to San Francisco, Orridge found new followers in cyberpunk circles, if only for having been among the first to incorporate video into live performances. In the field of “acid house” he quickly became a tutelary deity, thanks to albums such as Tekno Acid Beat (Temple, 1988), which includes Joy; Towards Thee Infinite Beat (Wax Trax, 1990), featuring Infinite Beat and Bliss; Direction Of Travel (Temple, 1992); and Peak Hour (Temple, 1993). The average had dropped to about five albums a year, but remained high enough to ensure that none of them was worth listening to.

The most interesting part of his output is perhaps the triptych of soundtracks under the name Kondole (Silent, 1989), namely Thee Whale (1988), Deadcat (1989) and Thee Shadow Creatures (1993), which were composed by a more attentive, if not also more mature, composer.

In 1993 Orridge participated in Unhealthy (Invisible) by Lab Report, that is, with Matt Schultz, Eric Pounder and Lydia Lunch; an electronic collage that harks back to his “industrial” origins.

Perfectly synchronized with fashion, Orridge sensed that the time had come to dust off his medals of valor. Cathedral Engine (Dossier) confirms the regression toward the origins: abandoning techno banalities, P-Orridge falls back on the cacophony of early industrial music. The subsequent initiative was Electric Newspaper (Com Four), each volume of which consists of a long collage of more or less random sounds, from 1960s 45s to snippets of interviews, a self-indulgent exercise in style that pushes to extremes certain ideas of the Residents and Negativland, the analogue of a documentary shot by leaving the camera running on the front steps of the house.

The problem is that the abnormal output of this homebound experimenter shows no sign of diminishing. Nor does the quality increase.