Chris & Cosey - Techno Primitiv (1984)

Comparing the respective careers of the four Throbbing Gristlers after they parted ways, I realise Gristle itself could be pretty much summarised as Chris & Cosey with Porridge providing a picture of a chair for the album cover, then telling you 'Hermann Göring sat on that chair,' with that lurid smile which lets you know you've been Porridged good and proper. It's strange how this only seems obvious - at least to me - with a couple of decades of hindsight. I'd guess the music of Chris & Cosey mostly sounded happy, doubtless as a result of having left a band which included Porridge, although it didn't seem so at the time. It seemed more like they'd divided into the polar opposites of weirdy stuff with pierced nobs on the one hand, and nursery rhyme proto-techno on the other; but having noticed that 2018's Tutti is almost pure Gristle with more polish, yet without sounding like a trip down memory lane, this is the rabbit hole I've chosen today.

I'm not sure if Techno Primitiv was exactly the last good thing for me, but as I still can't remember what Pagan Tango sounds like, it was the last to make an impression, following which my attention span wandered off somewhere else. The couple hit the ground running with 1981's Heartbeat, released the same year as the split and sounding like they were at least fucking trying. More records followed and a sound developed with some sense of direction, meaning we never quite bought the same album twice while allowing for occasional flashes of tangential brilliance - the Elemental 7 soundtrack or collaborations with Konstruktivists and the Eurhythmics for example. However, we shouldn't underestimate how different these records seemed to what had gone before. Without Porridge providing some vaguely sinister subtext - and I honestly don't know how much else - the music became its own subject in so much as that it lacked an overt message. These were studio experiments in building a groove and seeing where it led, with Cosey's vocalisations more about mood than anything. Technically, the electronics were always a couple of years ahead of everyone else, usually meaning there was enough going on to keep it from sounding like all those plug it in and press a button cybernauts who came later. So considering the improvisational nature of the composition, and that Chris & Cosey albums had a diary quality of what we've been working on since the last thing hereby presented for your consideration, there's no obvious singularity of vision or focus to sharpen a record into the sort of point you might get with other artists. Practically this meant what sounded to me like diminishing returns, more and more nursery rhymes, bass patterns which may as well have been the Birdie Song, Cosey sounding slightly bored, and albums suggesting the work of people titting about in the studio because they have nothing better to do.

Yet when they're good, they're great - moody and sensuous like a cyber-age Serge Gainsbourg, hypnotic with some mathematically ornate rhythm track taking centre stage within a vast sonic space windswept by half-heard melodies, noises, groans, sighs - all captured in digital hyperclarity so sharp that it's almost weird. Techno Primitiv has a few of those tracks which never quite worked, I felt, due to an incongruously chirpy quality - He's an Arabian for example, but then you hit the pseudo-tribal panorama of Do or Die and all is forgiven; and even the more uptempo tracks, the almost songs, have a certain frisson of the forbidden which elevates them above the frosty jangle of Christmas muzak. Above all, this one still sounds like an album regardless of whatever themes it may carry remaining ambiguous. It sounds like possibilities, like effort made beyond sticking a skull on the cover and giving the kids what they want. So credit where it's due, and all that.

Beef Terminal - The Grey Knowledge (2002)

I don't really know anything about this guy - one M.D. Matheson trading as Beef Terminal, which I've somehow only just realised is apparently slang for a woman's area. The previous album, 20 GOTO 10, was sent into The Sound Projector for review about er… two decades ago, come to think of it, and it was chuffin' fab; and two decades have somehow passed before it's occurred to me to have a look and see if the guy did anything else.

I vaguely recall some loosely descriptive publicity material turning up with 20 GOTO 10, mostly focussing on the album having been recorded in Matheson's kitchen then musing over the mental well-being of the artist on the grounds of the album being distinctly less buoyant than, off the top of my head, Kylie Minogue's 1988 debut. Anyway, this one was similarly recorded in Matheson's kitchen and maintains the sombre mood established on the previous disc. One aspect of what drew me to the music of Beef Terminal was, perhaps oddly, the fact of it sounding as though it had been recorded on a couple of standard tape decks, one hissy backing track bounced onto the next deck with fresh instrumentation added in the absence of anything so lavish as even a portastudio. I'm admittedly overstating the rudimentary production values here, but 20 GOTO 10 had that sort of quality, and succeeded specifically because it made a virtue of its shortcomings, repurposing the hiss and rumble as atmosphere much as did, I suppose, My Bloody Valentine.

The Grey Knowledge sounds maybe a little more expensive, but Matheson has kept everything fairly simple, hence almost painfully direct in terms of raw emotional impact. Mostly it's sombre but melodic guitar almost bordering on the bitter-sweet, and I suspect a few of the pseudo-bass lines may be played on the E-string of the same. Rhythms, where provided, are either a cheap-ish drum machine or looped samples of noise, mains hum, or whatever. It's almost entirely instrumental - excepting a Eurhythmics cover, which probably makes more sense on disc than on paper - and effects are limited to a slightly boomy reverb here and there.

It's difficult to describe the nuts and bolts of what happens on The Grey Knowledge without it sounding massively underwhelming, and yet the sum of these parts is hypnotic, engulfing, and almost overpowering in its suggestion of tragedy, loss, and anything else which might reduce you to tears. If ever one should require a demonstration of the maxim about less being more, it's right here.

Curve - Doppelgänger (1992)

I seem to recall Curve as being somewhat frowned upon in at least one music paper, their crime being the impersonation of a more fashionable group by someone who once played session guitar for the Eurhythmics and was thus financed by Nestle or some other soulless conglomerate. Curve were, so it transpired, U2 pretending to be My Bloody Valentine, fooling the cool kids into liking something that wasn't cool like when some cuboid Nazi square bank manager slips a Def Leppard album in with your precious Huggy Bear discs, and you've already punched the air in time to the first four tracks before you realise your mistake.

I never quite saw the problem, and so far as I could tell, Curve had a couple of decent tunes in there somewhere, so I wasn't too bothered about Toni Halliday being married to Sir Alan Sugar. Now, two decades after the fact, having actually heard My Bloody Valentine and picking this album up on the grounds that I remember it sounding okay when my girlfriend of the time played it into a flexidisc, I have to wonder if Curve might not be due some apologies.

My Bloody Valentine were nice enough, and Loveless is without doubt the greatest thing ever released by Creation Records - although  that's hardly a boast seeing as everything else the label ever put out was utter shite; but I just can't listen to it without visualising a bunch of smackies mumbling about rare Velvet Underground bootlegs.

Curve were, I suppose, My Bloody Valentine given hot baths, haircuts and a change of clothes, cruising along the interstate in an open-top Cadillac with guns and beer; and the weird thing is that if they really were just a steal of that shoegazing guitar drone schtick, then at the very least they saved the genre from the miserable buggers who invented it - invented by a loose definition of the term - and turned it into something that's good to listen to.

Curve's surge of guitars still sounds absolutely overwhelming, and the programmed elements strike a nice balance, going further than simply standing in for humans whilst holding back from anything that too obviously dates the music. The bass rumbles, and Toni Halliday's icy voice is a perfect complement to the burning wall of sound, if that isn't too purple a turn of phrase. There are few artists who have managed to seem simultaneously quite so primal and yet with such sophistication, making most of those corny old goth bands look like a Chas & Dave Halloween special; and Horror Head still doesn't sound quite like anything else recorded before or since.

Maybe Curve were really just Johnny Hates Jazz with leather jackets and a digital delay, but frankly who cares when it sounds this good?