Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) by Drew Daniel

impact of each note’s attack: the effect resembles the garbled honking of the unintelligible authority figures in animated
Peanuts
cartoons, their meaning always just out of reach. You can hear the changing depth and rate of the phaser as it shifts across the bass solo, cycling from slow to fast and back again, another range of textural information superimposed above the melodic, contributing to the liquid, slithering effect. Gen’s processed violin constitutes one of the signature TG sounds, a sound remarkably underutilized in subsequent industrial music (though recently re-emphasized in the processed violin/noise hybrid work of C. Spencer Yeh’s American noise project Burning Star Core). Here it is cast in a supporting role, sent to delay until it ping-pongs across the horizon, playing against itself, rebounding in a mirrored pool of sound. The entire signal chain is played as a single instrument binding acoustic source and electronic processing into a unified, fluid gesture. There’s a diorama-like quality to the way that the violin and the bass seem to occupy distinct planes within the mix; they feel almost unrelated, yet thicken in combination. A tentative melody on the vibes pulls the song into alignment with the other “mood” pieces of the album (it is a close cousin to “Exotica”), providing a respite between the manic overload of “Still Walking” and the fuzzy meltdown of “Convincing People.”

Convincing People
    By this time you will have gained some insight into the Control Machine and how it operates.
    William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin,
“Inside the Control Machine”
    The arpeggiating synth line starts in medias res, spinning a hamster wheel of six notes over and over, while a 4/4 beat keeps time but goes nowhere: kick (pillowy) and snare (washed out) blink off and on, defining a checkerboard rhythmic grid. Gen’s fuzzed-out bass figure constitutes one of the most straight-up “guitar riff” elements on the album, and chalks up another gesture toward “real music”—but the core of this song is the cumulative delirium caused by the precisely timed overlapping of delayed vocal lines. Gen’s chanted repetition of slightly similar phrases against themselves enacts the self-cancellation that he sings about: “there’s never a way” and “there’s several ways” and “there’snever a day” are superimposed until both affirmation and negation become simultaneous. It’s not exactly dazzling wordplay, but then it’s not intended to show up for the listener as “clever lyrics”; rather, the vocal processing within the song works to mortify language, harrowing it of sense. Gen’s vocal boomerangs back upon itself and triggers changes in his performance, upsetting the standard figure/ground distinction between “lead” and “backup” vocals with a sonic experience of multiple personality disorder. In sharp contrast to the chiaroscuro effect of delayed vocals in dub music production, in which an acoustically original moment descends into an increasingly murky rabbit hole as it repeats over and over with less and less high-end information, Throbbing Gristle’s use of delay in “Convincing People” works to produce a deliberately alienating
in
difference between natural utterance and prosthetic twin: the delayed signal and the original signal have the same volume and the same EQ, and so there is no immediately appreciable difference in tone and presence between the two. Unlike the dub approach, there is no sense here that the delay is being “played” like an instrument, or that the duration and internal feedback are being modulated over the course of the song; instead, the delay is set to repeat each phrase exactly once and then it cuts cold, with each line functioning as its own refrain. Like the bratty childhood tactic of repeating word for word the increasingly annoyed statements of surrounding adults, the song’s flatly literal repetition of each phrase functions