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

critically, laying open the rhetorical agenda of Gen’s lyrics for (unflattering) inspection. Technology extends poetics.
    Drew: Did you ever roll tape of vocals live that Gen would sing against?
    Chris: I always delayed his voice. We had various Roland Space Echoes, three different models. I used to keep it on his voice all the time. With those you could use them as echoes or keep them looping. So you could record his voice and it wouldn’t come back for like thirty seconds. It sounded pre-recorded, but it was just what he’d sung before.
    Drew: Like on “Spirits Flying”? [a live track from the last TG concert in 1981 that features entire choruses of looped Gen]
    Chris: Exactly. As the Space Echoes got more complicated the loops got longer. The last one that we had, which was an SR555, I think you could do a whole minute.
    Drew: I asked because of “Convincing People.” The way that it works is based so fundamentally upon how Gen sings against himself.
    Chris: It was quite hard to synch it up live; you had to mess around with it and the slightest adjustment could make it all run out of synch and it wouldn’t work so well. But when it works, it works really well.
    Drew: What did you play through your Gristle-izer?
    Gen: Only my voice. Microphone to Gristle-izer, and then to delays, which Chris would operate.
    Drew: So you would route the voice to him so that when you would do “Convincing People” live . . .
    Gen: . . . he would set the echo so that it would be doubled. [sings] “There’s always a way, there’s always a way . . .” The second part is played by the echo.
    Drew: When you were recording these pieces, did you do vocal overdubs or were the vocals and the processingtracked live together?
    Gen: It was almost always tracked live, if it was something that developed live. “Convincing People” was first made up in a finished structure at the Ajanta Cinema in Derby. I remember really distinctly being surprised that I had come up with a bassline that I could play and sing to at the same time. [laughs] It just worked beautifully and everybody sat on it perfectly straightaway, and it was the delay on the voice that inspired the way the song was constructed.
    Drew: Because it set up the call and response of the voice and established a tempo for everybody to lock onto?
    Gen: The bass duplicated the same thing: I would play “doo doo doo doo doo doo” and it would respond “doo doo doo doo doo doo” and I would go “whoooooh” and slide it. That guitar had the black-covered plastic jazz strings on it. That was one of the big differences with
20 Jazz Funk Greats
. I actually put jazz strings on the bass.
    Drew: Jazz playing, a jazz influence, and jazz strings on the bass—it sounds like maybe it wasn’t so sarcastic to call this album
20 Jazz Funk Greats
.
    Gen: Do you know that actually I’d never thought of that until now. I’ve always been so influenced by jazz, I just accepted it as part of my language.
    The Gristle-izer’s sawtooth oscillations notch holes into the sound as it passes through, nibbling serrated edges into the signal, lending a strobelike alternation to the phased plateaus of guitar and synth noise. The multiple Gen-voices bleed into and interrupt each other, producing an effect that resembles the antinarrative glossolalia of sound poetry. One can sense in Gen’s performance, with its mantric loops oftiny syllables (“we don’t want / we don’t want to / we don’t want / we don’t want to . . .”) ramping up in energy and breaking against each other, the results of long practice singing with “himself” in processing-heavy environments. He keens and bends his held tones into recursive self-harmonizing, then cuts into deliberately staccato bursts that percussively play the delay time against the sequenced rhythm. Technically, Gen’s mini-lists of hyperrepetitive fragments are an example of the rhetorical trope of
epizeuxis
, which the Renaissance literary theorist George