Altered Zones

The once-defunct home of Throbbing Gristle, Industrial Records, is officially un-funct. Perhaps best known as the imprint that baptized the industrial music genre, Throbbing Gristle's 1976 creation was more than a platform for the band's own music and that of fellow instigators; with it's anti-commercial, propagandistic, and frequently controversial iconography, it was an art project in itself, outwardly at odds with the industry in which it was obliged to maneuver. Take the Industrial Records logo, for instance, which looks like an awful lot like a chimney at a concentration camp-- or the cover of 20 Jazz Funk Greats, which features the band's four founding members posing for a publicity-style photo shoot on Beachy Head, Britain's most popular suicide local. After the group disbanded in 1981, the label went more or less out of commission, and licensed the majority of its catalogue to Mute/EMI and other specialist imprints.

Yesterday, the group posted the following announcement to the Industrial Records website: "Industrial Records hereby announces it’s official re-activation. IR is the sole representative of, and ONLY official label representing and releasing records by Throbbing Gristle. TG’s contract with Mute/EMI expired in June 2010, and despite a number of other offers and proposals, all four members of TG elected to re-start Industrial Records to re-release the IR/TG catalogue." In addition to selling remaining copies of existing editions of the band's work, Industrial Records will be reissuing a score of TG classics like The Second Annual Report; D.O.A., The Third & Final Report; Heathen Earth; 20 Jazz Funk Greats; and Throbbing Gristle’s Greatest Hits on September 26th-- remastered by founding member Chris Carter, and packaged with 8-page color booklets full of "visual ephemera" from the Industrial Records archive. 2012 will see the release of Desertshore, a creative reinterpretation of Nico's third album that the group are already describing as the last Throbbing Gristle album.

The band also declared that they will no longer be performing live under the name Throbbing Gristle, citing the words of founding member Peter Christopherson, who departed from this plane in November of last year: "About the future of TG live. I do not regard it as possible for any changed band or variation of personnel to perform live as Throbbing Gristle without all the original four of us on stage." Visit the Industrial Records website for more information, and scope currently available releases here. --Emilie Friedlander, Altered Zones via FACT Magazine