Sleazy...

Our dearest beautiful Sleazy left this mortal coil as he slept in peace last night.
Words cannot express our grief...




Peter ‘ Sleazy’ Christopherson

1955 - 2010


Book of condolence at http://unklesleazy.tv
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throbbing-gristle.com
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Statement by Chris Carter & Cosey Fanni Tutti , TG / X-TG
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Peter Christopherson's final blog
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thresholdhouse.com
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flickr.com
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Wikipedia
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Guardian Newspaper Obituary
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independent Newspaper Obituary
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BBC Obituary
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Guardian Music Obituary
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Chris & Cosey Remastered Vinyl

REMASTERED COLOURED VINYL REISSUES

The first two of four Chris & Cosey remastered vinyl reissues - HEARTBEAT and TRANCE - are now available from all good record stores.
Rather than blow our trumpets here please visit these links and read the fairly extensive press releases.
The second pair of releases - SONGS OF LOVE & LUST and EXOTIKA - will be available from 10th January 2011.



http://www.cargorecords.co.uk/release/13900

http://www.cargorecords.co.uk/release/13901


Read full review of Trance - CHRIS & COSEY on Boomkat.com ©

Read full review of Heartbeat - CHRIS & COSEY on Boomkat.com ©

Announcement Regarding Throbbing Gristle

In the evening 27th October TG members and their associated managements received two emails from Genesis P-Orridge stating he was no longer willing to perform in Throbbing Gristle and returned to his home in New York.

Cosey, Sleazy & Chris have concluded that once more, and for the time being, Throbbing Gristle has Ceased to Exist, at least as a live entity.

Therefore, and with deepest apologies, TG must cancel their scheduled performance at Archa Theatre, in Prague, Czech Republic on 30th October.
It being too short notice to offer an alternative set.

In order not to disappoint fans of the old quartet, Cosey, Peter & Chris will perform live under the name X-TG at Arena Del Sole, Bologna, Italy on 2nd November & at Casa Musica, Porto, Portugal on 5th November.

We hope fans will appreciate and enjoy this new project and the trio is looking forward to performing exciting new and radical electronic musics together.

Full refunds are available at the point of purchase if required.

Industrial Records Ltd, London. 29th October 2010

• industrial-records.com • throbbing-gristle.com •

Tutti Box

I have put a short explanation of the inner workings of the Tutti Box experimental sound generator on my CCCL (Chris Carter's Chemistry Lessons) blog - link below.

http://chriscarterchemistrylessons.blogspot.com

The missadventures of Chris Carter

or Carry On Circuit Bending

For the last week or so I’ve been head down, hard at work building a custom sound generator for Cosey to perform with at the upcoming Throbbing Gristle shows (details at throbbing-gristle.com).

Things started out well, if a little slowly as I haven’t put soldering iron to component for quite a while. Anyway by Monday we had an unfinished but functioning box of sonic tricks that sounded pretty good to us. The penultimate stage was mostly cosmetic, with Cosey choosing the colour of various LEDs, buttons and the type of control knobs. On Tuesday I was finishing it all off and finally putting the last few components in place.

So there I was in the kitchen - no I don’t have an underground lair or mountaintop laboratory... yet, though I do have a snazzy white lab coat. So I’m drilling a small 3mm hole in a nice piece of vintage 1970s’ copper covered circuit board while holding it in place when (and this all happened in a split second) the drill bit snapped, the drill jumped across the board and continued drilling through the nail of my middle finger with what was left of the broken drill bit.

I can’t remember exactly what happened immediately following this mishap, it seems I went into shock from the pain, then passed out. Weirdly I remember standing in the kitchen looking at my drilled and bloody finger then the next moment I was sitting in our car on my way to hospital wondering how on earth I’d got there. That oddly dislocated feeling is how I imagine one would feel when time travelling or teleporting - well apart from the searing pain.

So after being administered the usual x-rays, bandages and meds in the A&E department, and endless waiting around, I was sent home with a diagnosis of “a nasty hole but no broken bones”. Next morning I got a worried phone call from the hospital - by a doctor who was supposed to have checked me over in A&E but for whatever reason didn’t - telling me to return immediately for more treatment as the x-rays showed my finger was broken. Well I could have bloody well told them that!

So fast forward to Thursday... I’m in full-on ‘clearing up’ mode vacuuming, putting away piles of odds n’ ends, spare parts, unused components and attempting to get our kitchen back to normal - basically with one and a half hands.

I have this very nice Italian folding desk that was given to me in the 1970s’, I use it regularly for projects as does Cosey, Nick and many house guests. And although it has a plastic worktop it’s heavy because the frame is made from chromed steel. I’ve unfolded/folded this desk a hundred times but with one hand, and half a hand, it is not so easy. To fold it involves a flipping action so that it goes from being a regular desk to being a completely flat frame you can tuck away anywhere. So I flipped it... but being too concerned about catching my drilled finger in the frame that I didn’t realise my little finger, my pinky, was lying somewhere between the two halves of the frame. With a dull snap and a loud shout my finger was crushed and in a split second it was broken, within 4 hours it was literally black and blue.

Apart from cracking a rib in the 70s I have never broken a bone in my body, then I break two fingers in two days, what are the chances? Well according to the three doctors and half a dozen nurses I’ve seen this week both injuries are apparently classic DIY mishaps and they see things like that all the time, though not usually twice in one week.

In future I’ll be more careful (much more) and even though these are not massive injuries they are bloody inconvenient!

Promo Video

Here’s a short TG video Cosey and myself put together in an afternoon. It is noteworthy for a few reasons:

• It's a promo video for Throbbing Gristle and the first as far as we are aware - well, officially at least.
• The footage is from the legendary - and as yet unreleased - TG performance at the Volksbühne in Berlin.
• It was compiled and edited in HD, another first for TG.
• It is the first video we have edited on our new MacPro.

Enjoy... and feel free to redistribute.

THROBBING GRISTLE PROMO 2010 from Industrial Records on Vimeo.

Interviews

To coincide with the re-release of ‘The Spaces Between’ vinyl album (see below) I’ve been doing quite a lot of interviews lately. Although be prepared for me repeating myself a little as some of the interviewees questions were quite similar. Anyway... as I get links to the online versions I’ll be posting them here.

Here are the first...

LINK


LINK


LINK

more to come...

The Spaces Between Pre-Order

My remastered ‘The Spaces Between’ vinyl LP is due for release on September 20th and now available for pre-order. Follow this link to order it:
http://www.piccadillyrecords.com/

This is the Optimo press release:
Originally recorded between 1974 and 1978 at Industrial Records studio in London ‘The Space Between’ album was first released as a 90 minute cassette in 1980 on Throbbing Gristle's Industrial Records label. It wasn't until 1991 that it was again released by Mute Records on CD. Although tracks from "The Space Between" have appeared on numerous compilations since its release, the album has never been available on vinyl until now. This new vinyl edition on Optimo Music, now retitled ‘The Spaces Between’, doesn't include all the tracks of the original album but has been enhanced and remastered from the original two-track master tapes and has new cover artwork especially for this release. JD Twitch has this to say about the release; 'The original release featured 15 tracks. As I wanted to have a reasonably loud vinyl pressing, I have picked my favourite six to appear here (not an easy task to narrow it down). In addition there is a bonus track ‘Climbing’ which was recorded around the same time that was released by Coil's Geoff Ruston on his ‘Men With Deadly Dreams’ cassette in 1981. One of the first ever recordings to use an 808 drum machine, it still sounds as if it is from tomorrow. In my opinion, these are some of the key recordings in the history of electronic music. They were made using very basic equipment at a time when there was no blueprint for what electronic music could and should be. There is a beauty, an emotion and an imagination present here that is lacking in a lot of modern machine music. This music is as vital and wondrous today as it was four decades ago.'

All tracks have been remastered by Chris Carter in 2009 for this release.
Musically, it's an electronic soundtrack for a sleazy sci-fi movie, with moments of uplifting beauty combined with bits of claustrophobic mania. Amazing stuff.



‘The Space Between’ is also available here... http://www.kompakt.fm/releases/the_spaces_between

A change of direction... & some remastering

Live Performance:
Well our schedule for live performance for the first half of this year is finished. We have some more events toward the end of the year but you'll have to wait a few more weeks for details on those.

If you were one of the many that got to see us performing - either solo or as Carter Tutti you'll be aware how much we've changed our live sound this year. In fact everything we've done in the last 9 months or so has been entirely instrumental and electronic - and on most occasions about 50% improvised. We are really enjoying this change of direction and instrumental emphasis and from the feedback we've been getting so do many of you. At the moment we're pretty much making this up as we go along and we are not entirely sure how it will all work out. But we have also been doing a lot of new recording using the same techniques we've been using on stage so expect to see some new Carter Tutti releases later this year.

Remastering:
I am about to start remastering our early Chris & Cosey catalogue for vinyl. This is quite an undertaking as I'm not only tweaking the audio - from the original master tapes - but I'm also reconstructing the cover artworks from what remaining negatives, print films and parts that still exist or aren't lost. Which to be honest there isn't that much of around anymore - which alone should make it an interesting project. All being well we are hoping to get these re-releases out before the years end...
watch this space.

Performing at Acusmatiq Festival

Myself and Cosey Fanni Tutti will be performing a version of our new live audio/visual improvisational piece ‘Harmonic Coaction’ at the
Acusmatiq festival in Ancona, Italy on the 31st July.

'Harmonic Coaction - Part Two'
A live audio assimilation of person place and time.
'Harmonic Coaction' is a series of sound works constructed from audio field recordings relating to the performance site. The work is created live in situ using those recordings as key components, deconstructing and manipulating the sounds in juxtaposition and harmony. The accompanying visuals consist of images inspired by the site to create an audio visual continuum.

Link to sound excerpt of previous 'Harmonic Coaction - Part One' performance.
http://soundcloud.com/chris_carter/harmonic-coaction-part-one-live-excerpt

Some shots from the trip are here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chris_carter_/4863343486/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chris_carter_/4862721407/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/coseyfannitutti/4853056618/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/coseyfannitutti/4853069554/