DREW DANIEL (MATMOS) Buch über THROBBING GRISTLE

 Drew Daniel creates an exploded view of the album's multiple agendas: a series of close readings of each song, shot through with a sequence of thematic entries on key concepts, strategies, and contexts

Previous writings about Throbbing Gristle have tended to dissolve into lurid half-truths about deviance on and offstage; their actual recordings, lyrics and images have received comparatively slim analysis. Yet their work informs a broad range of music which draws inspiration from TG's arcane, deliberately misleading example: not just 'industrial' music but also synth-pop, the lounge revival, the noise scene, techno, and the English esoteric underground - they can all trace their debts to Throbbing Gristle. Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (a deliberately 'inconsistent' album) explains why.

 

Drew Daniel will create an exploded view of the album's multiple agendas: a series of close readings of each song, shot through with a sequence of thematic entries on key concepts, strategies, and contexts. (For example: noise, leisure, process, the abject, information, and repetition.) The book will argue that on Twenty Jazz Funk Greats, Throbbing Gristle modelled a critically new and highly promiscuous way of relating to or inhabiting musical genre - where punk rock was passionate and direct, TG were arch and mysterious, perverse and cold. Drew will interview all four members of the band during 2006.

Drew Daniel is one half of the acclaimed electronic group Matmos - successful in their own right, and also as collaborators with Bjork. Drew has taught the history of electronic music at the San Francisco Art Institute and a sound art seminar at Harvard. He has just moved to Baltimore, where he now teaches in the English Department at Johns Hopkins University.