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Showing posts with label 2012. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2012. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
DVD release of Marie Losier's BALLAD OF GENESIS AND LADY JAYE on Oct 30, 2012
Friday, September 28, 2012
Genesis statement of forthcoming TG album "Desertshore"
Earlier this week it was announced that Throbbing Gristle will release a final double album featuring Desertshore, the group's interpretation of Nico's 1970 album Desertshore, and a second disc called The Final Report. It will be out November 26 on TG's relaunched Industrial label.
"CHRIS & COSEY released the TG records without my consent & have kept all the money. We NEVER quit TG.That is UNTRUE.BOYCOTT their records."
-Genesis's Vocal Tracks were deleted By Chris And Cosey for this forthcoming release.
"CHRIS & COSEY released the TG records without my consent & have kept all the money. We NEVER quit TG.That is UNTRUE.BOYCOTT their records."
-Genesis's Vocal Tracks were deleted By Chris And Cosey for this forthcoming release.
Saturday, August 4, 2012
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge speaks after The Ballad of Genesis & Lady Jaye screening at the Walker Art Center
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge speaks after The Ballad of Genesis & Lady Jaye screening at the Walker Art Center from Brad Elliott on Vimeo.
Filmed by Brad Elliott Marie Losier(Director) & Genesis Breyer P. Orridge took questions from the audience after the screening of The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis on April 4th, 2012 .Saturday, July 21, 2012
Sunday Routine New York Times Genesis Article
http://www.nytimes.com/
Sunday Routine | Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
One Body, but Often Second Person
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, 62, a British performance artist and lead singer of the industrial band Throbbing Gristle and the experimental group Psychic TV, lives in a tiny apartment on the Lower East Side that she calls “the nest,” and rarely ventures out on Sundays. Ms. P-Orridge, who was born male, embarked on a “pandrogeny” project, which included breast implants, in an effort to merge identities with her soul mate, Lady Jaye. Their love affair was chronicled in the documentary “The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye,” by Marie Losier, which will be released on DVD in the fall. Lady Jaye died suddenly in 2007, though Ms. P-Orridge believes they are still together and often refers to herself in the first person as “we.”
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
WAKE-UP DRINK I’m afraid we’re not very exciting on Sundays. I go to bed between 6 and 7 a.m. Then we get up at about 10. We never drink coffee because we can’t stand the taste. And we could only ever drink it with sugar, and now we’re diabetic. We drink one of those super five-hour drinks with no sugar that’s supposed to wake you up. We have a row in the kitchen — we take it to bed so it’s right there in the morning, to grab it, and then we drink a glass of ice water to trigger my metabolism.
FANTASY READING Then we stay in bed. We have a bedspread made of about 18 wolfskins, and we lie under the wolves and read a book and that’s considered luxury time. We read what we call airport books — trash fantasy action books. At the moment we’re really into Clive Cussler. It’s a way of switching off my brain. We read really fast; we’re speed readers. It’s my way of escaping and just not having to think about work.
CLEANUP Around 1, I look at the mess in my apartment and I think, “Uh-oh,” and tidy up, basically. And then usually we have one of my assistants come over. There’s so many different things happening. An art exhibit here, collages, three books. There are bits of paper all over the floor. It becomes something of an explosion during the week. At the moment, we’re going to record a new record, with Psychic TV, and after that a poetry project and organizing concerts and exhibits abroad. It’s interesting. Since Lady Jaye dropped her body, everything has exploded in the way she wanted and predicted.
SUSTENANCE Around 6 or 7 p.m. we’ll look in the fridge and see if there’s anything to eat, and then decide what to snack on. We’ll usually cook something simple — one of my favorites is mashed potatoes, peas and poached eggs. Very English, comfort food.
A VISITOR We’re not a very social being. We have a new friend, James, who’s actually female, from New Orleans. She would usually come here with her dog, Sydney, a cocker spaniel, named after Sid Vicious. We always take the dog for a quick walk, but apart from that we don’t venture out. When your job is being in crowds of people and touring with people, being alone is a luxury. Obviously we’d rather not be fully alone. We’d rather Jaye be here.
WHITE NOISE Around 10 we’ll sit on the bed and drink some ice water and turn on mindless television, because that’s the time of day when we really miss Jaye. That’s when it’s really quiet and you feel the emptiness and sometimes we just forget and think she’s going to come through the door. Not to watch TV, there’s nothing on. Just to keep the space agitated so the loneliness is not so bad.
LATE-NIGHT GYM Between midnight and 1 a.m. — the housing co-op where the apartment is has its own gym. Nobody’s ever there at that time. It’s my own gym. I take a stupid book, an airport book, turn on the treadmill and walk for an hour, reading. We’re so drawn in we forget even doing it. And then we return to the little nest, write in the journal and read books until we fall asleep around 6 or 7.
Friday, June 29, 2012
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Interviewed by Technoccult Part 1: TOPI Status Update
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Interviewed by Technoccult Part 1: TOPI Status Update
http://technoccult.net
Photo by Seth Tissue / CC
Klint Finley: How’s the new TOPI going? What’s the status?
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Actually, it’s rather gratifying. You’ve probably been to the Ning. And there’s that world map at the front which shows where there are active people and it’s almost obliterated the world map at this point. So whilst the activities are still somewhat limited, and directionless to an extent, what it does demonstrate to us is that there is still a serious appetite, curiosity, need for some of the ideas that we put into hibernation for a while from the TOPY with a Y. There was always the plan to have T-O-P-I, the One True Topi Tribe. That was always part of the strategy from the very beginning. But the first decade of T-O-P-Y, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, was… not the kindergarten exactly…. but that was sort of a filtering process to reconvene the idea of magic in a contemporary, demystified way in public culture. And that was almost too successful and we actually ended up in exile as a result of the threat that was perceived by the British establishment.
Ironically, they attacked us when we had already said that we were going to disband that version and become nomadic. The last thing we sent out to people was printed on what you send wedding invitations on, it was gold embossed card and it just said “Changed Priorities Ahead, TOPY Nomads.” Which was actually a sign, a street sign. We were driving along the road coming back from looking for a big house, a community headquarters in the north of England and there were road works going on and there was this big sign that just said “Changed Priorities Ahead.” And it was one of those moments where we went “That’s exactly what we were hoping to do.”
So the intended idea there was that we were closed down, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, in the hope that those who had really started to comprehend on their own, in their own way, what we were trying to say – which was to bring people around to using an intuitive personalized version of magic – to get those individuals to understand that we were a non-hierarchal, non-Masonic, post-”museum of magic” network.
In other words, a lot of people did their 23 sigils and then they would sometimes write and then say “What happens now?” and we would just say “That’s it. You don’t get a prize. You don’t get a new instruction. You don’t suddenly have a special title. If you’ve not figured out how to really discover and express your true desires by now then you’re never going to get it. Most people did understand that but there were some that expected a prize and were disappointed.
So we had reached the point of dismembering it and deconstructing the ten year project and the next step was to find a location to then go into the One True Topi Tribe. We looked at an old hotel in the north of England, we looked at the farm in a place called Arbor Low in Yorkshire, which actually had a stone circle on the grounds of the farm, which is where we used to have the TOPY Global Annual Meetings over a long weekend and we would camp out and we would do rituals outside in the stone circle. It is a beautiful place. So we were seriously looking at different locations. And then we, meaning myself and my family, decided to go to Nepal to do some research and to work with Tibetan Buddhist monks that we had come to know. And then come back and built the One True Topi Tribe but as you know that got interrupted by the British government.
So we went into hibernation and then Thee Psychick Bible got published. And during the next few months after that was published, we started to get lots and lots of e-mails and letters and meet people at concerts and events. They were saying, “We really want to know more about this. Why is isn’t it still going on?”
In between, there was The Process and Transmedia, wasn’t there? [1]
There was, yeah. There was the Transmedia. That was just an ad-hoc bridging phase. It was kind of a separate topic, but basically as you probably know we’ve been interested in The Process since the sixties and collecting lots of documents and books and so on. I eventually got to know Timothy Wyllie and Father Malachi McCormick and some of the founders. And it always was part of my culture engineering side to reinsert The Process into public culture but rehabilitated to get rid of Ed Sanders’ destructive, dishonest propaganda used to discourage people from really looking into The Process.
So one thing we’ve often done with Austin Osman Spare in the original TOPY, and with piercing and tattooing with Modern Primitives and then with that website with The Process. We inserted things that we think were both useful and needed to be reassessed and reevaluated in popular culture because they had become relevant again or more relevant than ever. So we shared things that we find inspiring and said “This is really inspiring to us and it’s changing our ways of perceiving things, you might want to really check this out.” So that’s been very effective as an ongoing process of culture engineering. So that was really what that part was about. It was to just prepare the ground for the books that came out.
The original, Love, Sex, Fear, Death book that came out from Feral House, that was originally going to be by myself and Benjamin Tischer, who runs Invisible Exports gallery. The original structure was going to be reprinting all the key magazines in full color and then a long essay and then interviews with the key founding members that we had done. At the time that we were assembling all the materials, Feral House changed the basic structure and handed it off to Timothy Wyllie. And so it became two books basically- the Timothy Wyllie anecdotal version and then the follow-up one with the facsimiles. We didn’t mind because the whole point was just to get that material out there again. However it actually happened isn’t so important as long as we could re-launch the information back into the culture.
So while we were doing that, we were always testing the ground and observing. Thee Psychick Bible really revealed a whole new generation of people who are incredibly curious and really hungry for more information about the original TOPY and wanting to actually find a way to apply that to their lives again. But, of course, we have an old TOPY proverb: “Never return to the previous character.” And so there’s no point to us in doing TOPY (with a Y) again and the ultimate point of the next step was always to do the Tribe. Because when people say “What’s the Psychick Cross?” we say “That’s how you recognize people who are your people, your chosen family people who at least on some level have similar interests or you can communicate with more easily than Joe Public.”
And all my life, the ultimate project has always been to set up experimental communities that create their own mythology, their own rituals, their own techniques for mind expansion, for maximizing whatever potential they have in whichever form, and leaving that behind as a legacy, some kind of work or alternative way of living. Not as a “running away into the countryside and being a farmer” hippie thing, but something that’s normal, practical. And the state of the economy and the state of the world as it is at the moment tends to suggest to us that there’s an inevitable collapse. That the economic system that we’re living in is fatally flawed. It’s based on the idea of infinite consumption and infinite growth. But if you have a limited amount of resources, even if you count the planet as one of the resources, there is a point where there’s no more. We can’t consume forever. There’s actually a natural limit.
The way things are set up is to treat things that are scarce as if they aren’t scarce and things that are scarce as if they aren’t. So energy, for example, we treat as though it’s not scarce at all. And individual labor like people are not scarce at all. There’s plenty of people but we sort of treat people as if they were scarce in certain ways. [2]
Well, in terms of western capitalism, the powers that be, as far as we’re concerned and we’ve written about it in Psychick Bible that they think of human beings just as a resource like the cows or sheep, whatever. And in the industrial revolution, it suited the people who control societies and economies to have a more educated, healthier workforce. So in the west you’ve got more education, better healthcare, better housing and so on, because they needed strong, healthy people to work in the factories.
As we got more technological, they’ve ended up with all these workers who they need less and less of. So now human beings are actually a redundant factor using up food, air, energy and everything else and they don’t really need us anymore. And if they could get away with just erasing us, they would. The people who are at the top of the pyramid of power and in control of economies are ruthless. It would not bother them at all to reduce the population to whatever they need because they see themselves as a separate set of species, and in a sense they are. We see it more in the west because it was started in England with the royal family, the aristocracy. We even say they’re “Blue Bloods,” a separate species, a more divinely touched species, chosen by god. But in fact they’re gangsters. Most of them get in that position by murdering rivals which is like the mafia.
So, anyway, we were sitting back and we were looking at the world outside and Lady Jaye actually said in the early 2000s “The economy is going to really suddenly crash really hard.” And at the time we did have some shares- and she said, “You’ve got to get rid of those shares.” So we sold them and within two or three weeks everybody lost all that money, when everybody’s shares became worthless for a while. That had made us really start thinking about it more and we thought, well, when it goes, if you’re living in a city, who’s going to be better prepared to survive? Hells Angels, Bloods and Crips and gangs, even survivalist fanatical Christians because they’ve already got loyalty to a group. They’ve got basic core belief. They’re prepared to protect themselves and fight for themselves. They’re more mobile and more paranoid so they’re more able to provide it. People who just live in their apartments in the suburbs and do their 9 to 5 jobs are going to be devastated literally and physically.
Or the Mormons. They are really well-situated for a collapse. They have an international structure, so that if all the Mormons in one city are displaced there are other places they can go. They have physical buildings. They have savings. They have food supply. It’s like their whole religion is built around being ready to take over if there’s a collapse.
We were in England and our car broke down and we got picked up by a breakdown truck and the driver happened to also be a fire inspector, he was moonlighting. So we were chatting and he said “They’ve just finished building a brand new Mormon temple in that town.” And we said, “Oh, yeah, the Mormons are a little bit strange.” And he said, “Strange? I’m the fire inspector so I had to go and inspect it to see if it would pass all the tests and be allowed to be open.” So he went in and he checked the temple and they said, “Do you want to go downstairs and check the offices?” and he said, “Oh, sure.” So they went downstairs underneath the temple and there were all these cubicles and people in there with computers and they were all basically collecting the names of people who were dead, anybody, because you know, they’re trying to save everybody by baptizing them.
And so we looked at them and then he said, “Everything is fine and safe.” And they said, “You don’t want to see the rest?” And he said, “The rest?” He said, “Yeah, there’s another 5 floors going down.” So he went down and there was a huge reservoir of fresh water. And as you say there was a huge floor just for food and supplies and then there were all these schools and meeting halls and then lots of places. Basically all the Mormon temples have bunkers underneath them because there’s no need for planning permission when they go down. Some of them have ten different levels and, as you said so rightly, those are there so they could order their people and swarm in and go below ground and wait to have a crisis. One has to assume that they have weapons too.
So they’re thinking ahead. And so that makes you think what about everyone else? Is there an alternative way for people like us, the misfits, bohemians, the radical thinkers, people who ultimately are social problem solvers in the long term? Most of the real solutions to perception, reality and magical descriptions of the way that we are or what we may become, the creation side of beingness. What about us? Can we come up with something that’s non-destructive and non-violent but also an alternative way of living? And what would it be? What would it look like? Obviously you have to start to share resources.
And so we began thinking about setting up the One True Topi Tribe, initially as a discussion group and say, is it possible, and if it’s possible, what would it look like? What are you prepared to give? What are you prepared to surrender? And how much do you really want to survive, or even if there’s not that much of a crisis, how much do you really want to change your behavior and the way you do life? How real is your hunger for real change and for evolution and for new thinking? And what would that look like?
Of course, for myself, we’ve lived in communes and community situations almost all my life, tended to do collaborations in groups and networks, rather than do the divined inspired individual which is to me not that interesting. And that’s always been the ultimate plan, to find a way to set up a community, more of a village than a commune, but a community based on creation, magic, revelation and the exploration of unlimited visions of reality, consciousness, everything.
Is this connected to the idea of the cut-up? I know that a lot of your work, almost everything, kind of comes back to the Gysin/Burroughs cut-up method. So how does that apply to TOPI?
Well, one of the basic questions that the original TOPY was designed to address was in order for the human species to truly evolve we have to change our behavior. And the question is, is it ever going to be possible to change our innate behavior? Because at the moment we, as a species, we are at a primitive larval state of consciousness. And one of the things we often say is, how could there ever have been a second war? If there’s a war the first time, it’s novel and people don’t understand what the results are going to be, but surely when you’ve seen people maimed, decimated, crippled, wounded, grieving, everything destroyed, children lying dead and crippled… surely we would never ever let that happen again. It would be just too horrendous, too vile, to ever, ever let that happen again. And yet as a species, thousands of years later, almost everybody is at war in one way or another. New York communities, nations, belief systems and religions are still locked in this idea that one person’s opinions can be forced on another by violence. And that’s a really sad, pathetic state of affairs. So the first question was, can we possibly change? And if we can, how?
Burroughs said to me right at the beginning in ’71, almost as a sort of a test: “What I want you to think about, Gen: is it possible to short circuit control?” But somehow in my mind that got switched to: “is it possible to short circuit our behavior?” And then we look back and we thought, where does it come from? In the earliest prehistoric, or should I say preastoric because it’s neutral- in the earliest preastoric times human beings were just struggling to survive like any other animals. And so the male of the species was, in the DNA, this aggressive gene, an aspect that was about survival and it makes sense when everything – the environment, the weather, the predators – everything is about getting into survival, that, yes, we need to have an aggressive program in our behavior.
And it’s because of that that we’re still here, that we’ve managed to take control or have an effect on the physical environment whereas in the beginning we had not mastered the environment. Now, to some extent, we’ve mastered our environment and we’ve created some credible post technological, digital, futuristic environment worldwide. But we haven’t bothered to apply the same kind of research and resources to changing the way we think and behave. We’re out of whack. We still have this primitive, violent program genetically rooted inside us and yet we’ve changed the environment so that we can go into space, we can look at atoms and particles, do all these amazing things. But we’ve not valid as a species, as a whole, to even really apply the same resources to developing ourselves.
And one of the things about Tibet that fascinated us was that something like 70% of the population meditated for thousands of years in order to look at perception of consciousness. And that seemed to have got far enough along in their mapping of other dimensions outside and inside time to be able to drop the human body, the container of their mind, their consciousness and still retain a sense of individuated self in an immaterial space so much so that they can reincarnate in another body and remember who they were to some degree. The Dali Lamas, as you probably know, had to go through this test when they found there were lots of items that belonged to the previous Dali Lamas and mixed it with the ones that didn’t belong to that Dali Lamas and the child has to pick out only the ones that were his before. Otherwise they’re not the Dali Lama. And that, plus having met certain Tibetan masters, has convinced us that it is possible to transcend mortality and return.
So if they can do that, by sheer force of will and hundreds of years of focused meditation, what would we be able to do as a species if we devoted all those resources that go into war and weapons and useless things? If that was applied just to developing the consciousness of everybody. And why do we think that they attacked the psychedelic Sixties so strongly? Because it was- the moment when millions of people worldwide were suddenly trying to invade and explore other realms of consciousness, no matter how much it was like a bull in a china shop compared to a Tibetan monk, they were still breaking through ideas of reality and ideas of invitation.
So what you say then is TOPI is about cutting up behavior and cutting consciousness or am I just going too far with that idea?
GPO: No no no, it is. Because when we were doing COUM transmissions actions, we started doing them on our own, the solo one, and found that we would go into trans states and would do things occasionally like drink poison and cut myself and it would heal without a scar and start speaking in tongues and have an out-of-body experiences. We also ended up in hospital a couple of times in intensive care because we didn’t know how to repeat it in a safe way. It was very random. Sometimes the combination of sound, physical discipline and stress would trigger an amazing alteration of consciousness but sometimes it wouldn’t. We didn’t know how to make it happen when we needed to. And that’s when we stopped doing COUM because we thought this is getting really interesting but also very dangerous. We need to go back and think about this. Who might know more about these things that have been happening? Shamanic cultures. We started to look into Native American shaman and Siberian shaman and go and travel to the jungles, illegally, of Burma. We started to try and get more information about those states.
At the very least we thought more of the problems in the west especially is that inevitably a certain small ratio of human beings are born everywhere who are innately shamanic, innately magical or mystical. And in some cultures like Tibet, like certain, to me, much more sophisticated cultures, like Native Americans or the Hopi or whoever- If somebody demonstrates the potential to gift of shamanism they’re immediately taken to the wise people, and they’re told how to be safe, how to control these gifts and how to even expand these gifts and also how to share them in a positive way. And sometimes people are born who are conduits for this amazing shamanic energy but they don’t even realize people, we would say people like Brian Jones or Jimi Hendrix, people in popular culture who are so tuned to universe but completely clueless about how to protect themselves from this incredible energy and that’s what burns them out and destroys them. And it must happen everywhere even to people who just live in ordinary suburban families everywhere at random. So there are people all over the world who are intuitively and naturally gifted with the potential to be shamanic, healing, mystical people and there’s no one to help them and there’s not somewhere to go and be trained and have it explained and have a safe place to discover and explore these gifts.
And so that was another aspect of the TOPI. Let’s make a place. Let’s find these people. Let’s just say, do you feel a bit like this, like we do? Are you confused? Are you isolated? Does the status quo seem stupid, bigoted, hypocritical and not giving you the pictures that you’re seeing in terms of reality? Here is a place that will give you some encouragement and share what we know and you can share with us. And maybe that way we can all move forward a little bit. And then with ritual we, wanted it to be just a cut-up. Because if behavior is, if you like, genetic on a certain deep level, how would you break up something that’s ingrained, something that’s been inside our DNA thousands and thousands of years? And that’s where Burroughs and Gysin gave us the clue, which is DNA is a recording and behavior is locked into DNA, as well as society.
So, if it’s a recording, how could you cut up that recording and how could you cut up behavior? By cutting it up, by making random associations, by breaking the linearity, the logic, the continuum, and by breaking it up, reassembling it in apparently random ways, that breaks down all the expectations that we usually fall foul of and gives you the chance and space to maybe see, as Burroughs used to say about cut-ups: “Let’s see what it really says.”
And so, we saw magical ritual as a cut-up of behavior. That’s why we didn’t want a “museum of magic” of doing the banishing rituals and naming the names and all this Egyptian stuff. What’s actually happening here that’s- the names and all the languages and all the frippery and all this baroque nonsense. What are we actually seeing here that in a sigil, the orgasm, opens up the deeper mind and the other minds so at one moment they are all open and interconnected and you can post a message in it. You can call it magical, you can call it neurolinguistic programming, whatever you want to call it. But it works, and that’s all that matters. Or it seems to work a lot more than it should.
So that’s where we started to apply the cut-up and breaking expectation, breaking the linearity over and over and over to create new spaces, new collisions, new perceptions that you couldn’t get to any other way because we’re so trained by language, culture, society, family, education, economy. We’re so trained and so sucked in to this material solid established form of living and life and being and the hardest thing of all is to break it, truly break it.
Let me ask you, because I know you know more about Tibetan society than I do. I honestly don’t know that much but I’ve been led to believe that there was still a pretty significant element of control in Tibetan society on the part of the Lamas over the rest of society.
Oh yes.
So how do you protect against that? Because you’ve been having somebody who’s dedicating, you know, huge parts of their lives towards meditation and theoretically being compassionate but then they still have these patterns of control? [2]
You still have that, it’s very much like the Roman Catholic Church on one level. This whole hierarchy and this whole bureaucracy and it becomes this really ponderous massive edifice with thousands of years of scrolls and interpretations and documents and subgroups and cults and teachers and so on. Of course. And that’s why with TOPY we wanted to just strip away all their names and all the idea of of ownership of ideas and ways of breaking down behavior. Our basic philosophy is look for what’s useful and use it but don’t get sucked into the game.
We were in Kathmandu we just heard that Scotland Yard had raided our house and we couldn’t go back. We’d lost everything over night. We went into town and we used our American Express card and got all the money we could get on it which was $5,000 and then we went to see Samye Ling and through the interpreter he said, “Guess what, you’re an exile and now we’re exiles.” We laughed. And he had been talking a few days before this saying that his monastery which is right on the border of Tibet just inside Nepal and the Himalayas, that they were having real ecological problems because they had no electricity, so they were cutting down the trees in order to have heat, in order to cook. Especially in the winter which you can imagine are incredibly cold.
But there was a project that was being run by somebody, I don’t remember which groups or some aid organization, where they were supplying these small electric turbines which was basically just a big metal tube with a turbine in it, and because mountains are so high and all this watering, you basically just put this into a really fast flowing stream, guide the stream into it and it spins the turbine and makes enough electricity for a whole monastery to cook and heat and it’s not destroying anything, it’s just using the speed of water. And the cost of one of those is $5,000. And so having known that we’d lost everything we owned, we said, “Here’s $5,000 so that you can have your monastery without destroying anything else.”
Now some people would say that that was irrational and stupid to do because we also had two children. But what happened without anybody knowing that we had done that was we went back to the hotel we were staying at which was owned by Tibetans and without knowing anything they just said, “You can stay here as long as you want for free because we know you’ve done things for Tibetan people. We’ve been doing the same thing for the refugees all through the winter at our expense.” And then we went to the hotel room and we sat down and we looked across the room and we noticed this brown envelope, this suitcase, and we thought, oh yeah, when we left home about eight months ago we just put the mail in that envelope, threw in a suitcase, thinking we’ll read it later.
So for no conscious reason we just started to look through the envelope and amongst the bills and things was this postcard from Michael Horowitz and it said, “We were with Wynona,” – Wynona Ryder, is it was her father – he also looked after Timothy Leary’s archives. “We were at the Psychic TV concert and it was the most psychedelic thing we’ve seen since the Acid Test in ’66.” Then it said, “If you ever need a refuge, call this number.” So we walked back into the center of Kathmandu to the one international phone, because at that time there were hardly any international phones, and we rang the number and said “Guess what, we need a refuge.” And Michael said “Come over, you can stay as long as you want.” So we then rang Wax Trax up, our record label at the time, and said “We need tickets one way to America.” And they bought them for us instead of giving us royalties. And then we got to San Francisco. We moved in to Wynona Ryder’s old bedroom.
Then a few days later in a phone call Michael said “Someone wants to talk to you.” And we picked up the phone and it was Timothy Leary and he said “Genesis, I’ve been through this. I was an exile and on the run too. They were trying to get to my archives. Just come to LA, stay with me. We’ll do something.” So we went to LA. He gave us his old car which was actually parked at Michael’s and we started doing lectures with Timothy Leary about oppression, exile and control and that’s how we started to make money and find an apartment. But that wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t just thrown everything away.
So how do you know those moments or if that’s the right action to take? By the years of doing sigils and looking as deep as you can into your true motivations, what you really need. So many of us will say something but it is not really what we need to say, we do it in shorthand. There’s an example that we did with a Apache shaman and he told us he went around with certain people and said, “Tell me what you want, if you could have anything you want.” And one person said, “I want to go to America.” And he said, “Impossible. It will never happen.” “Why not?” And he said, “Well, where is America?” And he said, “Well, I meant I wanted to go to Las Vegas because I’ve always wanted to go in a casino and gamble.” And he said, “That you can do. But you can’t go to ‘America.’ You can’t stand on all of it at the same time.” And we do that so much with language and say just the tip of what we’re thinking instead of what we really want to say and that’s true in the way we behave, and in the way we even dialogue with our inner mind and with ourselves.
And so sigilizing and trying to strip away to the truth of what you want is one of the best disciplines of getting clearer and clearer to any given moment in terms of your response to things that happen. And so you’re always making choices that lead you towards your current final dream or next point that you want to reach.
And that’s why the more you can learn to have this ongoing critical self-dialog. “What do I really want?”" What I’m really saying here and learning through this exercise is cutting up logic and learning all different things coming at the same time and then selecting, sifting through and becoming more and more honest with yourSELF (self in capital letters) and becoming more and more in tune with that really specific you with no camouflage, no issues, no concerns with how you’re viewed by other people and how society views you et cetera, just exactly what it is that you really think and see and want to achieve. It sounds easy and it’s not. It’s not at all. And that’s why these different ways of approaching just stripping back that real desire that’s so important and so useful.
But by keeping and using cut-up in different forms you maintain an edge because the hardest thing is to stop yourself getting back into habits. You start to take it for granted. You’re doing quite well and you’re seeing quite well so that’s okay. You can’t ever by the time you got that you keep pushing and pushing yourself all the time, double checking.
One of the things that really started me on this path was being in the Exploding Galaxy in 1969 and it was a very rigorous psychological commune. There were no walls. You couldn’t sleep in the same place two nights running. You couldn’t wear the same things two days running. You shouldn’t have your hair the same two days running. You shouldn’t eat the same two days running. Anybody could stop you at any moment in the day and just say, “Stop, how come that’s the same as it was yesterday? Why haven’t you learned to do something different? Why do you use a knife and fork?” And so on. And so you’d be pushed constantly to rethink, am I doing this because it’s the right way, the clearest way, the quickest way, the most effective way, or am I being a bit lazy or am I just doing it because this is the way I’ve always done it? And that was a really deep grounding that we kept ever since. And we added the tool of the cut-ups to it. But the basic motivation, the central way of being, is the determined rejection of habit.
[2] By this I was referring to value of scrip or alternative currencies that are based on human input during financial crisis, not suggesting that people should be paid less.
[3] See Friendly Feudalism by Michael Parenti.
The Process Church of the Final Judgement dossier
Technoccult interview with Douglas Rushkoff
Special thanks to Fiacre O’Duinn for helping to arrange this interview.
http://technoccult.net
Photo by Seth Tissue / CC
Klint Finley: How’s the new TOPI going? What’s the status?
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Actually, it’s rather gratifying. You’ve probably been to the Ning. And there’s that world map at the front which shows where there are active people and it’s almost obliterated the world map at this point. So whilst the activities are still somewhat limited, and directionless to an extent, what it does demonstrate to us is that there is still a serious appetite, curiosity, need for some of the ideas that we put into hibernation for a while from the TOPY with a Y. There was always the plan to have T-O-P-I, the One True Topi Tribe. That was always part of the strategy from the very beginning. But the first decade of T-O-P-Y, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, was… not the kindergarten exactly…. but that was sort of a filtering process to reconvene the idea of magic in a contemporary, demystified way in public culture. And that was almost too successful and we actually ended up in exile as a result of the threat that was perceived by the British establishment.
Ironically, they attacked us when we had already said that we were going to disband that version and become nomadic. The last thing we sent out to people was printed on what you send wedding invitations on, it was gold embossed card and it just said “Changed Priorities Ahead, TOPY Nomads.” Which was actually a sign, a street sign. We were driving along the road coming back from looking for a big house, a community headquarters in the north of England and there were road works going on and there was this big sign that just said “Changed Priorities Ahead.” And it was one of those moments where we went “That’s exactly what we were hoping to do.”
So the intended idea there was that we were closed down, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, in the hope that those who had really started to comprehend on their own, in their own way, what we were trying to say – which was to bring people around to using an intuitive personalized version of magic – to get those individuals to understand that we were a non-hierarchal, non-Masonic, post-”museum of magic” network.
In other words, a lot of people did their 23 sigils and then they would sometimes write and then say “What happens now?” and we would just say “That’s it. You don’t get a prize. You don’t get a new instruction. You don’t suddenly have a special title. If you’ve not figured out how to really discover and express your true desires by now then you’re never going to get it. Most people did understand that but there were some that expected a prize and were disappointed.
So we had reached the point of dismembering it and deconstructing the ten year project and the next step was to find a location to then go into the One True Topi Tribe. We looked at an old hotel in the north of England, we looked at the farm in a place called Arbor Low in Yorkshire, which actually had a stone circle on the grounds of the farm, which is where we used to have the TOPY Global Annual Meetings over a long weekend and we would camp out and we would do rituals outside in the stone circle. It is a beautiful place. So we were seriously looking at different locations. And then we, meaning myself and my family, decided to go to Nepal to do some research and to work with Tibetan Buddhist monks that we had come to know. And then come back and built the One True Topi Tribe but as you know that got interrupted by the British government.
So we went into hibernation and then Thee Psychick Bible got published. And during the next few months after that was published, we started to get lots and lots of e-mails and letters and meet people at concerts and events. They were saying, “We really want to know more about this. Why is isn’t it still going on?”
In between, there was The Process and Transmedia, wasn’t there? [1]
There was, yeah. There was the Transmedia. That was just an ad-hoc bridging phase. It was kind of a separate topic, but basically as you probably know we’ve been interested in The Process since the sixties and collecting lots of documents and books and so on. I eventually got to know Timothy Wyllie and Father Malachi McCormick and some of the founders. And it always was part of my culture engineering side to reinsert The Process into public culture but rehabilitated to get rid of Ed Sanders’ destructive, dishonest propaganda used to discourage people from really looking into The Process.
So one thing we’ve often done with Austin Osman Spare in the original TOPY, and with piercing and tattooing with Modern Primitives and then with that website with The Process. We inserted things that we think were both useful and needed to be reassessed and reevaluated in popular culture because they had become relevant again or more relevant than ever. So we shared things that we find inspiring and said “This is really inspiring to us and it’s changing our ways of perceiving things, you might want to really check this out.” So that’s been very effective as an ongoing process of culture engineering. So that was really what that part was about. It was to just prepare the ground for the books that came out.
The original, Love, Sex, Fear, Death book that came out from Feral House, that was originally going to be by myself and Benjamin Tischer, who runs Invisible Exports gallery. The original structure was going to be reprinting all the key magazines in full color and then a long essay and then interviews with the key founding members that we had done. At the time that we were assembling all the materials, Feral House changed the basic structure and handed it off to Timothy Wyllie. And so it became two books basically- the Timothy Wyllie anecdotal version and then the follow-up one with the facsimiles. We didn’t mind because the whole point was just to get that material out there again. However it actually happened isn’t so important as long as we could re-launch the information back into the culture.
So while we were doing that, we were always testing the ground and observing. Thee Psychick Bible really revealed a whole new generation of people who are incredibly curious and really hungry for more information about the original TOPY and wanting to actually find a way to apply that to their lives again. But, of course, we have an old TOPY proverb: “Never return to the previous character.” And so there’s no point to us in doing TOPY (with a Y) again and the ultimate point of the next step was always to do the Tribe. Because when people say “What’s the Psychick Cross?” we say “That’s how you recognize people who are your people, your chosen family people who at least on some level have similar interests or you can communicate with more easily than Joe Public.”
And all my life, the ultimate project has always been to set up experimental communities that create their own mythology, their own rituals, their own techniques for mind expansion, for maximizing whatever potential they have in whichever form, and leaving that behind as a legacy, some kind of work or alternative way of living. Not as a “running away into the countryside and being a farmer” hippie thing, but something that’s normal, practical. And the state of the economy and the state of the world as it is at the moment tends to suggest to us that there’s an inevitable collapse. That the economic system that we’re living in is fatally flawed. It’s based on the idea of infinite consumption and infinite growth. But if you have a limited amount of resources, even if you count the planet as one of the resources, there is a point where there’s no more. We can’t consume forever. There’s actually a natural limit.
The way things are set up is to treat things that are scarce as if they aren’t scarce and things that are scarce as if they aren’t. So energy, for example, we treat as though it’s not scarce at all. And individual labor like people are not scarce at all. There’s plenty of people but we sort of treat people as if they were scarce in certain ways. [2]
Well, in terms of western capitalism, the powers that be, as far as we’re concerned and we’ve written about it in Psychick Bible that they think of human beings just as a resource like the cows or sheep, whatever. And in the industrial revolution, it suited the people who control societies and economies to have a more educated, healthier workforce. So in the west you’ve got more education, better healthcare, better housing and so on, because they needed strong, healthy people to work in the factories.
As we got more technological, they’ve ended up with all these workers who they need less and less of. So now human beings are actually a redundant factor using up food, air, energy and everything else and they don’t really need us anymore. And if they could get away with just erasing us, they would. The people who are at the top of the pyramid of power and in control of economies are ruthless. It would not bother them at all to reduce the population to whatever they need because they see themselves as a separate set of species, and in a sense they are. We see it more in the west because it was started in England with the royal family, the aristocracy. We even say they’re “Blue Bloods,” a separate species, a more divinely touched species, chosen by god. But in fact they’re gangsters. Most of them get in that position by murdering rivals which is like the mafia.
So, anyway, we were sitting back and we were looking at the world outside and Lady Jaye actually said in the early 2000s “The economy is going to really suddenly crash really hard.” And at the time we did have some shares- and she said, “You’ve got to get rid of those shares.” So we sold them and within two or three weeks everybody lost all that money, when everybody’s shares became worthless for a while. That had made us really start thinking about it more and we thought, well, when it goes, if you’re living in a city, who’s going to be better prepared to survive? Hells Angels, Bloods and Crips and gangs, even survivalist fanatical Christians because they’ve already got loyalty to a group. They’ve got basic core belief. They’re prepared to protect themselves and fight for themselves. They’re more mobile and more paranoid so they’re more able to provide it. People who just live in their apartments in the suburbs and do their 9 to 5 jobs are going to be devastated literally and physically.
Or the Mormons. They are really well-situated for a collapse. They have an international structure, so that if all the Mormons in one city are displaced there are other places they can go. They have physical buildings. They have savings. They have food supply. It’s like their whole religion is built around being ready to take over if there’s a collapse.
We were in England and our car broke down and we got picked up by a breakdown truck and the driver happened to also be a fire inspector, he was moonlighting. So we were chatting and he said “They’ve just finished building a brand new Mormon temple in that town.” And we said, “Oh, yeah, the Mormons are a little bit strange.” And he said, “Strange? I’m the fire inspector so I had to go and inspect it to see if it would pass all the tests and be allowed to be open.” So he went in and he checked the temple and they said, “Do you want to go downstairs and check the offices?” and he said, “Oh, sure.” So they went downstairs underneath the temple and there were all these cubicles and people in there with computers and they were all basically collecting the names of people who were dead, anybody, because you know, they’re trying to save everybody by baptizing them.
And so we looked at them and then he said, “Everything is fine and safe.” And they said, “You don’t want to see the rest?” And he said, “The rest?” He said, “Yeah, there’s another 5 floors going down.” So he went down and there was a huge reservoir of fresh water. And as you say there was a huge floor just for food and supplies and then there were all these schools and meeting halls and then lots of places. Basically all the Mormon temples have bunkers underneath them because there’s no need for planning permission when they go down. Some of them have ten different levels and, as you said so rightly, those are there so they could order their people and swarm in and go below ground and wait to have a crisis. One has to assume that they have weapons too.
So they’re thinking ahead. And so that makes you think what about everyone else? Is there an alternative way for people like us, the misfits, bohemians, the radical thinkers, people who ultimately are social problem solvers in the long term? Most of the real solutions to perception, reality and magical descriptions of the way that we are or what we may become, the creation side of beingness. What about us? Can we come up with something that’s non-destructive and non-violent but also an alternative way of living? And what would it be? What would it look like? Obviously you have to start to share resources.
And so we began thinking about setting up the One True Topi Tribe, initially as a discussion group and say, is it possible, and if it’s possible, what would it look like? What are you prepared to give? What are you prepared to surrender? And how much do you really want to survive, or even if there’s not that much of a crisis, how much do you really want to change your behavior and the way you do life? How real is your hunger for real change and for evolution and for new thinking? And what would that look like?
Of course, for myself, we’ve lived in communes and community situations almost all my life, tended to do collaborations in groups and networks, rather than do the divined inspired individual which is to me not that interesting. And that’s always been the ultimate plan, to find a way to set up a community, more of a village than a commune, but a community based on creation, magic, revelation and the exploration of unlimited visions of reality, consciousness, everything.
Is this connected to the idea of the cut-up? I know that a lot of your work, almost everything, kind of comes back to the Gysin/Burroughs cut-up method. So how does that apply to TOPI?
Well, one of the basic questions that the original TOPY was designed to address was in order for the human species to truly evolve we have to change our behavior. And the question is, is it ever going to be possible to change our innate behavior? Because at the moment we, as a species, we are at a primitive larval state of consciousness. And one of the things we often say is, how could there ever have been a second war? If there’s a war the first time, it’s novel and people don’t understand what the results are going to be, but surely when you’ve seen people maimed, decimated, crippled, wounded, grieving, everything destroyed, children lying dead and crippled… surely we would never ever let that happen again. It would be just too horrendous, too vile, to ever, ever let that happen again. And yet as a species, thousands of years later, almost everybody is at war in one way or another. New York communities, nations, belief systems and religions are still locked in this idea that one person’s opinions can be forced on another by violence. And that’s a really sad, pathetic state of affairs. So the first question was, can we possibly change? And if we can, how?
Burroughs said to me right at the beginning in ’71, almost as a sort of a test: “What I want you to think about, Gen: is it possible to short circuit control?” But somehow in my mind that got switched to: “is it possible to short circuit our behavior?” And then we look back and we thought, where does it come from? In the earliest prehistoric, or should I say preastoric because it’s neutral- in the earliest preastoric times human beings were just struggling to survive like any other animals. And so the male of the species was, in the DNA, this aggressive gene, an aspect that was about survival and it makes sense when everything – the environment, the weather, the predators – everything is about getting into survival, that, yes, we need to have an aggressive program in our behavior.
And it’s because of that that we’re still here, that we’ve managed to take control or have an effect on the physical environment whereas in the beginning we had not mastered the environment. Now, to some extent, we’ve mastered our environment and we’ve created some credible post technological, digital, futuristic environment worldwide. But we haven’t bothered to apply the same kind of research and resources to changing the way we think and behave. We’re out of whack. We still have this primitive, violent program genetically rooted inside us and yet we’ve changed the environment so that we can go into space, we can look at atoms and particles, do all these amazing things. But we’ve not valid as a species, as a whole, to even really apply the same resources to developing ourselves.
And one of the things about Tibet that fascinated us was that something like 70% of the population meditated for thousands of years in order to look at perception of consciousness. And that seemed to have got far enough along in their mapping of other dimensions outside and inside time to be able to drop the human body, the container of their mind, their consciousness and still retain a sense of individuated self in an immaterial space so much so that they can reincarnate in another body and remember who they were to some degree. The Dali Lamas, as you probably know, had to go through this test when they found there were lots of items that belonged to the previous Dali Lamas and mixed it with the ones that didn’t belong to that Dali Lamas and the child has to pick out only the ones that were his before. Otherwise they’re not the Dali Lama. And that, plus having met certain Tibetan masters, has convinced us that it is possible to transcend mortality and return.
So if they can do that, by sheer force of will and hundreds of years of focused meditation, what would we be able to do as a species if we devoted all those resources that go into war and weapons and useless things? If that was applied just to developing the consciousness of everybody. And why do we think that they attacked the psychedelic Sixties so strongly? Because it was- the moment when millions of people worldwide were suddenly trying to invade and explore other realms of consciousness, no matter how much it was like a bull in a china shop compared to a Tibetan monk, they were still breaking through ideas of reality and ideas of invitation.
So what you say then is TOPI is about cutting up behavior and cutting consciousness or am I just going too far with that idea?
GPO: No no no, it is. Because when we were doing COUM transmissions actions, we started doing them on our own, the solo one, and found that we would go into trans states and would do things occasionally like drink poison and cut myself and it would heal without a scar and start speaking in tongues and have an out-of-body experiences. We also ended up in hospital a couple of times in intensive care because we didn’t know how to repeat it in a safe way. It was very random. Sometimes the combination of sound, physical discipline and stress would trigger an amazing alteration of consciousness but sometimes it wouldn’t. We didn’t know how to make it happen when we needed to. And that’s when we stopped doing COUM because we thought this is getting really interesting but also very dangerous. We need to go back and think about this. Who might know more about these things that have been happening? Shamanic cultures. We started to look into Native American shaman and Siberian shaman and go and travel to the jungles, illegally, of Burma. We started to try and get more information about those states.
At the very least we thought more of the problems in the west especially is that inevitably a certain small ratio of human beings are born everywhere who are innately shamanic, innately magical or mystical. And in some cultures like Tibet, like certain, to me, much more sophisticated cultures, like Native Americans or the Hopi or whoever- If somebody demonstrates the potential to gift of shamanism they’re immediately taken to the wise people, and they’re told how to be safe, how to control these gifts and how to even expand these gifts and also how to share them in a positive way. And sometimes people are born who are conduits for this amazing shamanic energy but they don’t even realize people, we would say people like Brian Jones or Jimi Hendrix, people in popular culture who are so tuned to universe but completely clueless about how to protect themselves from this incredible energy and that’s what burns them out and destroys them. And it must happen everywhere even to people who just live in ordinary suburban families everywhere at random. So there are people all over the world who are intuitively and naturally gifted with the potential to be shamanic, healing, mystical people and there’s no one to help them and there’s not somewhere to go and be trained and have it explained and have a safe place to discover and explore these gifts.
And so that was another aspect of the TOPI. Let’s make a place. Let’s find these people. Let’s just say, do you feel a bit like this, like we do? Are you confused? Are you isolated? Does the status quo seem stupid, bigoted, hypocritical and not giving you the pictures that you’re seeing in terms of reality? Here is a place that will give you some encouragement and share what we know and you can share with us. And maybe that way we can all move forward a little bit. And then with ritual we, wanted it to be just a cut-up. Because if behavior is, if you like, genetic on a certain deep level, how would you break up something that’s ingrained, something that’s been inside our DNA thousands and thousands of years? And that’s where Burroughs and Gysin gave us the clue, which is DNA is a recording and behavior is locked into DNA, as well as society.
So, if it’s a recording, how could you cut up that recording and how could you cut up behavior? By cutting it up, by making random associations, by breaking the linearity, the logic, the continuum, and by breaking it up, reassembling it in apparently random ways, that breaks down all the expectations that we usually fall foul of and gives you the chance and space to maybe see, as Burroughs used to say about cut-ups: “Let’s see what it really says.”
And so, we saw magical ritual as a cut-up of behavior. That’s why we didn’t want a “museum of magic” of doing the banishing rituals and naming the names and all this Egyptian stuff. What’s actually happening here that’s- the names and all the languages and all the frippery and all this baroque nonsense. What are we actually seeing here that in a sigil, the orgasm, opens up the deeper mind and the other minds so at one moment they are all open and interconnected and you can post a message in it. You can call it magical, you can call it neurolinguistic programming, whatever you want to call it. But it works, and that’s all that matters. Or it seems to work a lot more than it should.
So that’s where we started to apply the cut-up and breaking expectation, breaking the linearity over and over and over to create new spaces, new collisions, new perceptions that you couldn’t get to any other way because we’re so trained by language, culture, society, family, education, economy. We’re so trained and so sucked in to this material solid established form of living and life and being and the hardest thing of all is to break it, truly break it.
Let me ask you, because I know you know more about Tibetan society than I do. I honestly don’t know that much but I’ve been led to believe that there was still a pretty significant element of control in Tibetan society on the part of the Lamas over the rest of society.
Oh yes.
So how do you protect against that? Because you’ve been having somebody who’s dedicating, you know, huge parts of their lives towards meditation and theoretically being compassionate but then they still have these patterns of control? [2]
You still have that, it’s very much like the Roman Catholic Church on one level. This whole hierarchy and this whole bureaucracy and it becomes this really ponderous massive edifice with thousands of years of scrolls and interpretations and documents and subgroups and cults and teachers and so on. Of course. And that’s why with TOPY we wanted to just strip away all their names and all the idea of of ownership of ideas and ways of breaking down behavior. Our basic philosophy is look for what’s useful and use it but don’t get sucked into the game.
We were in Kathmandu we just heard that Scotland Yard had raided our house and we couldn’t go back. We’d lost everything over night. We went into town and we used our American Express card and got all the money we could get on it which was $5,000 and then we went to see Samye Ling and through the interpreter he said, “Guess what, you’re an exile and now we’re exiles.” We laughed. And he had been talking a few days before this saying that his monastery which is right on the border of Tibet just inside Nepal and the Himalayas, that they were having real ecological problems because they had no electricity, so they were cutting down the trees in order to have heat, in order to cook. Especially in the winter which you can imagine are incredibly cold.
But there was a project that was being run by somebody, I don’t remember which groups or some aid organization, where they were supplying these small electric turbines which was basically just a big metal tube with a turbine in it, and because mountains are so high and all this watering, you basically just put this into a really fast flowing stream, guide the stream into it and it spins the turbine and makes enough electricity for a whole monastery to cook and heat and it’s not destroying anything, it’s just using the speed of water. And the cost of one of those is $5,000. And so having known that we’d lost everything we owned, we said, “Here’s $5,000 so that you can have your monastery without destroying anything else.”
Now some people would say that that was irrational and stupid to do because we also had two children. But what happened without anybody knowing that we had done that was we went back to the hotel we were staying at which was owned by Tibetans and without knowing anything they just said, “You can stay here as long as you want for free because we know you’ve done things for Tibetan people. We’ve been doing the same thing for the refugees all through the winter at our expense.” And then we went to the hotel room and we sat down and we looked across the room and we noticed this brown envelope, this suitcase, and we thought, oh yeah, when we left home about eight months ago we just put the mail in that envelope, threw in a suitcase, thinking we’ll read it later.
So for no conscious reason we just started to look through the envelope and amongst the bills and things was this postcard from Michael Horowitz and it said, “We were with Wynona,” – Wynona Ryder, is it was her father – he also looked after Timothy Leary’s archives. “We were at the Psychic TV concert and it was the most psychedelic thing we’ve seen since the Acid Test in ’66.” Then it said, “If you ever need a refuge, call this number.” So we walked back into the center of Kathmandu to the one international phone, because at that time there were hardly any international phones, and we rang the number and said “Guess what, we need a refuge.” And Michael said “Come over, you can stay as long as you want.” So we then rang Wax Trax up, our record label at the time, and said “We need tickets one way to America.” And they bought them for us instead of giving us royalties. And then we got to San Francisco. We moved in to Wynona Ryder’s old bedroom.
Then a few days later in a phone call Michael said “Someone wants to talk to you.” And we picked up the phone and it was Timothy Leary and he said “Genesis, I’ve been through this. I was an exile and on the run too. They were trying to get to my archives. Just come to LA, stay with me. We’ll do something.” So we went to LA. He gave us his old car which was actually parked at Michael’s and we started doing lectures with Timothy Leary about oppression, exile and control and that’s how we started to make money and find an apartment. But that wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t just thrown everything away.
So how do you know those moments or if that’s the right action to take? By the years of doing sigils and looking as deep as you can into your true motivations, what you really need. So many of us will say something but it is not really what we need to say, we do it in shorthand. There’s an example that we did with a Apache shaman and he told us he went around with certain people and said, “Tell me what you want, if you could have anything you want.” And one person said, “I want to go to America.” And he said, “Impossible. It will never happen.” “Why not?” And he said, “Well, where is America?” And he said, “Well, I meant I wanted to go to Las Vegas because I’ve always wanted to go in a casino and gamble.” And he said, “That you can do. But you can’t go to ‘America.’ You can’t stand on all of it at the same time.” And we do that so much with language and say just the tip of what we’re thinking instead of what we really want to say and that’s true in the way we behave, and in the way we even dialogue with our inner mind and with ourselves.
And so sigilizing and trying to strip away to the truth of what you want is one of the best disciplines of getting clearer and clearer to any given moment in terms of your response to things that happen. And so you’re always making choices that lead you towards your current final dream or next point that you want to reach.
And that’s why the more you can learn to have this ongoing critical self-dialog. “What do I really want?”" What I’m really saying here and learning through this exercise is cutting up logic and learning all different things coming at the same time and then selecting, sifting through and becoming more and more honest with yourSELF (self in capital letters) and becoming more and more in tune with that really specific you with no camouflage, no issues, no concerns with how you’re viewed by other people and how society views you et cetera, just exactly what it is that you really think and see and want to achieve. It sounds easy and it’s not. It’s not at all. And that’s why these different ways of approaching just stripping back that real desire that’s so important and so useful.
But by keeping and using cut-up in different forms you maintain an edge because the hardest thing is to stop yourself getting back into habits. You start to take it for granted. You’re doing quite well and you’re seeing quite well so that’s okay. You can’t ever by the time you got that you keep pushing and pushing yourself all the time, double checking.
One of the things that really started me on this path was being in the Exploding Galaxy in 1969 and it was a very rigorous psychological commune. There were no walls. You couldn’t sleep in the same place two nights running. You couldn’t wear the same things two days running. You shouldn’t have your hair the same two days running. You shouldn’t eat the same two days running. Anybody could stop you at any moment in the day and just say, “Stop, how come that’s the same as it was yesterday? Why haven’t you learned to do something different? Why do you use a knife and fork?” And so on. And so you’d be pushed constantly to rethink, am I doing this because it’s the right way, the clearest way, the quickest way, the most effective way, or am I being a bit lazy or am I just doing it because this is the way I’ve always done it? And that was a really deep grounding that we kept ever since. And we added the tool of the cut-ups to it. But the basic motivation, the central way of being, is the determined rejection of habit.
End Notes
[1]See Phil Farber’s interview with Gen from 1996 for more information.[2] By this I was referring to value of scrip or alternative currencies that are based on human input during financial crisis, not suggesting that people should be paid less.
[3] See Friendly Feudalism by Michael Parenti.
See Also
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge dossierThe Process Church of the Final Judgement dossier
Technoccult interview with Douglas Rushkoff
Special thanks to Fiacre O’Duinn for helping to arrange this interview.
Sunday, June 24, 2012
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Morrison Edley to DJ Show with White Ring and Night Vision. 6.30.12
Presented by Sentimentalist Magazine. Live sets by White Ring and Night Vision. DJ set after the bands by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Morrison Edley. With DJ support between bands by THOMAÏŸÏŸ (S!CK).
June 30, 2012
10:30pm
tickets $10/21+
... Buy tickets through Ticketfly http://www.ticketfly.com/
St. Vitus Bar, 1120 Manhattan Avenue
Greenpoint Brooklyn
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge http://
Morrison Edley (of Psychic TV)
http://www.tumblr.com/
White Ring http://www.facebook.com/
Night Vision http://www.facebook.com/
June 30, 2012
10:30pm
tickets $10/21+
... Buy tickets through Ticketfly http://www.ticketfly.com/
St. Vitus Bar, 1120 Manhattan Avenue
Greenpoint Brooklyn
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge http://
Morrison Edley (of Psychic TV)
http://www.tumblr.com/
White Ring http://www.facebook.com/
Night Vision http://www.facebook.com/
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Forthcoming...
Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE intends to perform an expanded poetry solo work originally created for Hans Ulbricht Obrist's "MAPS" event at the Serpentine Gallery, London in 2010. It will utilize video, music and voice. It is called "CREATION RE/CREATED
PTV3 2012 dis-concerts
20th & 21st March PTV3 begin recording next in their series of
heavy hyperdelic 12 inch singles for their new special editions, Angry Love Records.
Friday, March 23rd @ The Talking Head Club @ Sonar - Baltimore, MD
Special guests: CELEBRATION
http://www.sonarbaltimore.com/http://www.sonarbaltimore.com/">http://www.sonarbaltimore.com/> 410-783-7888
Saturday, March 24th @ Johnny Brenda's - Philadelphia, PA http://www.johnnybrendas.com
April:
Wednesday, April 4 – leave for Minneapolis, MN / film opening
Tuesday, April 10 – 15 – Los Angeles / San Diego screenings
Friday, April 20 – PTV recording,
Saturday, April 21 – PTV recording,
Saturday, May 5th: Tony Conrad, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Morrison Edley in a rare concert appearance at Donau Festival - Krems, Austria
http://www.donaufestival.at/
Thursday, May 10 – Interview w/ I Hate Monday’s fashion blog, 3pm
May:Friday, May 18th Gig @ S.K.I.F. 16, Sergey Kuryokhin International Festival - St Petersburg, Russia
http://www.kuryokhin.net
Sunday, May 20th @ P!PL club - Moscow, Russia
http://piplclub.ru/
GENS MISC. UPCOMING PROJECTS: Heartworm Press are publishing “Collected Lyrics and Poems of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge – Volume One 1961 to 1971. Later they will publish Gen's first novel, written in 1969, “Mrs. Askwith”. Other books will follow.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
BREYER P-ORRIDGE "I'm Mortality" exhibit Feb 17-March 25 2012
BREYER P-ORRIDGE
I'm Mortality exhibit
@Invisible exports Brooklyn, New York
http://www.invisible-exports.com/
February 17 - March 25, 2012
RECEPTION:
Friday, February 17, 6-8pm
INVISIBLE-EXPORTS is pleased to present I’m Mortality, the second solo exhibition at the gallery of new works by BREYER P-ORRIDGE.
Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE is one of the most rigorous and relentless agents of the postwar Anglo-American vanguard, interrogating the meaning and substance of identity in a peerless half-century program of willful reincarnation and shape-shifting. Embracing the body as not simply the vessel but the site of the avant-garde impulse, BREYER P-ORRIDGE has reinvented and reintroduced herself again and again—as Fluxus pioneer, groundbreaking performance artist, inventor of industrial music, "wrecker of civilization," and, most recently, as pandrogyne, in a romantic project of identity and gender merging with her now-late wife, Lady Jaye. In her new body of work, conceived to be a kind of “inter-dimensional” collaboration between the material and the immaterial world, BREYER P-ORRIDGE probes the limits of each of those enterprises, drawing on the consonant and indigenous traditions of shape-shifting and reincarnation encountered during recent trips to Nepal: a practice born at an intersection of Mortality and Immortality as experienced as biology and as consciousness.
Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE (born in Manchester, England in 1950) was a member of the Kinetic action group Exploding Galaxy/Transmedia Exploration from 1969-1970. S/he conceived of and founded the seminal British performance art group Coum Transmissions in 1969. Her work has been exhibited at The Tate Britain, the ICA London, The Serpentine Gallery, London, the ICA Philadelphia, the Musee D’Art Moderne, Paris among many others. Her complete archives are part of the Tate’s permanent collection. Lady Jaye BREYER P-ORRIDGE (born in Brooklyn, New York in 1969) was a practicing nurse, dominatrix and vital member of the East Village performance scene of pre-millennial New York.
"We view Breyer P-Orridge as a separate person who is both of us, Neither of us take credit for the work, the work is a melding of both of our ideas which we would not have had singly. Both of us are in all of our art. That third being, Breyer P-Orridge, is always present." —LADY JAYE, 2003
I'm Mortality exhibit
@Invisible exports Brooklyn, New York
http://www.invisible-exports.com/
February 17 - March 25, 2012
RECEPTION:
Friday, February 17, 6-8pm
INVISIBLE-EXPORTS is pleased to present I’m Mortality, the second solo exhibition at the gallery of new works by BREYER P-ORRIDGE.
Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE is one of the most rigorous and relentless agents of the postwar Anglo-American vanguard, interrogating the meaning and substance of identity in a peerless half-century program of willful reincarnation and shape-shifting. Embracing the body as not simply the vessel but the site of the avant-garde impulse, BREYER P-ORRIDGE has reinvented and reintroduced herself again and again—as Fluxus pioneer, groundbreaking performance artist, inventor of industrial music, "wrecker of civilization," and, most recently, as pandrogyne, in a romantic project of identity and gender merging with her now-late wife, Lady Jaye. In her new body of work, conceived to be a kind of “inter-dimensional” collaboration between the material and the immaterial world, BREYER P-ORRIDGE probes the limits of each of those enterprises, drawing on the consonant and indigenous traditions of shape-shifting and reincarnation encountered during recent trips to Nepal: a practice born at an intersection of Mortality and Immortality as experienced as biology and as consciousness.
Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE (born in Manchester, England in 1950) was a member of the Kinetic action group Exploding Galaxy/Transmedia Exploration from 1969-1970. S/he conceived of and founded the seminal British performance art group Coum Transmissions in 1969. Her work has been exhibited at The Tate Britain, the ICA London, The Serpentine Gallery, London, the ICA Philadelphia, the Musee D’Art Moderne, Paris among many others. Her complete archives are part of the Tate’s permanent collection. Lady Jaye BREYER P-ORRIDGE (born in Brooklyn, New York in 1969) was a practicing nurse, dominatrix and vital member of the East Village performance scene of pre-millennial New York.
"We view Breyer P-Orridge as a separate person who is both of us, Neither of us take credit for the work, the work is a melding of both of our ideas which we would not have had singly. Both of us are in all of our art. That third being, Breyer P-Orridge, is always present." —LADY JAYE, 2003
Friday, January 13, 2012
The Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Interview w/ Wes Holland jan 2012
The Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Interview w/ Wes Holland
Interview originally published in the January issue of Rhythms magazine, 2012
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is a legendary artistic figure. Beginning his career in the late 1960’s with the confrontational performance collective COUM Transmissions, he later fronted the highly influential industrial music group Throbbing Gristle. In the early 80’s he formed the trans-media psychedelic band Psychic TV in conjunction with his community based Temple ov Psychic Youth fellowship.
Since then he’s remained incredibly prolific, but is perhaps best known in recent times for his ‘Pandrogyne’ project he undertook with late wife Lady Jaye - “for he and her to fuse and become one single being.” Lady Jaye tragically passed away in 2007, and to this day Genesis has remained dedicated to the pandrogyne (evident by the continual way he refers to himself as ‘we’ instead of ‘I’).
Ahead of his first ever Australian appearance as part of the Adelaide Festival, Wes Holland delves deep into the life and art of GPO.
I’m always intrigued to read about your work with COUM Transmissions. Stuff you were doing in the 60’s and 70’s would turn heads even if it was happening today… what was COUM all about and what fuelled it artistically?
We were at Hull University in England’s north and after three weeks of doing economics and social history we knew we’d made a terrible mistake in our choice of subject. So we stopped going to lectures all together, and started to do my own interventions, performance and improvised weirdness on campus and in the streets. In the summer of 69 a performance art group called The Exploding Galaxy arrived from London headed by David Medalla, a kinetic artist of note from the Philippines.
They were short of people because some of them had gone on the hippy trail to India, and so they put the call out to anyone on Campus who’d be interested in performing with in their weird and wonderful improvised performance group. Everyone said ‘Get Genesis!’.
So we joined them and hitchhiked to London. There, we hung out with William S Burrows for a while. The Exploding Galaxy was a very rigorous psychological therapy designed to destroy habitual behaviour of any kind. To try and de-condition all social and familial and peer group influence so that you could truly begin to create a unique and personal narrative for the story of your life.
COUM started out much more as street theatre and provocations. I remember one of our favourite activities was at the beginning of the weekend, we had a room called the costume room. There were various stereotypes of what we considered the British public at the time. There was a middle aged arrogant, bitchy Christian woman called Harriot Straightlace as well as a baby, a clown, a vicar and an alien brain - a visitor from some other planet. And there were costumes to go with each character. Each Friday you’d draw lots to become one of those characters. But then you had to be them 24 hours a day for the whole weekend… three days. Shopping, sleeping, and everything. You’d stay in character as if you were them. That’s an example of one way we were breaking down archetypes and inherited stereotypes trying to find out where behaviour begins, who controls it, which of it is necessary and how much of it is about control.
It got us more and more fascinated. We became friends with Burrows and then Brion Gysin. Burrows said to me in 70 or 71, “How do you short circuit control?.. That’s your task Genesis. To find out.” That was the beginning of the real evolution. COUM went from street theatre down to eventually just me and (soon to be Throbbing Gristle members) Cosey Fanni Tuti and Sleazy (Peter Christopherson). We were starting to do role play switching… Cosey would start out as female and me as male, and then we’d switch to become the opposite. It got even more intimate with sexual taboos and transgression and who decides where and what is appropriate? Because it’s different in every country and culture. Therefore it’s arbitrary. Therefore it can be chosen. That was COUM.
From out of COUM came the legendary Throbbing Gristle, what did you set out to achieve as a rock and roll group?
COUM started out very underground. We got more and more extreme and started to include bodily fluids and blood in our work as well as fake and real injuries… what is real? What is not? What is trickery? What is not? Where is the borderline between real and unreal? Awake and asleep? Alive and dead? Where are those lines and who decides? And are they even relevant?
Suddenly, we found we were being accepted by the British council and getting grants and performing at big arts events. We even represented Great Britain with Gilbert & George in Milan in 1976. As soon as all of that started to happen, we just thought “This isn’t what we want. We don’t want to become another member of the establishment, we have to change direction. What else can we NOT do? Ahh, none of us can play instruments! Let’s be a rock band! Let’s reconstruct rock music!”
The first thing we all agreed on was NO drummer. Drummers inevitably set up certain patterns that are so traditional that the responses of the other musicians are sort of drawn to expected techniques and sounds. We wanted to get away from that, and mirror the world we lived in which was post-war Britain. We grew up playing in the bomb craters in Manchester. We’d seen the results of war. We wanted our work to be a reflection of the Western European experience after a huge war. What was relevant to us? The decay and the industrial landscape. The steam engines we’d go past on the way to school were being cut apart and turned into scrap metal. The mills that used to make cotton and natural fabrics were closed because of nylon and manmade fabrics. We saw this contradiction. This fake modernity of Harold MacMillan’s slogan ‘you’ve never had it so good’. There was nothing relevant to the youth of the time at all.
We experimented with cut-ups to completely make it impossible for our conscious, habituated memory of music, to control what we play. If we do cut ups using tape recorders and so on, then we’ll create music that’s new. Music that is irrational and illogical to average ear. To reflect what we saw as the decay of British power and capitalism and fake freedoms.
I asked Richard Fearless from Death In Vegas recently about his love of Throbbing Gristle. He described you as the first electronic band to have a punk energy. He said the first time he ever saw TG, you came on stage and slammed the house lights on. It was blindingly bright, deafeningly loud, but incredible. Take me through a Throbbing Gristle live gig in the early days and that energy that came out of the shows.
We used to find unusual places to play. We played in a closed down school run by Spanish anarchists. It was semi-derelict and they’d created a rough stage out of scrap wood and burned bonfires inside the building to keep it warm. We’d use halogen lamps pointed at the audience as one of our ways of rejecting the normal idea of ‘audience looks at the band/band looks at the audience’. Instead its people almost blinded by the lights so that they have to address the music and the sound.
In those days there were no samplers and there were no synthesizers. (TG’s) Chris Carter, who is an electronic genius, built his own synthesizer. Sleazy built the equivalent of a sampler by using eight walkmans that went through a keyboard that could create rhythms so he could play it with his fingers and jam. All those tapes could be anything. He did lots of field recordings; he bugged the offices of a mercenary group and recorded them. He tape recorded illicit gay sex in public toilets and added all those things in subliminally – all of that was directly influenced by Borrows and Dysin.
We also built all the speakers ourselves, and they were loud. For my bass guitar we had bass bins taller than me that we could climb into. And four 4x12 amps as my monitors! A 200 watt bass amp just to moniter my bass so when we hit it, it made your clothes move. For a gig at Butler’s Wharf (London) we had two PA’s. One at the front was ours, and a normal one at the back which had a feed of our mix. We mixed everything ourselves, Chris Carter mixed everything live on stage. So for the audience, if they tried to back away from the extreme volume, it actually got louder!
We did all sorts of tricks like that. We once played inside a square cube of scaffolding covered in tarpaulins and we had cameras on us, so you could see us playing through the monitors inside a building. So if you wanted to SEE us play, you had to be inside watching the televisions, but there was no sound. If you wanted to HEAR us play, you had to go on the roof and look down five floors.
We did all kinds of things to mess with the idea of the band being the focus and the music being the really important effect. We thought of it as functional, metabolic industrial music. When Lady Jaye saw the first reunion gig at the Astoria in London she said “We’ve always loved these records… but now I get it. Now I get what people used to talk about.” Just today we were talking to some people who saw us when we played in New York at the Masonic Temple and they said the same thing; “We saw you live and we felt how loud it was, and how our bodies were affected, at that moment we understood the legend.”
I’ve heard you say that Throbbing Gristle was a band built on anguish, while your band that came afterwards Psychic TV, together with your Temple ov Psychick Youth fellowship, was about joy, friendliness and happiness.
Yes. That’s based on my position as the singer and the lyricist. In Throbbing Gristle, all the lyrics and melodies were dark… if you can call Maggot Death, Blood Bait or We Hate You (Little Girls) melodies!
In those days, between ‘75 and ‘81, we were really angered and disgusted. Just as much as all the people who formed punk bands. Disgusted at the hypocrisy and the bigotry and the attempt to continue this fake concept of the perfect England. That was not our experience. Our experience was in Palace Square demonstrating against Vietnam and seeing people beaten with clubs and trampled by horses. Our experience with Britain was very disillusioned. Disillusion and a lack of power to change things. The slogan from the 60’s rang true: ‘No matter who you vote for, the government gets in.’ That sense of helplessness and the inability to truly change things leads you to look for experimental alternatives of your own and to analyse what it is you would like life to be like, what it is you would like to see the human species do to evolve. To take away it’s primitive, disgusting love of violence, depression, power, control and riches for its own sake. The things that we believed was destroying the world.
So Psychic TV was our attempt to look for ways to set up communities and alternative networks where those who have enough in common could recognise each other. By the end, in Brighton in the late 80’s, we had five Temple Of Psychic Youth houses. Every Monday we’d all meet, one house would make the food and you’d all debate and analyse our issues with the world, our issues with ourselves and how we were operating as a community and failing…
Earlier this year I managed to track down a copy of the book Genesis P-Orridge book ‘Painful But Fabulous’. One of the most interesting parts was the selection of press clippings from articles written about you and your work with TOPY in the 1980’s. Tell me about being called names like ‘the sickest man in Britain’ and it leading to you being exiled from England?
“Put him in jail and throw away the key!” they used to write. In the early 70’s we squatted a whole street in Hackney and we moved in artists, writers and other creative people with families into the houses. We convinced the local council to allow us to stay legally and pay rent, and then after a few years they gave everyone the right to buy their house plus they put on new roofs and renovated the buildings. To this day there is this whole street of houses that is still part of this co-op in Hackney. Practical stuff. In Brighton we closed down the dolphinarium. Every weekend for a year we picketed the dolphinarium. Politely. We gave people leaflets explaining the dolphins were in this tiny circular pool with so much chlorine they were blind and when the dolphins died they give a new one the same name so nobody knows. After a year, they closed down. They used to make 1.5 million pounds profit a year, and the year we picketed them, they went bankrupt. Meanwhile, we’re being attacked by English newspapers for being ‘degenerate, evil monsters’ when we’re actually doing more good work than most people.
I’m in intrigued by the story behind the Psychic TV song Godstar - the theme from the unreleased Brian Jones film. Tell me about growing up obsessed with Brian Jones and the impact he had on your life.
I met the Stones in 1965. My father worked for a company that did corporate cleaning contracts, and we got two free VIP tickets to this show called Thank Your Lucky Stars. By luck, the Stones were there doing 19th Nervous Breakdown. As we had a VIP pass we were backstage, and all of a sudden I banged into Mick Jagger. I said “I’m so sorry Mick, could you sign my VIP card?” He took me upstairs and introduced me to the rest of the band and we spent half an hour there, talking and hanging out. Brian Jones had this incredible atmosphere around him. Very ethereal, as if he was partly here and partly in another dimension. Of course he was incredibly androgynous. All of the Stones became more androgynous through his influence. Even today, if Brian Jones walked into a club or a shop dressed in his clothing, people would stare and say “My goodness, how exotic!”. So that had a profound influence on me as a 15 year old. He became symbolic to me of both the exotic idea of androgyny but also experimentation. He did all the musical arrangements. He brought in the sitars and the marimbas and the harpsichords and all these instruments that were involved in the most classic Stones songs. Of course he did the first real world music record with the Master Musicians of Joujouka for the Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka album. I’ve still got one of his jackets. We were doing a gig and afterwards a guy comes up to me and says “I know how much you like Brian Jones, I used to be one of their roadies.” We recognised his name, and he gave me this jacket. It was a Houndstooth jacket they wore at the beginning to be more like The Beatles, and when I put it on, it fitted perfectly. It was almost spooky.
The film The Ballad Of Genesis and Lady Jaye was released this year. It’s an intriguing story… take me through yours and Lady Jaye’s experience with Pandrogeny?
It started out as instinctive. But it’s Lady Jay who deserves the notoriety.
The first day we met was in a dungeon where she worked as a dominatrix. We’d been up for three days on ecstasy and finally crashed on the floor amongst all the torture instruments. When we woke up when we heard voices and we saw this woman walking back and forth in the other room. We could tell she was wearing all original 60’s clothing with a Brian Jones bob. She started to undress smoking her cigarette very glamorously, as she changed into a fetish outfit. We found ourselves saying “If we can be with this woman for the rest of our lives, that’s all we want”. She was being told things like, “Don’t go in there… the guy in there is a weird English artist and you don’t want to go near him,” So of course she’s thinking “I must meet this person!”
She took me home and dressed me in her clothes the very first day I met her, then she took me to a slave auction. We were standing there watching this auction happen, and then we noticed a man next to us who was moving in a strange way. We looked down and she had one of her five inch high heels on the back of a naked man’s hand. He’d crawled up and begged her to hurt him. She was just grinding his hand with her high heel for 20 minutes while she was talking to me, so nonchalantly. We just thought, this woman is amazing.
We fell in love at first sight. It was so all-consuming that we wanted to become each other, to never be separated. So to represent that obsessive desire to fuse and become one being, we began to dress alike and do our hair alike.
Then we thought about it more theoretically and thought about what Burrows had said… “Where is control?” We thought control is DNA. DNA is the ultimate recording device. It’s the biological tape and in order to cut it up, you have to deny its power. How do you do that? By changing yourself in a way that DNA wouldn’t make you. By rejecting the body that DNA would give you. It wasn’t that we wanted to look identical, so much as, we didn’t want to grow to be the body that DNA wished us to be. So we started to do little things at the beginning. We got tattoos of her beauty marks on my face. We got our lips made the same size. She got her eyes surgically made more like mine. Then her nose and her chin. Then we got our cheeks done to match. Then on Valentine’s Day 2003 we went for it full on with matching breast implants. We woke up holding hands, looked down and thought “these are our angelic bodies.”
At that point it became a much more serious problem. We were out of the binary system of male/female, which is what we wished to do. We wanted to reject inherited systems of thought, inherited values, archetypes and stereotypes, genders - to truly build ourselves as two halves of one. That’s what we called the pandrogyne… the positive androgyne. The powerful androgyne. The political androgyne.
From that we started to think about cutting up DNA and the future. We thought about Bryan Gysin and how he said “We’re here to go into space”. How would we go into space? If you reject the idea that the human body is finished and is sacred, then to go into space we could become cold blooded. We could hibernate. We could grow fur. We might not needs legs anymore because of weightlessness. Once you dismiss the idea that the human body looks way that DNA wishes it too, and you let your imagination run wild, you could have gills and go under the sea. You could have feathers or fur, or horns and suddenly anything you imagine you can be, you’re liberated to actually choose, not just the narrative, but the physical logo of the human body that you present to the world. “Viva la evolution!”
You’re originally from Manchester, one of rock music’s great cities. One Mancunian who had a profound effect on your life was your friend Ian Curtis…
In the 70’s we became very good friends. He started writing to Throbbing Gristle as just a fan to buy the Second Annual Report album through mail order. He would ring me whenever they (Joy Division) came to London. He’d always ask me to take him around all the secret military shops that we knew of in Islington where he could buy uniforms and memorabilia, mainly from the second world war. We’d go shopping together, we became very good friends. When they were recording the Closer album he invited me down to the studio pretty much every day to listen to them recording. He told me that he was really influenced by Frank Sinatra, and so was I. The phrasing of Frank Sinatra is what got both of us.
We were the last person he spoke to the day he died. He rang me up from Manchester and he would often ring me late at night, very depressed. This particular night, he sang the song Weeping from our D.O.A. The Third And Final Report Of Throbbing Gristle LP, and he sang it word perfect. There was something so eerie about the way he sang it. That was actually my song about trying to commit suicide after Cosey left in 1978, the same year as the record. We just knew intuitively that Ian was going to commit suicide that day. In those days there were no cell phones. Hardly anyone had answer machines. We were ringing everyone we knew in Manchester, including Factory records people, saying “Somebody’s got to get around to Ian’s house, because he’s going to try and top himself!” Those who answered their phones just laughed and said, “He’s always saying stuff like that, he doesn’t mean it,” but we said “No, he really means it, please go to his house!” But no one would go. That’s why we wrote the (Psychic TV) song I.C. Water for him. The ‘I.C.’ is for Ian Curtis, but it’s also ‘I.C.’ as in ‘I See White’ and ‘Icy Cold’.
I’ve heard you describe yourself as a cultural engineer… what do you mean by that?
On September 3rd, 1975 in London Fields Park we said to (industrial music pioneer) Monte Cazazza “this music that we’re making needs a name”. We were explaining what we thought it should be like. He said “you’ve already named it, you keep saying ‘industrial’.” It was Monty who pointed out to me that I’d named this genre of music, industrial music.
The Modern Primitives book about piercing and tattooing was suggested to be researched by me. We arranged for most of the interviews and most of the content. In those days there were only about three people in the world doing that kind of tattooing. That book changed the world. Piercing, tattooing and liberation of the body and the skin became a way of expressing one’s self. The innate power of it remains. And now every town and village in the world has got a piercing and tattooing expert.
It’s not only industrial music and piercing and tattooing. We were very involved in the early days of rave. We also predicted in the industrial culture handbook that occult magic would become trendy again, and be reassessed which it did.
That’s being a cultural engineer. Literal manipulation of the culture almost subliminally, hiding behind the camouflage of being a silly eccentric rock star. Lady Jaye used to call it ‘dazzle camouflage’. You do it so obviously in front of people, they don’t see what you’re doing.
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge & Psychic TV will perform at the Adelaide Festival on Saturday March 3. Details at adelaidefestival.com.au
Interview originally published in the January issue of Rhythms magazine, 2012
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is a legendary artistic figure. Beginning his career in the late 1960’s with the confrontational performance collective COUM Transmissions, he later fronted the highly influential industrial music group Throbbing Gristle. In the early 80’s he formed the trans-media psychedelic band Psychic TV in conjunction with his community based Temple ov Psychic Youth fellowship.
Since then he’s remained incredibly prolific, but is perhaps best known in recent times for his ‘Pandrogyne’ project he undertook with late wife Lady Jaye - “for he and her to fuse and become one single being.” Lady Jaye tragically passed away in 2007, and to this day Genesis has remained dedicated to the pandrogyne (evident by the continual way he refers to himself as ‘we’ instead of ‘I’).
Ahead of his first ever Australian appearance as part of the Adelaide Festival, Wes Holland delves deep into the life and art of GPO.
I’m always intrigued to read about your work with COUM Transmissions. Stuff you were doing in the 60’s and 70’s would turn heads even if it was happening today… what was COUM all about and what fuelled it artistically?
We were at Hull University in England’s north and after three weeks of doing economics and social history we knew we’d made a terrible mistake in our choice of subject. So we stopped going to lectures all together, and started to do my own interventions, performance and improvised weirdness on campus and in the streets. In the summer of 69 a performance art group called The Exploding Galaxy arrived from London headed by David Medalla, a kinetic artist of note from the Philippines.
They were short of people because some of them had gone on the hippy trail to India, and so they put the call out to anyone on Campus who’d be interested in performing with in their weird and wonderful improvised performance group. Everyone said ‘Get Genesis!’.
So we joined them and hitchhiked to London. There, we hung out with William S Burrows for a while. The Exploding Galaxy was a very rigorous psychological therapy designed to destroy habitual behaviour of any kind. To try and de-condition all social and familial and peer group influence so that you could truly begin to create a unique and personal narrative for the story of your life.
COUM started out much more as street theatre and provocations. I remember one of our favourite activities was at the beginning of the weekend, we had a room called the costume room. There were various stereotypes of what we considered the British public at the time. There was a middle aged arrogant, bitchy Christian woman called Harriot Straightlace as well as a baby, a clown, a vicar and an alien brain - a visitor from some other planet. And there were costumes to go with each character. Each Friday you’d draw lots to become one of those characters. But then you had to be them 24 hours a day for the whole weekend… three days. Shopping, sleeping, and everything. You’d stay in character as if you were them. That’s an example of one way we were breaking down archetypes and inherited stereotypes trying to find out where behaviour begins, who controls it, which of it is necessary and how much of it is about control.
It got us more and more fascinated. We became friends with Burrows and then Brion Gysin. Burrows said to me in 70 or 71, “How do you short circuit control?.. That’s your task Genesis. To find out.” That was the beginning of the real evolution. COUM went from street theatre down to eventually just me and (soon to be Throbbing Gristle members) Cosey Fanni Tuti and Sleazy (Peter Christopherson). We were starting to do role play switching… Cosey would start out as female and me as male, and then we’d switch to become the opposite. It got even more intimate with sexual taboos and transgression and who decides where and what is appropriate? Because it’s different in every country and culture. Therefore it’s arbitrary. Therefore it can be chosen. That was COUM.
From out of COUM came the legendary Throbbing Gristle, what did you set out to achieve as a rock and roll group?
COUM started out very underground. We got more and more extreme and started to include bodily fluids and blood in our work as well as fake and real injuries… what is real? What is not? What is trickery? What is not? Where is the borderline between real and unreal? Awake and asleep? Alive and dead? Where are those lines and who decides? And are they even relevant?
Suddenly, we found we were being accepted by the British council and getting grants and performing at big arts events. We even represented Great Britain with Gilbert & George in Milan in 1976. As soon as all of that started to happen, we just thought “This isn’t what we want. We don’t want to become another member of the establishment, we have to change direction. What else can we NOT do? Ahh, none of us can play instruments! Let’s be a rock band! Let’s reconstruct rock music!”
The first thing we all agreed on was NO drummer. Drummers inevitably set up certain patterns that are so traditional that the responses of the other musicians are sort of drawn to expected techniques and sounds. We wanted to get away from that, and mirror the world we lived in which was post-war Britain. We grew up playing in the bomb craters in Manchester. We’d seen the results of war. We wanted our work to be a reflection of the Western European experience after a huge war. What was relevant to us? The decay and the industrial landscape. The steam engines we’d go past on the way to school were being cut apart and turned into scrap metal. The mills that used to make cotton and natural fabrics were closed because of nylon and manmade fabrics. We saw this contradiction. This fake modernity of Harold MacMillan’s slogan ‘you’ve never had it so good’. There was nothing relevant to the youth of the time at all.
We experimented with cut-ups to completely make it impossible for our conscious, habituated memory of music, to control what we play. If we do cut ups using tape recorders and so on, then we’ll create music that’s new. Music that is irrational and illogical to average ear. To reflect what we saw as the decay of British power and capitalism and fake freedoms.
I asked Richard Fearless from Death In Vegas recently about his love of Throbbing Gristle. He described you as the first electronic band to have a punk energy. He said the first time he ever saw TG, you came on stage and slammed the house lights on. It was blindingly bright, deafeningly loud, but incredible. Take me through a Throbbing Gristle live gig in the early days and that energy that came out of the shows.
We used to find unusual places to play. We played in a closed down school run by Spanish anarchists. It was semi-derelict and they’d created a rough stage out of scrap wood and burned bonfires inside the building to keep it warm. We’d use halogen lamps pointed at the audience as one of our ways of rejecting the normal idea of ‘audience looks at the band/band looks at the audience’. Instead its people almost blinded by the lights so that they have to address the music and the sound.
In those days there were no samplers and there were no synthesizers. (TG’s) Chris Carter, who is an electronic genius, built his own synthesizer. Sleazy built the equivalent of a sampler by using eight walkmans that went through a keyboard that could create rhythms so he could play it with his fingers and jam. All those tapes could be anything. He did lots of field recordings; he bugged the offices of a mercenary group and recorded them. He tape recorded illicit gay sex in public toilets and added all those things in subliminally – all of that was directly influenced by Borrows and Dysin.
We also built all the speakers ourselves, and they were loud. For my bass guitar we had bass bins taller than me that we could climb into. And four 4x12 amps as my monitors! A 200 watt bass amp just to moniter my bass so when we hit it, it made your clothes move. For a gig at Butler’s Wharf (London) we had two PA’s. One at the front was ours, and a normal one at the back which had a feed of our mix. We mixed everything ourselves, Chris Carter mixed everything live on stage. So for the audience, if they tried to back away from the extreme volume, it actually got louder!
We did all sorts of tricks like that. We once played inside a square cube of scaffolding covered in tarpaulins and we had cameras on us, so you could see us playing through the monitors inside a building. So if you wanted to SEE us play, you had to be inside watching the televisions, but there was no sound. If you wanted to HEAR us play, you had to go on the roof and look down five floors.
We did all kinds of things to mess with the idea of the band being the focus and the music being the really important effect. We thought of it as functional, metabolic industrial music. When Lady Jaye saw the first reunion gig at the Astoria in London she said “We’ve always loved these records… but now I get it. Now I get what people used to talk about.” Just today we were talking to some people who saw us when we played in New York at the Masonic Temple and they said the same thing; “We saw you live and we felt how loud it was, and how our bodies were affected, at that moment we understood the legend.”
I’ve heard you say that Throbbing Gristle was a band built on anguish, while your band that came afterwards Psychic TV, together with your Temple ov Psychick Youth fellowship, was about joy, friendliness and happiness.
Yes. That’s based on my position as the singer and the lyricist. In Throbbing Gristle, all the lyrics and melodies were dark… if you can call Maggot Death, Blood Bait or We Hate You (Little Girls) melodies!
In those days, between ‘75 and ‘81, we were really angered and disgusted. Just as much as all the people who formed punk bands. Disgusted at the hypocrisy and the bigotry and the attempt to continue this fake concept of the perfect England. That was not our experience. Our experience was in Palace Square demonstrating against Vietnam and seeing people beaten with clubs and trampled by horses. Our experience with Britain was very disillusioned. Disillusion and a lack of power to change things. The slogan from the 60’s rang true: ‘No matter who you vote for, the government gets in.’ That sense of helplessness and the inability to truly change things leads you to look for experimental alternatives of your own and to analyse what it is you would like life to be like, what it is you would like to see the human species do to evolve. To take away it’s primitive, disgusting love of violence, depression, power, control and riches for its own sake. The things that we believed was destroying the world.
So Psychic TV was our attempt to look for ways to set up communities and alternative networks where those who have enough in common could recognise each other. By the end, in Brighton in the late 80’s, we had five Temple Of Psychic Youth houses. Every Monday we’d all meet, one house would make the food and you’d all debate and analyse our issues with the world, our issues with ourselves and how we were operating as a community and failing…
Earlier this year I managed to track down a copy of the book Genesis P-Orridge book ‘Painful But Fabulous’. One of the most interesting parts was the selection of press clippings from articles written about you and your work with TOPY in the 1980’s. Tell me about being called names like ‘the sickest man in Britain’ and it leading to you being exiled from England?
“Put him in jail and throw away the key!” they used to write. In the early 70’s we squatted a whole street in Hackney and we moved in artists, writers and other creative people with families into the houses. We convinced the local council to allow us to stay legally and pay rent, and then after a few years they gave everyone the right to buy their house plus they put on new roofs and renovated the buildings. To this day there is this whole street of houses that is still part of this co-op in Hackney. Practical stuff. In Brighton we closed down the dolphinarium. Every weekend for a year we picketed the dolphinarium. Politely. We gave people leaflets explaining the dolphins were in this tiny circular pool with so much chlorine they were blind and when the dolphins died they give a new one the same name so nobody knows. After a year, they closed down. They used to make 1.5 million pounds profit a year, and the year we picketed them, they went bankrupt. Meanwhile, we’re being attacked by English newspapers for being ‘degenerate, evil monsters’ when we’re actually doing more good work than most people.
I’m in intrigued by the story behind the Psychic TV song Godstar - the theme from the unreleased Brian Jones film. Tell me about growing up obsessed with Brian Jones and the impact he had on your life.
I met the Stones in 1965. My father worked for a company that did corporate cleaning contracts, and we got two free VIP tickets to this show called Thank Your Lucky Stars. By luck, the Stones were there doing 19th Nervous Breakdown. As we had a VIP pass we were backstage, and all of a sudden I banged into Mick Jagger. I said “I’m so sorry Mick, could you sign my VIP card?” He took me upstairs and introduced me to the rest of the band and we spent half an hour there, talking and hanging out. Brian Jones had this incredible atmosphere around him. Very ethereal, as if he was partly here and partly in another dimension. Of course he was incredibly androgynous. All of the Stones became more androgynous through his influence. Even today, if Brian Jones walked into a club or a shop dressed in his clothing, people would stare and say “My goodness, how exotic!”. So that had a profound influence on me as a 15 year old. He became symbolic to me of both the exotic idea of androgyny but also experimentation. He did all the musical arrangements. He brought in the sitars and the marimbas and the harpsichords and all these instruments that were involved in the most classic Stones songs. Of course he did the first real world music record with the Master Musicians of Joujouka for the Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka album. I’ve still got one of his jackets. We were doing a gig and afterwards a guy comes up to me and says “I know how much you like Brian Jones, I used to be one of their roadies.” We recognised his name, and he gave me this jacket. It was a Houndstooth jacket they wore at the beginning to be more like The Beatles, and when I put it on, it fitted perfectly. It was almost spooky.
The film The Ballad Of Genesis and Lady Jaye was released this year. It’s an intriguing story… take me through yours and Lady Jaye’s experience with Pandrogeny?
It started out as instinctive. But it’s Lady Jay who deserves the notoriety.
The first day we met was in a dungeon where she worked as a dominatrix. We’d been up for three days on ecstasy and finally crashed on the floor amongst all the torture instruments. When we woke up when we heard voices and we saw this woman walking back and forth in the other room. We could tell she was wearing all original 60’s clothing with a Brian Jones bob. She started to undress smoking her cigarette very glamorously, as she changed into a fetish outfit. We found ourselves saying “If we can be with this woman for the rest of our lives, that’s all we want”. She was being told things like, “Don’t go in there… the guy in there is a weird English artist and you don’t want to go near him,” So of course she’s thinking “I must meet this person!”
She took me home and dressed me in her clothes the very first day I met her, then she took me to a slave auction. We were standing there watching this auction happen, and then we noticed a man next to us who was moving in a strange way. We looked down and she had one of her five inch high heels on the back of a naked man’s hand. He’d crawled up and begged her to hurt him. She was just grinding his hand with her high heel for 20 minutes while she was talking to me, so nonchalantly. We just thought, this woman is amazing.
We fell in love at first sight. It was so all-consuming that we wanted to become each other, to never be separated. So to represent that obsessive desire to fuse and become one being, we began to dress alike and do our hair alike.
Then we thought about it more theoretically and thought about what Burrows had said… “Where is control?” We thought control is DNA. DNA is the ultimate recording device. It’s the biological tape and in order to cut it up, you have to deny its power. How do you do that? By changing yourself in a way that DNA wouldn’t make you. By rejecting the body that DNA would give you. It wasn’t that we wanted to look identical, so much as, we didn’t want to grow to be the body that DNA wished us to be. So we started to do little things at the beginning. We got tattoos of her beauty marks on my face. We got our lips made the same size. She got her eyes surgically made more like mine. Then her nose and her chin. Then we got our cheeks done to match. Then on Valentine’s Day 2003 we went for it full on with matching breast implants. We woke up holding hands, looked down and thought “these are our angelic bodies.”
At that point it became a much more serious problem. We were out of the binary system of male/female, which is what we wished to do. We wanted to reject inherited systems of thought, inherited values, archetypes and stereotypes, genders - to truly build ourselves as two halves of one. That’s what we called the pandrogyne… the positive androgyne. The powerful androgyne. The political androgyne.
From that we started to think about cutting up DNA and the future. We thought about Bryan Gysin and how he said “We’re here to go into space”. How would we go into space? If you reject the idea that the human body is finished and is sacred, then to go into space we could become cold blooded. We could hibernate. We could grow fur. We might not needs legs anymore because of weightlessness. Once you dismiss the idea that the human body looks way that DNA wishes it too, and you let your imagination run wild, you could have gills and go under the sea. You could have feathers or fur, or horns and suddenly anything you imagine you can be, you’re liberated to actually choose, not just the narrative, but the physical logo of the human body that you present to the world. “Viva la evolution!”
You’re originally from Manchester, one of rock music’s great cities. One Mancunian who had a profound effect on your life was your friend Ian Curtis…
In the 70’s we became very good friends. He started writing to Throbbing Gristle as just a fan to buy the Second Annual Report album through mail order. He would ring me whenever they (Joy Division) came to London. He’d always ask me to take him around all the secret military shops that we knew of in Islington where he could buy uniforms and memorabilia, mainly from the second world war. We’d go shopping together, we became very good friends. When they were recording the Closer album he invited me down to the studio pretty much every day to listen to them recording. He told me that he was really influenced by Frank Sinatra, and so was I. The phrasing of Frank Sinatra is what got both of us.
We were the last person he spoke to the day he died. He rang me up from Manchester and he would often ring me late at night, very depressed. This particular night, he sang the song Weeping from our D.O.A. The Third And Final Report Of Throbbing Gristle LP, and he sang it word perfect. There was something so eerie about the way he sang it. That was actually my song about trying to commit suicide after Cosey left in 1978, the same year as the record. We just knew intuitively that Ian was going to commit suicide that day. In those days there were no cell phones. Hardly anyone had answer machines. We were ringing everyone we knew in Manchester, including Factory records people, saying “Somebody’s got to get around to Ian’s house, because he’s going to try and top himself!” Those who answered their phones just laughed and said, “He’s always saying stuff like that, he doesn’t mean it,” but we said “No, he really means it, please go to his house!” But no one would go. That’s why we wrote the (Psychic TV) song I.C. Water for him. The ‘I.C.’ is for Ian Curtis, but it’s also ‘I.C.’ as in ‘I See White’ and ‘Icy Cold’.
I’ve heard you describe yourself as a cultural engineer… what do you mean by that?
On September 3rd, 1975 in London Fields Park we said to (industrial music pioneer) Monte Cazazza “this music that we’re making needs a name”. We were explaining what we thought it should be like. He said “you’ve already named it, you keep saying ‘industrial’.” It was Monty who pointed out to me that I’d named this genre of music, industrial music.
The Modern Primitives book about piercing and tattooing was suggested to be researched by me. We arranged for most of the interviews and most of the content. In those days there were only about three people in the world doing that kind of tattooing. That book changed the world. Piercing, tattooing and liberation of the body and the skin became a way of expressing one’s self. The innate power of it remains. And now every town and village in the world has got a piercing and tattooing expert.
It’s not only industrial music and piercing and tattooing. We were very involved in the early days of rave. We also predicted in the industrial culture handbook that occult magic would become trendy again, and be reassessed which it did.
That’s being a cultural engineer. Literal manipulation of the culture almost subliminally, hiding behind the camouflage of being a silly eccentric rock star. Lady Jaye used to call it ‘dazzle camouflage’. You do it so obviously in front of people, they don’t see what you’re doing.
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge & Psychic TV will perform at the Adelaide Festival on Saturday March 3. Details at adelaidefestival.com.au
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