Gen's upcoming events and Misc.upcoming projects...





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.

Sunday, December 8, 2013

Psychic Tv Live 2 Brooklyn shows to close out the Y-era of 2013


Pre-orders up now for next Psychic Tv 12" from Angry Love Productions

OTTT28 "GREYHOUNDS OF THE FUTURE" 12" - 1st (PATCH) EDITION

$ 28.00

Price includes shipping and handling in the USA only. Overseas orders are subject to additional fees calculated at checkout.
OTTT28 - Psychic TV 12"
"Greyhounds of the Future b/w Alien Lightning Meat Machine Part II"
Random recycled colored vinyl
Edition of 230
Comes in traditional Angry Love 'handmade' packaging bearing rubber stamps, includes limited edition patch + insert.
*****PLEASE NOTE THAT THE PATCH IN THIS EDITION HAS TWO COLOR VARIATIONS AND WILL BE SHIPPED OUT RANDOMLY. CUSTOMERS WHO PURCHASE TWO COPIES IN THE SAME ORDER WILL BE GIVEN EACH VARIATION.**** 

THIS IS FOR PRE-ORDERS AND WILL SHIP BY THE END OF DECEMBER 2013


Sunday, November 24, 2013

3 New PSYCHIC TV Releases On Cold Spring


Cold Spring Newsflash - 19th November 2013


NEW COLD SPRING RELEASES

Shipping 9th December:

PSYCHIC TV - 'Live At Thee Marquee' CD (Cold Spring CSR189CD) - £7
PSYCHIC TV's complete, unheard show, recorded at the prestigious Marquee Club, London, 20th May 1986. For this event Psychic TV were: Genesis P-Orridge, Alex Fergusson, Mouse, Matthew Best. Tracklisting: 1. Intro, 2. Ov Power, 3. She Touched Me, 4. Just Like Arcadia, 5. Supermale, 6. I Like You, 7. Riot In Thee Eye, 8. Interstellar Overdrive, 9. Unclean, 10. Godstar, 11. We Kiss, 12. Roman P., 13. IT. Ltd x 1000 copies, featuring an 8-page booklet of unseen photos.
• All Psychic TV Titles• All Cold Spring Titles

PSYCHIC TV - 'Thee Fabulous Feast Ov Flowering Light' CD (Cold Spring CSR188CD) - £7
PSYCHIC TV in a unique line-up - a unique show, recorded 19th May 1985 at Hammersmith Palais, London. For this event Psychic TV were: Genesis P-Orridge, Alex Fergusson, Max Prior, Mouse, Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, Dave Ball (Soft Cell), Rose McDowall (Strawberry Switchblade, Sorrow, Coil, Current 93). Tracklisting: 1. I Like You, 2. Just Like Arcadia, 3. Godstar, 4. Unclean, 5. Baby's Gone Away, 6. Southern Comfort, 7. We Kiss, 8. Thee Starlit Mire, 9. Ov Power, 10. Gen Poetry, 11. Tribal. This is a completely unheard show, with unseen photos! Ltd x 1000 copies.
• All Psychic TV Titles• All Cold Spring Titles

PSYCHIC TV - 'Hacienda' CD (Cold Spring CSR187CD) - £7
PSYCHIC TV, 5th November 1984, Manchester. This was PSYCHIC TV's first show at NEW ORDER / FACTORY's legendary HACIENDA club! For this event Psychic TV were: Genesis P-Orridge, John Gosling (Zos Kia, Coil), Paul Reeson, and Alex Fergusson. Tracklisting: 1. Intro, 2. Enochian Calls, 3. I Like You, 4. Unclean Monks, 5. Unclean, 6. Roman P., 7. Southern Comfort, 8. Godstar, 9. Thee Starlit Mire, 10. Thee Shining. This is the complete show with unseen photos! Ltd x 1000 copies.
• All Psychic TV Titles• All Cold Spring Titles

PSYCHIC TV COMBO #2 - 'Live At Thee Marquee CD & Thee Fabulous Feast Ov Flowering Light CD & Hacienda' CD
(Cold Spring CSR187CD + CSR188CD + CSR189CD) - £18
BUY ALL 3 RELEASES FOR A SPECIAL COMBINED PRICE!

PSYCHIC TV - 'Live At Thee Marquee' CD (Cold Spring CSR189CD)
PSYCHIC TV - 'Thee Fabulous Feast Ov Flowering Light' CD (Cold Spring CSR188CD)
PSYCHIC TV - 'Hacienda' CD (Cold Spring CSR187CD)

• All Psychic TV Titles• All Cold Spring Titles

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Dazed Digital-Bizarre gifts and mementos from the life of a pandrogynous art/noise legend

GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE

Bizarre gifts and mementos from the life of a pandrogynous art/noise legend

IMG_8959_web
Taken from the November issue of Dazed & Confused:
The life and work of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (who refers to h/erself as “we” since amalgamating with late wife Lady Jaye in their Pandrogyny project) is marked by an unending devotion to exploration. Through Early Worm, the Exploding Galaxy, COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Thee Majesty, PTV3 and beyond, the artist, composer, thinker and performer has made it h/er business to cut apart reality and splice it back together again while expanding boundaries of sound, physicality, belief and consciousness. 
In P-Orridge’s high-rise apartment in downtown New York, artefacts from various explorations across the globe are strewn about the premises. Given h/er belief that bodies are merely vessels that house our greater, more spiritual selves, what sort of power can we find in these inanimate objects? 
“There’s no way of knowing whether we’re here or if someone is dreaming us,” P-Orridge says. “My dreams are as real as this. Therefore, what’s real? You have out-of-body experiences from meditation, extreme pain or using psychedelic chemicals and you’re like, wait a minute, these walls can just dissolve. It seems solid, but is it really? So these objects are inculcated with some form of energy that can be absorbed and retained. They help me function. The talismans hold power by being believed in, just like people with their crucifixes. All we can say is that we found they have assisted my navigation through this apparent reality.”
Motorcycle Jackets
Photography by Fumi Nagasaka
Motorcycle jackets
“The Illuminati jackets are from Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth’s motorcycle club – that’s what they called them-selves. They were based in Portland. When we were touring in the late 80s, we’d drive up to Portland and then six of them would actually follow us all down the west coast: two in front, two behind and two at the side. It looked fucking fabulous. And there were these people doing merch who had a heavy Volkswagen thing behind that, so it was a real convoy going through. Blew the citizens’ minds, it did! We also used to have Hells Angels colours and Gypsy Jokers too. We gave back the Hells Angels colours as tradition demands, but kept the Gypsy Jokers. Then one day we were walking down the road in Hackney and a whole crowd of Hells Angels surrounded me and said, ‘Why are you wearing those colours?’ And we said, because I’m a member of the Gypsy Jokers, and they went, ‘We want it! Give it to us!’ And we went, ‘No!’ But it so happened we were on a bridge over a canal, and they got out their spanners and chains and said, ‘Here’ the deal. You either give it to us or we beat you half to death and throw you in the canal so you drown.’ So I gave it to them. Because, you know, you can’t argue with that. Really a sad day. I still miss that jacket. 
Breyer P-Orridge clone DNA
This is a clone of me and Lady Jaye. It’s all the DNA necessary to create something that’s made from both of us. It’s a mini version of the alchemical wedding. Both of us integrated. It’s got pubic hair, hair from the head, eyebrows, toenails, fingernails, skin off of heels, blood. 
 
THESE TALISMANS HOLD POWER BY BEING BELIEVED IN. THEY HAVE ASSISTED MY NAVIGATION THROUGH THIS APPARENT REALITY
 
Derek Jarman’s seaside gift
We met Derek in 1969 when we were in the Exploding Galaxy. That was the period when gay lib street theatre and being a transvestite as a political act began. So on the weekends we would all dress up in drag and run around Portobello Road, doing fake opera and ballet and hugging people and kissing men, and so on. Then there was a gap of time as often happens, and we were walking down Tottenham Court Road and heard this incredibly distinctive, posh voice: ‘Gen, is that you?’ And it was Derek. He lived above a cinema and we went for the traditional British cup of tea and reconnected. He was really excited by the idea of Throbbing Gristle, and was even more excited by Psychic TV because he was into magick. So he started to ask me, could you do soundtracks? So TG did In the Shadow of the Sun and Psychic TV also did one which was originally called Mirrors. Instead of money, he would give me paintings and objects. This one is from Dungeness, where he had his cottage. It says on the back that he carved that piece of clay on a beach in 1961. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? And it has memory. Thank God Scotland Yard didn’t take it. 
Dream Machine
Photography by Fumi Nagasaka
Dreamachine
This one arrived in the mail unexpectedly in a parcel. We opened it and there was this dreamachine (a stroboscopic flicker device created in 1961 by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, William Burroughs’s ‘systems adviser’ and lover) with a note from this guy called Johnny Smoke,  this very intensely, self-consciously eccentric person. He said, ‘I’ve been making dreamachines and if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t know how. So I’ve had the idea of making them available the way that Brion Gysin wanted.’ So we said, that’s great! He’s asked me to do some kind of template of the inside and paint it or write on it for a special Breyer P-Orridge dreamachine. He’s made one with fur on the outside. He’s pimping dreamachines! Next he’ll have a low-rider one with hydraulics. But it’s just great that it’s there because that’s what Brion wanted. He didn’t care if it became public domain. He just said they are a really good tool for activating the internal mechanism. 
Tridents
We once took these through customs. They said, ‘Hey, what are you? Neptune or Satan?’ It was fortunate they were amused. We got them all in Kathmandu, where there are these shops with Tibetan and Nepali stuff, necklaces and stuff. The tourists want all the  shiny bits, but this one shop is run by a guy who has one lightbulb and everything is covered in dust. It’s obvious he doesn’t care if he sells anything, and that’s where we go rooting around. We feel a compulsion to rescue these because to us they feel alive. And they shouldn’t be in the corner turning rusty, they should be respected like animals. They’re spiritual orphans and we’re their foster parent.” 
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, a limited-edition book of unpublished personal photographs, is published by First Third Books on November 4

Sunday, October 13, 2013

COUM Transmissions Home Aged & The 18 Month Hope LP pre-orders!

"Pre-orders up for the new COUM Transmissions “Home Aged & The 18 Month Hope” LP which features a compilation of various recordings and interviews spanning from 1971-1975. COUM Transmissions was a Fluxus-inspired performance art group founded in 1969 by Genesis P-Orridge (then Neil Andrew Megson) after a stint with the Exploding Galaxy Commune and would go on for the next ten years and eventually morph itself into the industrial music pioneers, Throbbing Gristle." via Dias Records http://shop.daisrecords.com/collections/vinyl/products/coum-transmissions-home-aged-the-18-month-hope-lp

Sunday, September 22, 2013

William S. Burroughs & the Wreckers of Civilization

Written by Matthew Levi Stevens and published by RealityStudio.org 

William S. Burroughs & the Wreckers of Civilization

by Matthew Levi Stevens

Genesis P Orridge and William S. Burroughs, circa 1981 (xerox from NME)
Genesis P Orridge and William S. Burroughs, circa 1981 (xerox from NME)
Sometime in 1973 William S. Burroughs received in the mail to Duke Street an apparently irate letter, complaining: 
“Dear William S. Burroughs, I’m so tired of you and Allen Ginsberg exploiting the fact that you know me – telling everybody just so you can get into parties free. Will you please cease and desist?”
A little while later he received a small booklet called To Do With Smooth Paper, which he acknowledged with a postcard. Subsequently, he received a shoebox containing a plaster-cast of a left hand, minus the thumb, on which had been written “Dead Finger’s Thumb.” Intrigued, Burroughs wrote back, and before long was extending an invitation to visit to a young man going by the unlikely name of Genesis P-Orridge.
Born Neil Andrew Megson in Manchester in 1950, the psychedelic prankster and would-be Beatnik who called himself Genesis P-Orridge had discovered the Beats when an English teacher going by the nickname “Bogbrush” had introduced him to Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, and then shortly thereafter he found a copy of Burroughs’ Dead Fingers Talk in a motorway services shop. This was in 1965, and before long young Megson, like so many others of his generation, was busy turning on, tuning in and dropping out as fast as he could: growing his hair, hitchhiking to London to see The Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd, and spending time in the commune of David Medalla’s Exploding Galaxy. By the early 70s, Megson had become Genesis P-Orridge (changing his name legally by Deed Poll) and had thrown himself with abandon into the newly-emerging world of Be-Ins, Happenings, and Performance Art — with a sideline in collaged Mail Art.
In April 1972, an arts collective in Toronto calling itself General Idea started to issue a magazine calledFile (a satire on Life), which included a kind of contacts section catering to the international Mail Art scene, in which artists and writers could request imagery to work with, named “The Image Bank” in a nod to Burroughs’ Nova Express. It was inevitable that P-Orridge would come across a copy in London:

I was looking through it and noticed “William S. Burroughs, Duke Street, St. James” and his request was for “Camouflage for 1984.” And I thought “oh, he won’t still be at this address, but I’ll send something anyway” and so I sent him a small book of about 30 pages, and each page was hand drawn calligraphic collages, and it was called “To Do With Smooth Paper” — and I was really shocked, about a week later I received a postcard that said “Thank You for the smooth paper, William S. Burroughs” — Shock horror, and excitement all at once!  And I thought “wow, he really exists — and he writes back, too!”
Around this time P-Orridge was visiting London from the North of England, preparing to relocate, and would stay in the studio space of an artist friend Robin Klassnik. (As it happened, the address was 10 Martello Street, in Hackney, the basement of which would later become Throbbing Gristle’s rehearsal-cum-recording space, the infamous “Death Factory.”) After the incident of “Dead Finger’s Thumb” — apparently a cast of the left hand of the folk singer Donovan (although P-Orridge says “the story of how I acquired that isn’t that important!”) — there had been a further exchange in which P-Orridge sent Burroughs the phone number of his London friend. Arriving for his next visit a couple of weeks later, Klassnik informed P-Orridge:
“Some stupid bloke rang up asking for you, pretending to be William Burroughs — so I told him to piss off and put the phone down on him!”
Eventually, after a further exchange, Burroughs wrote to P-Orridge, sending his phone number and instructing him that the next time he was coming down to London he should call, arrange to get a cab round to Duke Street, and Burroughs would pay for it.
And so it was that on his next visit P-Orridge found himself whisked from Victoria Station in a taxi to Dalmeny Court, Duke Street St. James, and upstairs to the small, spare flat. The lift opened straight into the hall, which also contained an Orgone Accumulator. In the small living room there was a desk, filing cabinets, and a typewriter — more like an office where somebody worked than a home in which they lived, P-Orridge thought. There were Brion Gysin paintings on the wall, the first P-Orridge had ever seen, a photo of Allen Ginsberg with the stars-and-stripes top-hat, and a pen drawing that P-Orridge had sent, which he was touched to see that Burroughs had put a hand-woven Moroccan ribbon around. There was a colour TV with a remote control — also the first P-Orridge had ever seen — a Sony tape recorder, and a full bottle of Jack Daniels. 
There was also a lifesize cardboard cut-out of Mick Jagger, which prompted P-Orridge to ask “Why did you do that stupid interview with David Bowie?” — to which Burroughs replied “Advertising!”
Burroughs had a live-in companion, a young Irishman called John Brady, that he had met cruising nearby Piccadilly Circus and invited to move in with him. Says P-Orridge:
…he was living in London, and it was an Irish hustler called John who was sharing the apartment with him — who used to hang out in Piccadilly, y’know, doing something or other sexually to get money!  And William always seemed to prefer young hustlers because there was no need for an emotional attachment. There was no danger of being embroiled beyond a controllable point. So I think that that was one of the reasons that he began to almost exclusively look for sexual pleasure among professional young hustlers. There was too much fear of pain to go into a relationship, a form of love.
It could be a precarious arrangement at the best of times, with the middle-aged writer often at the mercy of his Dilly Boy’s drunken temper, but for today things were civilized enough: Johnny “the Sailor” staying long enough to meet P-Orridge and take a photo of him and Burroughs together before going out, leaving them alone to talk.
William S. Burroughs and Genesis P-Orridge, Duke Street, 1973 (Photo by Johnny Brady)
William S. Burroughs and Genesis P-Orridge, Duke Street, 1973 (Photo by Johnny Brady)
My very first question to him, a living, breathing, Beatnik legend in the flesh was… “Tell me about magick?” …William was not in the least surprised by my question. “Care for a drink?” he asked.
P-Orridge had asked Burroughs whether or not he still used cut-ups in writing, and he replied “No, I don’t really have to anymore, because my brain has been rewired so it does them automatically!” Putting on the TV to watch The Man From U.N.C.L.E., he explained “Reality is not really all it’s cracked up to be, you know…” and began hopping through the channels on the TV with the remote — at the same time mixing in pre-recorded cut-ups from the Sony tape-recorder — until P-Orridge was experiencing a demonstration of cut-ups and Playback in Real Time, Right There Where He Was Sitting:
I was already being taught. What Bill explained to me then was pivotal to the unfolding of my life and art: Everything is recorded. If it is recorded, it can be edited. If it can be edited then the order, sense, meaning and direction are as arbitrary and personal as the agenda and/or person editing. This is magick.
Burroughs went on to describe his theories about the pre-recorded universe, quoting Wittgenstein, and describing with obvious relish his experiments with tape recorders at both the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968 and, closer to home, on the streets of London, where he used “Playback” to wage psychic warfare against the Scientology HQ and the infamous Moka Coffee Bar. In addition to the street-recordings, cut-up with what he called “trouble sounds” (i.e. police sirens, screams, sound effects of explosions and machine-gun fire taped from the TV), Burroughs had also taken photographs of his targets. As part of his explanation, he showed P-Orridge one of his journal scrapbooks in which he had posted two photos: a simple black & white street-scene, with the relevant building clearly visible, and then another beneath it from which he had carefully sliced out the “target” with a razor-blade, gluing the two halves of the photo back together so as to create an image of the street with the offending institution removed. The same principle could clearly be applied to photos of people that you wanted to “excise” from your life, he said.
After much talk of street-recording and playback, working their way steadily through the hard liquor, eventually they went for a meal — Burroughs taking P-Orridge to dinner at the nearby Aberdeen Steak House on Haymarket. “They had all these foreign waiters, and they were all like ‘Good eeevening, Meester Weelliam’ — and it was just like something out of one of his books!”
P-Orridge states that Burroughs’s closing remark to him that first meeting was “How do you short-circuit Control?” and later memorialised the meeting in a poem that he sent, illustrated with a drawing of “Uncle Bill,” to the Mail Art magazine Quoz, which in part reads:
Poem for Uncle Bill:
UB who UB
Supposedly an evil power
Yet
An old man
Sometimes it showed
Drinking whisky
Till it slurred

Passing a Rolls Royce
E promise to buy you one
Complete with chauffeur

We agreed to eradicate
A few phenomena and parted.
A legacy of that first encounter that would have a major bearing on P-Orridge’s next project was Burroughs’ use of tape recorders. Forming the group Throbbing Gristle with Chris Carter, Peter Christopherson, and then-girlfriend Cosey Fanni Tutti, P-Orridge would help to invent a new genre of music that they dubbed “Industrial.” The idea was to strip back music even further than the “back-to-basics” of Punk to create a kind of Garage musique concrète, in which the processing and manipulation of found sound was a key part of the semi-improvised mayhem that was as often sonic assault as it was about the alchemy of sound. Their launch at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London’s The Mall saw an unprecedented backlash in the press in response to their confrontational shock tactics and uncompromising “anti-music.” The Daily Mail of 19th October 1976 infamously quoted the Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn that “These people are the wreckers of civilization!”
P-Orridge’s bandmate Peter Christopherson, operating in a defiantly “non-musician” capacity, was also an aficionado of Burroughs. The discovery of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch at the back of W. H. Smith’s one rainy Saturday afternoon had been a revelation to the 13 year old boy. Certain from a very young age that he was a homosexual but feeling stifled by his academic family background in the North of England, he would say later, quite simply, “It changed my life!”
A talented photographer who helped to design high-profile rock album covers as a day-job, in his spare time Christopherson delighted in taking photos of young male friends in what appeared to be compromising situations, carefully staged. One particular set of images was for his friend John Harwood’s boutique “Boy,” which appeared to show youths beaten and bloodied by Skinhead thugs. Another was an early set of promo photos for the Sex Pistols, taken in the public toilets at the YMCA — apparently declined by Malcolm McLaren because they made the band look “too much like psychotic rent-boys”. These kinds of extracurricular interests had earned Christopherson the affectionate nickname “Sleazy” from his bandmates — a nickname that would endure with friends and later fans throughout his life. When it came to Industrial Music, his role in Throbbing Gristle completely bypassed conventional instrumentation of any kind. Inspired by Burroughs, he would enthusiastically apply and develop such ideas as he had read about in The Job and Electronic Revolution with found sound and loops, frequently cutting up recordings live, from prepared tapes and treated radio and TV sources.
William S. Burroughs and Sleazy Christopherson, New York, The Bunker, circa 1977
William S. Burroughs and Sleazy Christopherson, New York, The Bunker, circa 1977
In 1977, Christopherson was in New York on business and visited Burroughs at The Bunker, taking with him a portfolio of his “boy” photos. Burroughs was really enthusiastic about the images, and talked about wanting to incorporate them in a book alongside the text he was then working on, Blade Runner. (“Nothing to do with the film,” Christopherson made clear.) Regrettably the publisher wouldn’t run to the expense. Nonetheless they bonded over a bottle of vodka, Christopherson later recalling: ”I remember getting very, very drunk with him… and it was one of those times where you could sit for a long time and not say anything and feel OK about it. Maybe that has something to do with the place, which is a converted YMCA…”
But he also had a more practical idea: “I suggested that it would be great to release a record of his original cut-up recordings… we really wanted people to be able to hear what they actually sounded like.”
Genesis P-Orridge had also been suggesting the same idea:
I thought of doing the LP in 1973, it was about the first thing I suggested to him when I met him. And I wrote him letters suggesting it again and again and again for the following eight years, and suddenly one day James Grauerholz wrote back and said “Okay.” Just when I thought he was never going to do it!
So eventually it was agreed, and arrangements were made for P-Orridge and Christopherson to go over to Lawrence, where in the middle of the summer heat they spent a frantic and humid week in a motel room with inadequate air-conditioning, a rented Revox tape-recorder, going through a shoebox full of old tapes. By all accounts the actual tapes were in a pretty poor condition, and it sounds like they were duplicated for posterity not a moment too soon. As P-Orridge told Vale in an interview for Re/Search:
He just agreed to us taking the tapes away, fifteen hours of them, and editing them down to an LP. It’s a good job we got them, ’cause they were recorded over twenty years ago and the oxide was actually crumbling off the tapes as we held them.
Industrial Records Promo for Nothing Here Now But the Recordings
Industrial Records Promo for Nothing Here Now But the Recordings
The album, titled Nothing Here Now But The Recordings, came out in May 1981 on Throbbing Gristle’s Industrial Records label, serial number IR0016. It was a significant release. There had been previous records of spoken word from William S. Burroughs, starting with the classic Call Me Burroughs issued by the English Bookshop in Paris in 1965 and reissued the following year on the ESP label; and then in 1971 a recording of Burroughs reading a draft of Ali’s Smile was released in a very limited edition of only 99 copies. But this was the first time that recordings of the actual cut-up experiments with tape would be made available.
It would also be the final release on the Industrial Records label, followed by the demise of Throbbing Gristle later that year. Notifying their fans and followers with a simple postcard, reading “Throbbing Gristle: The Mission Is Terminated,” in many respects things had come full circle for the Wreckers of Civilization: passing on the baton to the next generation with the challenge, example and inspiration of the cut-up experiments of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin.
Written by Matthew Levi Stevens and published by RealityStudio on 29 July 2013.