Psychic TV: A Soundtrack for Derek Jarman

Psychic TV: A Soundtrack for Derek Jarman

(Cold Spring)

CD/DL/Streaming

Out Now

On a Prayer For Derek Jarman, Psychic TV reinforce the potency of the cut-up thirty years after its initial use. This isn’t music. This is sonic assembly. Love. By Ryan Walker.

”In a sense, I always felt my role was to find family within the films. But, we found community within the filmmaking and that by trying to create situations where everyone could come together for a few weeks, everyone could come together for a few weeks and find something to work on which opened up avenues for different sorts of themselves, and that that was the purpose of filmmaking. To create community” – Derek Jarman.

”The ‘I’ is what we call the flat people who assume that the person they’ve been donated by social conditioning is a one-dimensional, actual person. The ‘we’ is how we see the world, which is that everybody is made up of lots of different personalities, fantasies and attitudes. The multi-personality is the reality, not the ‘I’ personality. And where those two things meet is the position we’re trying to work at” – Genesis P. Orridge.

”Fear is the opposite of Love, and we can no longer afford to be afraid of who we really are” – Larry Thrasher.

A Prayer For Derek Jarman is a contemporary revision and recollected edition of unreleased material intended for use on a series by Psychick Television titled Themes. In this original form, Themes 2, intended ”to be used as a facilitator of internal psychic states and cataylse an integration of the conscious and subconscious minds,’’ is an extension of the ideas interrogated on Themes 1 (later Cold Dark Matter), ‘’primarily assembled to be used as a facilitator of internal psychic and emotional observation,’’ and itself a limited, 5000 bonus pressing, given away jointly with Force The Hand Of Chance, the band’s ‘82 debut album on Some Bizarre. “At this stage,’’ cultural engineer Genesis P. Orridge states in the latest edition of the material written in 1997, ‘’one should view this as an experimental film document of anthropological significance. This particular album should be viewed primarily as a bulleting relating to my personal research and my collaborative investigations with other people.’’

When an album that hasn’t been available for three decades, collecting the collaborative efforts of those two artistic forces, arrives, it feels utterly perfect. The pandrogyne project soundtracks of Psychic TV, obsessed with the articulation of cosmosis, a conduit to and beam between everyone on the planet, laced into the close-as-bones work of Jarman’s films, feels totally right. And it does just that because of what Orridge mentions above – other people.

Filmmaker and artist Derek Jarman and ‘video group integrated with music’ collective Psychic TV, here with Orridge, joined by John Gosling (Zos Kia, Coil, Mekon, Bassomatic), and Larry Thrasher of Big Swab, Splinter Test and Silent Records favourites, the post-industrial-noise group, Thessalonians, in their own significant ways galvanised countless tribes to come together through their adopted mediums.

For both, the medium is the message. And those messages have always been exhausting, but exhilaratingly rich with information, hard-hitting in their crater-making impact and far-reaching in their immortal reverence.

Having met through the Kinetic Arts Troupe in London in the late 60s, also called the Exploding Galaxy, featuring a roster of radical artists such as Hermine Demoriane (of performance art collective COUM Transmission, also featuring Cosey Fanni Tutti, later of Throbbing Gristle). It was in the 70s that Throbbing Gristle were filmed by Jarman on Psychic Rally in Heaven, where their collaboration debuted. Additionally, Jarman was the sole media figure to show support to Orridge when being villainised, and eventually exiled, by the workings of the ”non-elected feudal officialdom of Poor Britain’’.

In Jarman’s case, the medium is his films. From Jubilee (1978) to the Angelic Conversation (1985) and his last film, Blue (1993), Jarman’s visual world are more epochal pieces of sensory experiments rather than solely strips of queer film. As much fascinated by the ripping up of a certain bolt of deified fabric or mythologised passage on a succession of ancient pages, be it Shakespeare’s sonnets, Austrian philosophers, Baroque painters, the nascent buzz of punk’s primordial alien cast, or England itself, his pieces are the result of wishing to bring people together (Adam Ant, Siouxsie Sioux, Jordan, or Smiths fans), and through introducing them, as figures in the tribe to the pulsating detonator of that decade’s vibrating zeitgeist Jarman persistently tapped against, whilst also experimenting with time as a material that can be cut into and manipulated into a collage of colour, a bricolage bulging with attitude, mood and sound, succeeded in deepening and widening out the meaning of his films in ways impossible to dislodge, the power of which, equally futile to dilute.

Starting after the ‘terminated mission’ in 1981 of industrial music pioneers Throbbing Gristle, Genesis P. Orridge and Alex Ferguson, joined by Peter Christopherson and later Jhohnn Balance of Coil (who also collaborated with Jarman which, perhaps contrary to this article, was actually two out of the film titles mentioned above) are also a unit, a mixed-media collective, invested in the idea of tribes. Lead by Orridge and instructed by William Burroughs to ”short circuit control”, Psychic TV, arguably the antithesis of the anguish of TG as a far more celebratory project, stated their agenda was ”to break people across as seeing themselves as one dimensional and having no potential, to seeing themselves as being almost anything they want to be, and those different things don’t always have to agree in the usually accepted way.”

Tribes, populated by subcultural footsoldiers enduring the eternally-incomplete and internally engrained sagas on their transgressive mission, or tribes waiting to be formed, leaning against the rising heats of stagnation, furiously kicking against walls and looking into the sky hoping it bends backwards in on itself to kickstart the narrative they are now a critical particle of, cut across time with fervor of a machete slicing through a veil of dense lianas. Anarchy before the Pistols. Anarchy online. Anarchy between the schisms and strictures of the physical form, diseased flesh eaten alive by time on this mortal, corporeal plinth.

Tribes are born out of boredom. Industrial tribes for industrial boredom. Acid house and rave tribes. Boredom is their bullet. Their surgical scalpel with which they extract stimuli out of the wombs of stagnation. Mishapen bones start to attain shape in the snap of foetid ashes. A body evolves. Boredom galvanises disparate litters of individuals, sick to death of staring into a lifeless space, a nauseating nothingness, into a hot charge of collective action. Spiritually sharing the same idea, and under the sheer influence and driven by the unwavering ambition of that idea, to spread as a legitimate manifestation of something that cannot be stopped, introduce chaos to order, and intentionally twist it back again. Tribes mutate. Tribes weaponise boredom. They hijack history as receptacles refracting what they succeed in stealing from its various antecedent hordes radiating from avant-garde basements, junkie caves and bohemian squats. They chew it into usefulness and channel its burst of new, electric flavours for all the world to shriek at with utter disgust.
AA”Imagine, for a moment,” Orridge explains as an extension of the cut-up method, obsessively explored since their spoken word, scissors and scotch tape experiments since their time in Manchester, 1961, ”that we are each of us recording and playback devices concerned with the description, navigation and perceptual expression of what is generally called ‘reality’ in order to physically and mentally tolerate and survive the mysterious state of being we so casually refer to as ‘life’. It could lead us, for example, towards an understanding of the ability of the mass media to manipulate, restrict and control our essential comprehension of ourselves.”

Sonically, A Prayer For Derek Jarman concentrates the cut-up method Orridge applies to society with regularly incredible results. The sonic cut-up is the societal cut-up. They are the same. But when working with such a method, the results don’t matter. The process is what counts. It’s what contributes to the cracking apart of one previously assumed unwavering way of life and instead, shakes another one into its place. Therefore, what we experience here is ”a refining, a distillation of the raw material from which all sound, and all the infinite reverberation that that medium signifies, is constructed.”

Inspired by Brin Gysin, William Burroughs and André Breton; the work here reflects an incessant, unquenchable desire, an alchemical ability to intentionally warp, unravel and ‘re-Mind’ those who listen. ”I have taken my source materials and reduced them down to five, basic ingredients,” Orridge says. ”I have then explored a combination of strict formula and equation combined with random chance in order to obtain an irrational result.”

As though salvaged and scavenged from a ruinous scrapyard located nearby, and dedicated to the ‘decomposer’ Alexander Scriabin, whose work focused on ”controlled and induced religious ecstacy”, The Loops of Mystic Union plants its feet firmly into the dirt and digs itself into the fertile mound below. Every day life can be cut up. Cut up like the spectral, agitated blades slicing through the track, a Vibrolin played by John Gosling gnawing through piles of countless bones in a distant meat shop, punctuating through a landmass of harsh, ambient vapours. And those pieces can be lured into linking back together like metal filings drawn to the pull of a powerful magnet. Recorded in 1980 at the Building Site, all eighteen hypnotic minutes of this climactic, galaxial dirge burn as bright as the ”single blue lightbulb to illuminate your surroundings” Orridge suggests be employed as a suitable sensory tool when listening to the piece, requested by Jarman for his Super 8 cut-ups, Home Movies.

Next, like a distant sister of the Velvet Underground’s Sunday Morning or the Durutti Column’s investigations of a missing boy lamented through juddering sonic spells of dreamy, lo-fi folk, sat alone staring at the ceiling hoping it sucks her into its gaping convex, the utterly heart-tugging morphine-veiled lullaby of Elipse of Flowers touches each nerve until it melts into thin drips of butter. Expressing the sentimental looseness’’ of the ’60s Flower Child avatar, it thumps with primal drum thuds throughout, a palm-muted guitar chugs and chops away throughout it all, providing a ticking, rhythmic backbone to ethereal twinkles of glockenspiel glowing with hallucinatory rhinestones and an entrancing top-line electric noodling in and out of lucidity. All evoking the feeling of floating through outer space. Drifting through different dimensions. Blissfully shattering through different states of consciousness at a garden party shot by Jarman in Swinging London.

Recorded by Orridge and Thrasher at Jhopdi Studios, but only realising its completion on this collection as a trio of themes, Mylar Breeze (Parts 1 & 2) meanwhile hits the piano thick and fast. Beautiful beyond belief. Naively navigating up and down the keys, discovering the noise each makes is kind of awe-inspiring, like creating a portal growing in size to fit through the more one plays and pours themself into each rolling chord and punchy note. Through these themes, we can imagine the short movie Jarman made around the time of Sebastiane projected onto a pair of closed curtains, a group of young men huddled together, hanging onto each frame, this is the soundtrack to their youth. The third theme seeps through stone walls with an ominous chant. Before the chants evaporate into a similar narcotic minimalism of the previous themes. It’s delayed piano melodies skipping and dancing, interweaving and overlapping like fibres, or fingers, locked into and around each other.
AA”During the filming of Sebastiane,” Orridge recalls in the album’s liner notes, ”his notorious and wonderful Latin celebration and seminal gay movie, Derek noticed a ripped piece of silver milar caught on a branch of driftwood on the beach that was blowing in the sea breeze and catching the sunlight in sparkling flashes as it moved. He made a short Super 8 movie of this painterly kinetic scene for himself and for the ease of labelling, he and I named it Mylar.”

Prayer for Derek Jarman engulfs us in a sensory-splendour of exotic birds tweeting from afar or hands wading through water, a Datman recording of the sea opposite Prospect Cottage, Dungeness. They turn into instruments. Rhythms. It’s eventually joined by savage asylum squalls, jerky guitars, thunderstorms and crying babies. The chants return to swallow everything completely with one closing of their immense jaws. Everything crushed into one woozy churn, contaminating and complementing what it collides against to create a bizarre symphony of noise, struggling to breathe, yet totally wild and beatific.

After three heat-seeking bass pulses of immensely distorted proportions strike out from the sky, The Rites of Reversal, a tonal theme for a film by Orridge of William Burroughs, where Jarman was the cameraperson, sees a buzzing clipper consuming a nest of mad hair and reducing it to a pinhead. Wild dogs growl and pant. Their low, guttural growls hybridising with a human’s deranged snarls. The fly floats too close to the fan.

This isn’t music. This is sonic assembly. An irrational result. Are you there?

~

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Ryan Walker | Louder Than War