After being released in 1984 on the Icelandic Gramm label, this Psychic TV album containing live session recordings was deemed to be re-released. That happened 15 years later by the then-still-unknown Cold Spring Records from the UK. And yes, that pressing also sold out, so for everybody who missed it two times already, there is now a new chance to get it on red or black double vinyl or simply on a CD which has maybe less of an old-school feel, but is just as flawless as a playback device. I haven’t heard any of the previous releases, so in what way they differ, I can not tell. I mention this specifically because discogs.com mentions the mixing of additional audio between the tracks being ‘recordings of the Pagan marriage between Genesis and Paula P-Orridge’. The 1997 release also notes additional sounds, but it says recordings of the ‘Astru Naming Ritual for Caresse’. It’s a mystery, but as that goes with everything Psychic TV, it’s probably a mixup somewhere. Mystery unsolved.
The whole collective performing the ritual is an impressive bunch, and I can sadly only copy-paste the list here: Genesis P-Orridge, Alex Fergusson, John Gosling, Godkrist, Grey Wolf, Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson, Thee TOPI Method, Priestess and my heroes: Peter Christopherson and Geff Rushton. Musicwise, it is a proper ritual. What would happen if you put a bunch of people who know what they are doing on a stage or in a room with loads of equipment… Right, a noisy djembe circle of the highest order. So we get rhythms from a drum computer which leads everybody into a trance, and whatever one feels then gets added. And the better people know each other or the more they have mentally overlapping thoughts (with or without tools and/or psychotropics), the more coherent the outcome is. The Velvet Underground created music like that 20 years earlier (I must note that “Meanwhile” had that VU vibe, too), and GYBE still does it this way.
As said, the original recordings are from November 1983 when Psychic TV did a disconcert (?) in Reykjavik, organised by HÖH and GRAMM Records. The difference with the previous Cold Spring release is that Martin Bowes of Attrition fame remastered it, and I must say, he did a pretty good job. All layers a properly audible, there are a lot of dynamics in the sound, and the whole release has a solid continuity.
An important question remains, though. A third repress of an album, isn’t that overdoing it? Are those who do not remember the past condemned to repeat it? Is this repetition because people forgot? Or is it because people who weren’t alive then or not yet sentient beings need to know what happened in ’83? Or is the current state of the industry of ‘our music’ of quality so low that new music worth releasing isn’t there (by the way: 3 of the four new Cold Spring releases are reissues of some sort)? I wonder what a historian would say on the subject… But having said all of this: There is absolutely nothing wrong with this release.
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