Nonbinary: A Memoir
by Genesis P-Orridge (Music 781.66 P-Orridge)
Genesis P-Orridge was a
multi-disciplinary artist who is probably best known for being one of the
founders of the industrial music genre in the 1970s. Gen was also one of the
earliest people to work in live art installation works that have come to be
known as “performance art,” and continued to work in other artistic media
throughout their life. Writing this book turned out to be one of their last
creative acts, as they died of leukemia in 2020 while still working on the
text. The book was ultimately published in June of 2021. While there have been
numerous interviews over the decades with Gen, and bits of their life story
have been a part of lots of documentaries on industrial music and culture, Nonbinary is the first in-depth look at their
life, particularly the early years.
In fact, the emphasis of this book
on developmental years was one of my biggest takeaways. There are lots of other
places to find out more about the history of early industrial music, and
P-Orridge’s contributions to it in the bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV,
but well over the first half of this book covers the time period before 1975,
the beginning of Throbbing Gristle. More recent times, from the 1990s to the
present, figure in only the last 50 or so pages. Of course, this emphasis on
early times is likely not intentional, since Gen died before the book was
formally complete. But in some ways, I think it makes the book both more
interesting and more essential for understanding their unique and creative life
story.
I also think that the short afterword
to the book by author and thinker Douglas Rushkoff really helps to frame the
overall text — you might want to read it first, and then get into the book
proper. Rushkoff briefly summarizes how the book project came into being — it
was essentially done when Gen’s health became too compromised to continue
traveling for performances — and he observes a particular quality about the
whole book that I think comes through loud and clear. Let me quote him, because
I think it’s a great lens through which to read the whole text. I wish I had
read it before I read the whole book:
“What helped me get Gen to turn
the corner was when I suggested they not write their autobiography, but rather
their experiences with others. Gen’s eyes lit up at the thought of sharing their
adventures transitioning from man to medium, as they themselves transitioned
from life to — well, whatever is next. Predictably, then, this volume may seem
just a bit mosaic to some readers. Well, what would you expect from a
cut-and-paste artist who was no more dedicated to crashing civilization than
crashing their own identity? The reading
experience you just had was to my mind a bit like experiencing Genesis the
person. Fluid. Changing. Self-annihilating. Nonbinary in the sense that the
subject and object, figure and ground, merge and intertwine.”
Gen’s official start to the book is
a prologue that retells their first meeting with novelist William Burroughs in
London in 1972. The event clearly stood out to Gen as a kind of confirmation
along the creative path, and the beginning of an encouraging relationship that
continued through to the end of Burroughs’ life in 1997.
Then we’re taken back to the very
earliest years of Gen’s life, and some biographical background on their
parents. Among some general parental backgrounds, they recount in great detail
the story of Gen’s father narrowly surviving the Battle of Dunkirk in WWII, and
report an otherwise fairly normal childhood. The resided in Manchester,
England, with maternal grandparents living next door during Gen’s single-digit
years, and moved around a couple of times during grammar school years. They
sang in grammar school choir. At the age of 15, they discovered the beat
writers, which led to British counterculture magazines of the time, and then the
underground music of the 60s, and soon Gen’s focus had settled on the arts.
This, combined with a near-death experience, eventually led to the kinds of art
and music that P-Orridge is famous for.
I don’t want to give away all of
the historical details in Nonbinary right here, but suffice it to say that
if you’re a fan, I think you’ll learn a lot about Gen’s life that you might not
have read about previously. What I do want to emphasize is how Gen’s musings
about their past lead to a couple of spots in the book that nicely summarize
their contributions to the arts. One, which is fairly obvious but important
nonetheless, is founding the industrial music genre. Genesis recalls, “On
September 3, 1975, I went for a walk in London Fields in Hackney, London E8,
with Monte Cazazza. We were talking and trying to come up with a name not for
the band but for the music Throbbing Gristle was making, and we kept using the
word ‘industrial.’ Industrial music.” They go on to explain their thoughts
about the context, and are pleased to reflect that industrial music remains a
living, growing genre of music 45 years later.
The second major takeaway, in my
estimation, relates to Gen’s approach to music having little to do with musical
skills in the conventional sense. While they have mentioned in many previous
interviews the notion that Throbbing Gristle was intentionally a band of
non-musicians figuring out how to approach music in new ways, there is a fairly
concise explanation of the band’s early working methods in the book. Briefly
put, they would jam while recording, Gen would go through these tapes and copy
promising parts onto another tape, and then the band would learn how to
recreate those more compelling passages and organize them into pieces.
Although they weren’t approaching
music from the conventional paradigm of learning technique and music theory,
they were learning how to create, refine, and reproduce particular kinds of
orchestrated content that suited their needs. Aspects of this approach have
become common musical practices since the early industrial era. They worked
with lots of tape recorded extra audio in the form of “field recordings” of
found sound, an obvious precursor to sampling culture. They reassembled bits of
interesting music into new compositional wholes, a process very similar to
contemporary production practices, and built into certain kinds of software
packages like Ableton as the primary way to approach raw materials. And we also
see lots of people producing music who aren’t coming from conventional musical
backgrounds. Some come from other artistic disciplines, often from the visual
arts. All of these pioneering practices, from the musical to the technical, are
well represented in the book.
(If you enjoy this, you may also
wish to try Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music by
Alexander Reed, or Spectrum Compendium: Archival Documentation of the
Post-Industrial Underground, Spectrum Magazine Archive 1998-2002 by Richard
Stevenson.)
( publisher’s official Nonbinary: A Memoir web page ) | ( Wikipedia page
for Genesis B. P-Orridge )
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to
this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
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