Tag: Throbbing Gristle

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: ADULT.’s Stark and Sensual Collaboration with Nitzer Ebb’s Douglas J McCarthy

Comprised of Detroit-based husband-and-wife multimedia artist duo Adam Lee Miller and Nicola Kuperus, ADULT. have received both national and international attention both for their music, which features elements of industrial electronica, house music and punk rock — and for their visual art, which includes sculptures, paintings, photographs, films, videos and installations; in fact, since the act’s founding back in 1998, Miller and Kuperus have strove to blur and intersect the lines between visual art and their music, exhibiting their work at the Austrian Cultural Forum (NY), Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh), Detroit Institute of Arts, MOMAS (Saitama, Japan) and Centre d’ar contemporain de Meymac (France). Their film The Three Grace(s) triptych has been shown at the Anthology Film Archives, Distrital Film Festival, Mexico City and Grey Area for Art and Technology.

The duo’s latest effort Detroit House Guests is largely based on the visual artist residency model, in which Miller and Kuperus invited a varied and impressive array of musicians and artists, including Nitzer Ebb’s Douglas J. McCarthy, Swans’ Michael Gira, Light Aslyum’s Shannon Funchess, Lichens, Austrian thereminist Dorit Chrysler and multidisciplinary artist Lun*na Menoh and others to their studio for a three week period — with the parameter that they all live, work and collaborate together to create an album that also manages to be an anthropological sound experiment.

“We Are a Mirror” is the latest single off Detroit House Guests and it finds Miller and Kuperus collaborating with Nitzer Ebb’s Douglas J. McCarthy. Featuring an glitchy and minimalist yet propulsive production consisting of subtle, industrial clang and clatter, an assortment of bleeps, blips and bloops, stuttering drum programming and club-rocking that manages to seamlessly mesh both artists’ sound while being incredibly brooding and seductive.

Directed by Hazel Hill-McCarthy III, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker, whose previous work includes a documentary featuring Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis P-Orridge, the recently released video for “We Are a Mirror” was filmed in Miller and Kuperus’ hometown of Detroit between the hours of 6pm and 6am — and it employs a relatively straightforward concept: the trio of Miller, Kuperus and McCarthy in a sparsely arranged mirrored room with a light display, broodingly posing and performing the song. And while evoking a murky nightclub, the video also feels as though it could be an fashion shoot as it possesses a grungy and glamorous quality.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

 

Originally formed by its founding duo Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and video director Peter Christopherson after the breakup of Throbbing Gristle in the early 1980s, Psychic TV (also known as Psychick TV or PTV) was conceived as an experimental video art and music project. Throughout each of its three incarnations, the project has included a diverse and rotating cast of collaborators including Coil, Current 93, Hafler Trio, The Cult, Soft Cell, Fred Giannelli, XKP, Master Musicians of Jajouka, Matthew Best, Abino Brolle, Daniel Simon Black, William Breeze, Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, Derek Jarman, John Gosling, Timothy Leary, Rose McDowall, Stephen Kent, Vagina Dentata Organ, Andrew Weatherill, Larry Thrasher, Z’EV, Zef NoiSe, Jeff Berner and a lengthy list of others. Interestingly, the project has a long-held reputation for relentless experimentation with its sound and aesthetic, and at one point for being incredibly prolific — with the release of a monthly series of live albums starting in 1986, the band earned an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for most records released in one year.

Psychic TV’s latest effort Alienist can trace its origins back to 2009 when the project’s creative mastermind and primary member Genesis Breyer P-Orridge proposed that the band cover Funkadelic‘s “Maggot Brain” as a musical interlude while on tour. After that tour, the members of the band went into the studio to record their interpretation of “Maggot Brain,” that lead to the band recording a series of 12 inch records annually which included the band’s interpretation of a classic song on the A side and a new song on the B side. Mostly chosen by drummer and co-producer Edley ODowd, the band has covered Hawkwind‘s “Silver Machine,” Can‘s “Mother Sky,” and Captain Beefheart‘s “Dropout Boogie” among others. Alienist is the latest effort in their 12 inch series and the album includes the band covering Harry Nilsson‘s “Jump Into the Fire” and 60’s British psych rockers, The Creation’s “How Does It Feel to Feel,” one of Breyer P-Orridge’s all-time favorites, along with two original tracks “I’m Looking For You” and “Alienist,” a trippy, dance-floor friendly song that sounds as though it drew from Evil Heat-era Primal Scream, Zooropa-era U2 and house music, while also channeling the project’s acid house experiments of the late 80s.

 

 

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Uncategorized by William Ruben Helms

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