Forty years ago, in March of 1981, during the week beginning Monday the 16th and continuing through Friday the 20th, Throbbing Gristle occupied a residency at the prestigious Italian National Radio’s RAI Studios in Rome. They were there as a result of Cosey Fanni Tutti being referred to the institution by Robert Wyatt when it was looking for contributors for a project based on the concept of a “Journey Through a Body”. Once offered the commission, the opportunity quickly extended to include the entire TG ensemble. The group then traveled to Italy and began work on what would become their final studio album before terminating the TG mission following their last live performance in San Francisco on the 29th of May that year.
The constraints conceived for this project had TG recording one completely improvised composition per day for a total of five pieces corresponding to the basic body parts, though there appears to be no documentation on how each track corresponds to which part. Because, as Cosey recollected in her Art Sex Magic autobiography, the studio techs were essentially “useless”, being either stoned or drunk most of the time, TG were pretty much left to their own devices while recording. Having traveled with only a few bits of their own gear, the group primarily relied upon whatever instruments, effects and production tools were available in the RAI studio. They had made no advance preparations for any of the recordings and each day’s work was mixed to its final form at the end of that day with no further production, remixing or overdubs done after that. Following the completion of the sessions, RAI refused to release the master tapes to the group and only provided a cassette dub of the recordings. The album was then unofficially released in 1982 by Walter Ulbricht Schallfolien, and remained a scarce, occasionally bootlegged rarity until Mute & Industrial Records finally acquired the masters and issued an official version of the album on CD in 1993. They wouldn’t release an official vinyl version until 2018.
As mentioned, the album consists of 5 mostly instrumental sections, each offering a distinct mood and style. The album opens with the sprawling, harrowing medical nightmare, Medicine, clocking in at an imposing 15+ minutes. Its layers of beeping monitors, wheezing air pumps and general hospital room discord put the listener on life support in the role of a patient in medical stasis. From there, things get erotic as a plodding, vaguely funky drum machine accompanies sounds of sexual copulation and occasional spoken word overdubs from Genesis. The mood gets lighter and more serene in the third movement as we get TG’s most literal homage to Martin Deny in the form of Exotic Functions, complete with bird calls and waterfalls. The penultimate section does an abrupt about-face into brute force and aggression before the album resolves in the final section with a dreamy kaleidoscope of piano noodling which sounds very much like an ancestral precursor to a Psychic TV piece, Mirrors, which would be recorded using a strikingly similar template a few years later as a soundtrack to the short film of the same name by Derek Jarman.
Overall, the sound of Journey Through a Body is idiosyncratic, even by TG’s standards. Being created using facilities, instruments and tools other than the usual Industrial Studios setup meant that the textures and ambiences achieved all feel and sound quite different from anything the group had created before. While there are distinctly “TG” style performance techniques on display, the result feels alien and dissociative given the unfamiliar sound palette. Hearing pianos and other acoustic elements integrated into the TG sound is almost jarring. There was also something of a gap for the band in terms of being in the studio together. Their last album, Heathen Earth, had been recorded just over a year prior to this, in February of 1980, and the only other studio work they’d dune after that was recording the double 7” releases (Adrenalin/Distant Dreams, Subhuman/Something Came Over Me), synchronously released in October of 1980. As such, the group hadn’t been spending a lot of time in the studio together and, indeed, their personal relationships were nearing their breaking point as the conflict between Gen and Cosey & Chris became more entrenched. One can only wonder what the mood was like in the studio for these sessions and how their personal issues may have contributed to the overall feel of the album.
As previously stated, Journey Through a Body would be the final studio recording of TG before their split. The group would not set foot in a studio together again until March of 2004, almost exactly 23 years later, to record the TG NOW EP in preparation for their live performing return later that year. For many years, Journey Through a Body existed in a twilight of bootlegs and mythology before being reclaimed by the band and made an official part of its canon. It is often considered their least popular recording, though to be fair, its genesis and manifestation were unique and the results offer a distinct perspective on their approach as seen through the prism of a decidedly foreign environment and tool set. It still managed to capture TG in all their varieties, from creeping insidiousness to seductive enchantment to brutal assault.
