COUM Transmissions
Encyclopedia
COUM Transmissions was a performance art
group interested in pushing boundaries, influenced by Dada
and the Merry Pranksters
.
CT was a whimsical, eccentric as well as confrontational band
and performance art
group, from Hull
, Yorkshire
– a collective
the constants of which were its founder, Genesis P-Orridge
, and Cosey Fanni Tutti
, who joined in early 1970. It had a rotating membership, not atypical of the 1960s, and included both intellectual
and criminal
elements and existed formally from 1969 until 1976. In that year, they exhibited at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts in a show called Prostitution, which consisted of explicit photographs of lesbians, assemblages of rusty knives, syringes, bloodied hair, used sanitary towels, press clippings and photo documentation of COUM performances in Milan and Paris. There was a lot of outrage expressed by London newspapers and UK politicians, including Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn, who referred to COUM as the "wreckers of Western civilization". However, memberships to the ICA increased sharply as a result of the COUM show.
The last official COUM performances and art shows took place in 1976. At or around that time, Genesis proclaimed he was through with performance art. Cosey, on the other hand, felt she had only just begun. Though she feels the name COUM to be "tainted" now and unusable, she has been known to say her individual projects are still a part of the COUM family of work. In fact she now has a website called Coum
During its final performance, in '76, the occasion was also the birth of the four-member Throbbing Gristle
, which is a slang term, from Hull, meaning erection.
Members of CT over its existence included Foxtrot Echo (aka Echo Foxxtrot), Fizzey Paet, Ray Harvey and "Spydee Garmantel". Although Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson
and Chris Carter
were acquaintances of the collective they did not technically join up until COUM had morphed into Throbbing Gristle
.
The collective, as a band, opened for Hawkwind
, got interest from John Peel
and were played on his radio show.
COUM's work took on different directions and lives of its own. Examples include Cosey's pornographic
modelling career and, most notably, the industrial music group Throbbing Gristle
.
TG dissolved and the parts went on to form their own projects and projections. As Psychic TV
, Chris And Cosey
, Coil
, Thee Majesty
, Genesis
, Cosey
, Chris
and Sleazy
continue to elaborate and expand upon what they originally discovered back in the late sixties/early seventies together.
A definitive documentary work on COUM Transmissions is the book Wreckers of Civilisation, by Simon Ford, a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum
, London
. Black Dog Publishing Company, July 2000.
and friends, 1968) in 2008. When announcing the release of the album, Dais stated that it is to be "the first in a planned continuing series of lost recordings by COUM Transmissions".
The COUM LP was recorded in 1971 and then shelved due to the fluid nature of COUM's membership and interests. What musical content the LP features is improvisational and avant-garde in nature, and for the most part the album's tracks consist of spoken word material and sound experiments, at times reminiscent of the audio material that William S. Burroughs
and Brion Gysin
had been experimenting with in the 1960s.
Side B
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
group interested in pushing boundaries, influenced by Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
and the Merry Pranksters
Merry Pranksters
The Merry Pranksters were a group of people who formed around American author Ken Kesey in 1964 and sometimes lived communally at his homes in California and Oregon...
.
CT was a whimsical, eccentric as well as confrontational band
Band (music)
In music, a musical ensemble or band is a group of musicians that works together to perform music. The following articles concern types of musical bands:* All-female band* Big band* Boy band* Christian band* Church band* Concert band* Cover band...
and performance art
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
group, from Hull
Kingston upon Hull
Kingston upon Hull , usually referred to as Hull, is a city and unitary authority area in the ceremonial county of the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. It stands on the River Hull at its junction with the Humber estuary, 25 miles inland from the North Sea. Hull has a resident population of...
, Yorkshire
Yorkshire
Yorkshire is a historic county of northern England and the largest in the United Kingdom. Because of its great size in comparison to other English counties, functions have been increasingly undertaken over time by its subdivisions, which have also been subject to periodic reform...
– a collective
Collective
A collective is a group of entities that share or are motivated by at least one common issue or interest, or work together on a specific project to achieve a common objective...
the constants of which were its founder, Genesis P-Orridge
Genesis P-Orridge
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is an English singer-songwriter, musician, writer and artist. P-Orridge's early confrontational performance work in COUM Transmissions in the late 1960s and early 1970s along with the industrial band Throbbing Gristle, which dealt with subjects such as prostitution,...
, and Cosey Fanni Tutti
Cosey Fanni Tutti
Cosey Fanni Tutti is best known as a performance artist and for her time in Throbbing Gristle and Chris & Cosey....
, who joined in early 1970. It had a rotating membership, not atypical of the 1960s, and included both intellectual
Intellectual
An intellectual is a person who uses intelligence and critical or analytical reasoning in either a professional or a personal capacity.- Terminology and endeavours :"Intellectual" can denote four types of persons:...
and criminal
Crime
Crime is the breach of rules or laws for which some governing authority can ultimately prescribe a conviction...
elements and existed formally from 1969 until 1976. In that year, they exhibited at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts in a show called Prostitution, which consisted of explicit photographs of lesbians, assemblages of rusty knives, syringes, bloodied hair, used sanitary towels, press clippings and photo documentation of COUM performances in Milan and Paris. There was a lot of outrage expressed by London newspapers and UK politicians, including Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn, who referred to COUM as the "wreckers of Western civilization". However, memberships to the ICA increased sharply as a result of the COUM show.
The last official COUM performances and art shows took place in 1976. At or around that time, Genesis proclaimed he was through with performance art. Cosey, on the other hand, felt she had only just begun. Though she feels the name COUM to be "tainted" now and unusable, she has been known to say her individual projects are still a part of the COUM family of work. In fact she now has a website called Coum
During its final performance, in '76, the occasion was also the birth of the four-member Throbbing Gristle
Throbbing Gristle
Throbbing Gristle were an English industrial, avant-garde music and visual arts group that evolved from the performance art group COUM Transmissions...
, which is a slang term, from Hull, meaning erection.
Members of CT over its existence included Foxtrot Echo (aka Echo Foxxtrot), Fizzey Paet, Ray Harvey and "Spydee Garmantel". Although Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson
Peter Christopherson
Peter Martin Christopherson, a.k.a. Sleazy was a musician, video director and designer, and former member of the influential British design agency Hipgnosis....
and Chris Carter
Chris Carter (musician)
Chris Carter was born on January 28, 1953 in London, England and educated at the Friern Barnet Grammar School. He is best known for being a synthesist and member of Throbbing Gristle and Chris & Cosey...
were acquaintances of the collective they did not technically join up until COUM had morphed into Throbbing Gristle
Throbbing Gristle
Throbbing Gristle were an English industrial, avant-garde music and visual arts group that evolved from the performance art group COUM Transmissions...
.
The collective, as a band, opened for Hawkwind
Hawkwind
Hawkwind are an English rock band, one of the earliest space rock groups. Their lyrics favour urban and science fiction themes. They are also a noted precursor to punk rock and now are considered a link between the hippie and punk cultures....
, got interest from John Peel
John Peel
John Robert Parker Ravenscroft, OBE , known professionally as John Peel, was an English disc jockey, radio presenter, record producer and journalist. He was the longest-serving of the original BBC Radio 1 DJs, broadcasting regularly from 1967 until his death in 2004...
and were played on his radio show.
COUM's work took on different directions and lives of its own. Examples include Cosey's pornographic
Pornography
Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...
modelling career and, most notably, the industrial music group Throbbing Gristle
Throbbing Gristle
Throbbing Gristle were an English industrial, avant-garde music and visual arts group that evolved from the performance art group COUM Transmissions...
.
TG dissolved and the parts went on to form their own projects and projections. As Psychic TV
Psychic TV
Psychic TV or PTV, is a video art and music group that primarily performs psychedelic, punk, electronic and experimental music...
, Chris And Cosey
Chris and Cosey
Chris & Cosey, now performing as Carter Tutti, are a band formed in 1981, consisting of partners Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti, both previously members of industrial music pioneers Throbbing Gristle.- History :...
, Coil
Coil (band)
Coil were an English cross-genre, experimental music group formed in 1982 by John Balance—later credited as "Jhonn Balance"—and his partner Peter Christopherson, aka "Sleazy". The duo worked together on a series of releases before Balance chose the name Coil, which he claimed to be...
, Thee Majesty
Thee Majesty
In 1998, Genesis P-Orridge was ending his association with the name Psychic TV, the band he created after the termination of Throbbing Gristle. At the same time, he began conceptualizing Thee Majesty as a spoken word-based project springing from his Splinter Test project with PTV alumnus Larry...
, Genesis
Genesis P-Orridge
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is an English singer-songwriter, musician, writer and artist. P-Orridge's early confrontational performance work in COUM Transmissions in the late 1960s and early 1970s along with the industrial band Throbbing Gristle, which dealt with subjects such as prostitution,...
, Cosey
Cosey Fanni Tutti
Cosey Fanni Tutti is best known as a performance artist and for her time in Throbbing Gristle and Chris & Cosey....
, Chris
Chris Carter (musician)
Chris Carter was born on January 28, 1953 in London, England and educated at the Friern Barnet Grammar School. He is best known for being a synthesist and member of Throbbing Gristle and Chris & Cosey...
and Sleazy
Peter Christopherson
Peter Martin Christopherson, a.k.a. Sleazy was a musician, video director and designer, and former member of the influential British design agency Hipgnosis....
continue to elaborate and expand upon what they originally discovered back in the late sixties/early seventies together.
A definitive documentary work on COUM Transmissions is the book Wreckers of Civilisation, by Simon Ford, a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum
Victoria and Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum , set in the Brompton district of The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, is the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects...
, London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. Black Dog Publishing Company, July 2000.
Discography
In July 2009, American record label Dais Records released the COUM Transmissions LP The Sound Of Porridge Bubbling in a limited edition of 500 copies, as was the case with Early Worm (Genesis P-OrridgeGenesis P-Orridge
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is an English singer-songwriter, musician, writer and artist. P-Orridge's early confrontational performance work in COUM Transmissions in the late 1960s and early 1970s along with the industrial band Throbbing Gristle, which dealt with subjects such as prostitution,...
and friends, 1968) in 2008. When announcing the release of the album, Dais stated that it is to be "the first in a planned continuing series of lost recordings by COUM Transmissions".
The COUM LP was recorded in 1971 and then shelved due to the fluid nature of COUM's membership and interests. What musical content the LP features is improvisational and avant-garde in nature, and for the most part the album's tracks consist of spoken word material and sound experiments, at times reminiscent of the audio material that William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
and Brion Gysin
Brion Gysin
Brion Gysin was a painter, writer, sound poet, and performance artist born in Taplow, Buckinghamshire.He is best known for his discovery of the cut-up technique, used by his friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs...
had been experimenting with in the 1960s.
Track listing
Side A- "Welcome To The Alien Camp" - 1:57
- "Real Sure Alien Brain" - 2:51
- "On The Count Of Three" - 1:57
- "Dogs Are Funny People" - 1:24
- "It's Easy With KeseyKen KeseyKenneth Elton "Ken" Kesey was an American author, best known for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , and as a counter-cultural figure who considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. "I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a...
" - 1:32 - "73 Vibrant" - 2:56
- "Magazine Illustration" - 0:48
Side B
- "Magickal Variants" - 5:16
- "Nude Supper" - 9:46
- "The Sound Of Porridge Bubbling" - 1:56