Posted on: January 5, 2009 Posted by: anfnewsacct Comments: 0

At the end of 2008, Counter Cultural provocateur Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Psychic TV released their SEVENTY FIFTH album (go ahead and look it up on Allmusic.com!) MR. ALIEN BRAIN vs THE SKINWALKERS.

The album was produced by Edward ODowd & Genesis for Angry Love Productions. It was mastered by Bryin Dall at Waxy Yellow Build Up Studios, New York July 2008 and marks the second release from the Brooklyn based incarnation of this line up. Most of these tracks were recorded live for NPR’s “WORLD CAFE” program at WXPN-FM’s studios in Philadelphia, PA May 2008 or at Galapagos Arts Space, Brooklyn, New York 2007. There’s been some extraordinary press coverage to date, a sampling of the latest being included below.

Initial pressing will include an exclusive DVD boasting 30 minutes of unseen PSYCHIC TV/PTV3 live and on the road and in the studio by filmmaker Marie Losier and other surprises. This album is lovingly dedicated to LADY JAYE BREYER P-ORRIDGE:1969-2007.

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With his band Throbbing Gristle in the late 1970s, as frontman and head polemicist, Genesis P-Orridge made musical analogies for urban English decay, war and greed: harsh and sometimes physically disturbing electronic sound. When a movement came out of that notion – industrial music – he took the position of its seer.

Later he started a different band, Psychic TV, and for years, in the ’80s and ’90s, it pulled toward pleasure-seeking repetitions of rave and acid house. This all set the earlier confrontations in a more benevolent light. Any record or performance involving Genesis P-Orridge has been about ideas as much as about music, and the ideas were generally about how to slip free from the normative impositions of life, the binary one-thing-or-the-otherness of art, manners, sex or anything else.

At 54, in 2005, he waged the ultimate war against binary thinking: he and Lady Jaye Breyer, his wife and collaborator in Psychic TV, sought a kind of third way, a shared and neutral gender, neither male nor female. They called their project pandrogyny. He had facial surgery and breast implants and now refers to himself as s/he, or just plain she.

Last fall Ms. Breyer died unexpectedly. But the band’s show at Club Europa on Sunday night, its first performance since her death, was suffused with sweetness and good feeling. That was fascinating – given that the show was partly a memorial, that the sampled sounds included sirens and gunfire, and that Genesis P-Orridge doled out her voice in screams or snarling drones.

What was this happiness? It was no postelection glow; in one song Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (as the singer is now known), who lives in Queens, intoned, “No matter who you vote for, the government gets in.” It just seemed a party for living and persevering, with ’60s psychedelic rock the dominant baseline reference.

In its third iteration now, Psychic TV is a sextet with guitars and electronics; a guest musician, Hanna Haddix, took over Ms. Breyer’s role as manipulator of the samplers. The musicians smiled and talked to one another while playing, sharing glasses of wine, cracking one another up.

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