Psychic TV (PTV3) in NYC

[schwenko]

Genesis (Breyer) P-Orridge now lives in Queens, my neck of the woods! Haven't spotted her yet though.

from the NY Times

November 11, 2008
Music Review
A Big Electronic Party in Celebration of Survival
By BEN RATLIFF
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.

With short blond bob, gold teeth, a denim skirt and go-go boots, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge mugged and gestured and vamped, taking the position of rock singer fairly seriously, but not seriously enough to spread discomfort. She sang Syd Barrett’s trippy “No Good Trying” and the Velvet Underground’s stomping “Foggy Notion”; she picked up a silver-painted violin to make feedback and wah-wah noises in improvisational sections; and in her own sad “New York Story,” about Ms. Breyer, she repeated the line “I love you any way you say.” It reduced her and her bassist, Alice Genese, to weeping. “God bless tears,” she said, wiping away some.

Occasionally funk broke out, of a few kinds: the swinging “Papal Breakdance” and the nervous, twitchy “Depraved Corrupted,” in which Genesis Breyer P-Orridge menacingly and teasingly rolled her r’s. It became a dance party too, and a noncompetitive, almost utopian one — if you still believe in the old utopia-dystopia thing.