Chris Carter - Miscellany (Mute)

A solo box set from Throbbing Gristle’s Chris Carter contains archival recordings of future shaping electronic dispatches from Ballardian Britain

It is no coincidence that JG Ballard’s urban disaster trilogy was published during the years that the future shaping electronic dispatches of Archival Recordings 1973 – 1977 were made. Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975) are dissections of a dead culture, the characters that Ballard populated them with submitting to primal urges, adopting death impulses and coveting an unmade society. Chris Carter was not responding to Ballard’s suggestions, but rather reacting to the same cultural inputs. Based on the evidence of these recordings, it sounds like Carter held the Radiophonic Workshop hostage in some remote bunker and forced them to anticipate the future from the DOA present.

Each track is an exploration conducted in minutes, but with results that stay around much longer. Imagery is implanted within or imprinted upon the listener, who is then coded to experience certain triggers. There’s a dispassionate sensuality running throughout, the sexual act reintegrated with the technological. Electronic rhythms and synth washes percolate, surface and penetrate. Walls contract and expand.

“Head Less” could have been the main title of Blade Runner, an adaptation of the William Burroughs novella rather than the film that borrowed its title (already adapted from another writer). “Hegel Vogt” is a nightmare collage of repeating idents advertising the mortuary wing of a high functioning sex farm. The acid squelch and post-nuclear death wails of “Hexfoil” give it an exhilarating yet ghostly presence. “Warm Hair” is all the saddest endings happening at the same time, a series of interlocked moments given up to what was and can never be again. It’s an emotive outburst that in the Ballardian scheme of things must afterwards be disputed, disregarded, redacted. “Variables” course corrects with dystopian bluntness.

The later, remastered albums in the box set – Mondo Beat (1985), Disobedient (1998) and Small Moon (1999) – are expressions of ideas explored in the archival pieces, with edgy ambience and difficult techno (in the vein of 12″s I was drawn to but didn’t understand at age fifteen). 1985’s “Moonlight” leaps off of Brutalist heights into the unknown, pulling everything in and around it. It’s the sort of electronic anthem that demands the dancefloor while simultaneously reconfiguring the higher senses. The delivery system has been accelerated, the message amplified.

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