Throbbing Gristle - The Third Mind Movements (2LP)

Throbbing Gristle’s The Third Mind Movements arrived in 2009 like a secret postcard from their reunion years. The band had been back in action since the mid-2000s, and this one slipped out around the same stretch that put them on stages in the States, including Coachella that spring. It feels like a dispatch from the road. Not a set of songs so much as a gallery of states, improvised and sculpted by four players who knew how to bend electricity into mood. Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Chris Carter, and Peter Christopherson spent a career turning studio gear into an instrument. Here they lean into that history and strip away almost everything else.

What you get is largely instrumental. Voices flicker at the edges, but they’re more ghost than guide. The palette is familiar yet newly focused: Carter’s synths and sequences breathing in slow pulses, Sleazy’s treatments and tape play wrapping everything in fog, Cosey’s guitar and cornet cutting through with sudden color, Genesis steering by feel and texture. The title tips the hand. “Third mind” nods to Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs, and the idea of cut-ups animates the album’s flow. Movements glide into each other with an internal logic that feels assembled from spontaneous parts. It is collage made from live electricity.

If Part Two: The Endless Not tried on song shapes in 2007, The Third Mind Movements drifts toward ritual. Beats show up, but in a way that suggests distant machinery rather than dance. A low, steady throb sets the frame. Over it, small events spark up and recede. A flutter of shortwave. A tremor of bass. A guitar scrape that becomes a horizon line. The band always drew power from patience, and they trust it here. You start listening for tiny shifts. A click turns into a rhythm. A smear of synth resolves into a chord. It is ambient in the Eno sense only halfway. Too much iron in the water for that. Closer to a trance field built from coils and valves.

The context gives it weight. By 2009, Throbbing Gristle had already defined and outlived “industrial.” They were performing for a new crowd in America, and this album feels like a backstage pass to how they summoned the thing each night. Fans who picked up the tour-only CD at the merch table knew what they were getting. A working document. Later, The Third Mind Movements vinyl became a prized catch for collectors. Spin it next to 20 Jazz Funk Greats and you can trace the line from early tape experiments to a late style that is all poise and pressure. Spin it after Desertshore and The Final Report and you hear how much of Sleazy’s future atmospheres were already alive in these rooms.

The sound is gorgeous in a lived-in way. Not glossy. Just detailed. You can tell how carefully the four of them listen to one another. Cosey has talked about improvisation as conversation, and that comes through. Carter’s electronics don’t crowd. They leave space. Genesis tests the air with a phrase or a small fragment and then lets it go. Christopherson moves across the stereo field, placing small artifacts where your ear least expects them. Headphones are a must. Vinyl is even better if you can find a quiet copy. Throbbing Gristle albums on vinyl tend to reveal the low end they were always chasing, and this one loves a good system.

As a full-length, it holds together better than the word “improvised” might suggest. The sequencing is sharp. There is tension, release, and a sense of arrival by the end. You come out of it with that odd TG calm. A little colder, but alert. The album isn’t trying to shock. It’s trying to tune you. That might be why it has aged so well. People still walk into a Melbourne record store, flip past the usual suspects, and light up when they see The Third Mind Movements vinyl tucked on a high shelf. If you buy Throbbing Gristle records online, you will see this one pop up with a whisper rather than a shout. It sells and then it’s gone.

For newcomers, start with the canon and circle back. For the faithful, this is one of the essential late documents. It captures a group of artists who had nothing left to prove and found another language anyway. If you stumble on a clean copy in a bin of vinyl records Australia shops keep behind the counter, do not hesitate. File it next to your other Throbbing Gristle vinyl and let it play after dark, when the house is quiet and the power grid sings.