Throbbing Gristle

Thirty years on from the original, Throbbing Gristle returned to the source material of The Second Annual Report - their catastrophic debut of November 1977, pressed in a run of 785 copies on their own Industrial Records with white labels, a "Nothing Short Of A Total War" sticker, and a Xerox warning strip about the shortcomings of the pressing - and reinterpreted it live at La Grande Halle-La Villette, Paris, on 6 June 2008. That performance was captured in full and issued as this 12" 180gm LP, Thirty-Second Annual Report, on the newly reactivated Industrial Records (IR2008/2). Limited to 777 copies - the number deliberately chosen to mirror the original pressing. Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter Christopherson, and Chris Carter, operating at full capacity in a contemporary PA environment, with all the weight of modern sound reproduction behind them.

The vinyl configuration is: Side A - three movements of "Slug Bait" (6:40 / 8:16 / 2:33) plus "Maggot Death" (4:40); Side B - "After Cease To Exist" in a single unbroken 20:33 stretch, the complete soundtrack to the COUM Transmissions film premiered in Arnhem in 1977. The accompanying black CD extends the document with "Industrial Introduction," three additional "Maggot Death" versions, and "Zyklon B Zombie" - material that would not fit within the vinyl format. What TG delivered was not a faithful recreation but a reinterpretation: the structural skeleton of the original retained, the flesh replaced entirely. Of the sampled dialogue from the first record - a police interview with a child offender - only one fragment survives. The rest is rebuilt from the inside out with the precision and controlled ferocity of a group that had never lost its ideological clarity.

This is the no-frame edition: stickered plain sleeve, numbered copy, LP + black CD. The framed acrylic edition was the more widely documented presentation of this release, but the content is identical - the same pressing, the same disc. The Thirty-Second Annual Report completes a circle that began with the ICA "Prostitution" exhibition in 1977, which prompted questions in Parliament and the "Wreckers of Civilisation" headline. An extraordinary document of a group still operating at the exact centre of its own logic.