Women Of The SS

condition (record/cover): NM / generic

Picture-disc in generic plastic bag.

Women Of The SS was a side-project of John Zewizz's Sleep Chamber, not a right-wing project, as Zewizz himself has been at pains to clarify: it emerged from the same Boston-based ritual-erotica / industrial orbit that produced the Sleep Chamber catalogue, and the SS initials function inside Zewizz's consistent fetish-iconography rather than any actual political reference.

The material originally circulated as a 1984 C60 cassette before this 1991 RRRecords vinyl edition. Musically the approach sits close to the first-wave Throbbing Gristle / Psychic TV axis: tense, claustrophobic electronic beds, serpentine female spoken-word delivered through heavy tape processing, and the fetishistic subject-matter that Zewizz's Inner-X-Musick catalogue had specialised in for most of the Eighties. One Discogs reviewer captured the effect precisely: if Throbbing Gristle had ever made an album to have sex to, this would be it.

The 7" accompanying the picture LP runs, on side A, a single track; side B plays the same track backwards. The configuration (picture disc plus transparent 7") is characteristic of RRRecords's commitment to objects-as-objects, running parallel to Lessard's more famous anti-records. A scarce artefact of the American ritual-erotica industrial underground, and a specifically provocative entry in the RRRecords catalogue.