The Second Annual Report
The Second Annual Report is considered to be influential within electronic music, being one of the first industrial music albums. Recorded in their rehearsal space and at various grubby gigs onto a Sony cassette recorder in a defiantly lo-fi manner in 1977, the music alternately chugged along like a squelchy, crude cop of the Velvet Underground, or stretched out into malingering new age, like a syphilitic Tangerine Dream. The album that established Throbbing Gristle’s reputation as perverse noiseniks with an unseemly interest in the seedy side of life, The Second Annual Report is still a difficult listen today, but it set the tone for the entire Throbbing Gristle mission: the endless binding of clean and unclean.