How The Pandrogyne Confounds Hir DNA: Interview with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (2003)

Jun 14

alchemy, Genetic Manipulation, Singularity, Sonic Esoterrorism, transhumanism

From acceler8or.com – a new site from R.U. Sirius.

“People will say, “I feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body’… And I say, ‘I feel like I’m trapped in a body.’ ”

While he’s best known as the musician who helped start both the industrial music and the acid house music subcultures, Genesis P-Orridge is foremost a hero of the post-punk counterculture, a true mutant, an experimental artist, and an androgyne (“I prefer pandrogyne where ‘p’ is for positive/power/potent/precious.”) If you don’t know about Mr. P-Orridge’s oeuvre, you haven’t just missed a career, you’ve missed an entire dimension of hyperreality.

His pornographic postcards earned perhaps his first serious public attention (from the law, of course. Beat luminaries and collaborators William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin aided in his defense.) His performance/art group COUM Transmissions involved physically challenging, graphically sexual and upsetting presentations executed to the accompaniment of assaultive sound collages just before hippie gave way to punk. With Throbbing Gristle, the first industrial rock group, P-Orridge became something of a punk pop star.

Most of us would be content to live out that role for a decade or so but P-Orridge moved on. As an expression of his interest in magickal practices —particularly as prescribed by the eccentric Englishman Austin Osman Spare, he started Thee Temple Ov Psychic Youth; an “anti-religion” dedicated to novel forms of magickal invocation frequently involving the transference of sexual secretions through the mail. And then, back to music: with Psychic TV, P-Orridge proselytized for the Acid House movement, which he helped to import from Detroit to England. Today’s rave culture is its (mostly rather pallid) successor.

In the early ‘90s, chased out of England by Scotland Yard for obscure fictive reasons, P-Orridge settled in the USA where he became a close friend with Timothy Leary and continued to perform with variations of his Psychic TV lineup. In the early 200s, P-Orridge messed with his own gender identity, dressing continually in women’s clothes and then getting breast implants. He and his wife, Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge, who passed on in 2007, were transforming their physical appearances to be as similar as possible. Since her death, Genesis has been incorporating her into everything he does, referring to himself as “us,” and insisting that “SHE IS (STILL) HER/E”

P-Orridge is an unusual mix: he’s taken punk provocateurism to its outer limits but his manner is that of an androgynous British pop star. And beyond all the pop culture referents is a serious, almost classical explorer of consciousness and what it is to be a human being.

I interviewed him for The Thresher in 2003, after the release of Painful but Fabulous: The Lives & Art of Genesis P. Orridge, published by Shortwave/Soft Skull Press.

Recently, I’ve found myself thinking about a number of elements of this interview, particularly Genesis’s idea that he is resisting his DNA. I decided to revisit and re-edit this conversation for Acceler8or.

Read the interview here

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