John Lacey / Coum Transmissions – Music for Stocking Top, Swing and Staircase (2014)

Music for Stocking Top, Swing and Staircase‘ is a spellbinding archival discovery documenting a performance by one of the missing links in experimental electronic and prototypical industrial music. John Lacey is one of the background players in British electronic music and conceptual performance art. He was an early collaborator with Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti and a crucial member of COUM Transmissions alongside Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis P-Orridge. Lacey contributed technical direction – essentially constructing their live set-up of quadraphonic speakers, custom tape decks and mixing desks and his self-built synthesisers to their massed live actions – as with the recording captured here, extracted from a 12 hour session on 1st October, 1974 at the Gulbenkian Hall, RCA, London. John also introduced his COUM Transmission comrades Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti to Chris Carter – with whom he was collaborating on another multimedia show – and if you’re reading this we’ll assume you’ll no doubt realise the weight of importance behind that fact! This LP + CD documents a section of the 12 hour recording made through a portable cassette deck which captured both the performance and external sounds including the barks of Cosey’s dog, Tremble, and murmurs of discussion in proximity to the mic. It’s totally ghostly and hypnotic, with an understandable amount of tape hiss and warble which only adds to the enigmatic atmosphere and affords a beautifully unbridled glimpse of COUM Transmissions, and by turns, a wayward British spirit at its most unsuspecting. As a very neat aside, John Lacey would go on to become an influential tutor on the music and multimedia course at UCLan, with a roll call of former pupils including half of Demdike Stare, Rainer Veil, and Other Ideas’ Andrew Hargreaves.