Foetus Maximus

Jim Thirlwell, a demon for all seasons

By Skylaire Alfvegren

LA Weekly: Wednesday, August 29, 2001 - 12:00 am

“I can’t wait to slip into my nano-technology body,” remarks J.G. Thirlwell, pioneer of the musical genre sloppily referred to as “industrial.” He’s just finished the Ray Kurzweil tome The Age of Spiritual Machines, and is discussing the coming advances in mechanical physiology: miniature, self-replicating robots deployed internally to repair damaged organs. Slate-gray eyes sparkling, he enthuses, “I can’t wait to become a robot.”

Thirlwell left his native Melbourne, Australia, for London in the late ’70s, where he flirted with the likes of extreme-noise kings Whitehouse and avant-catastrophist David Tibet of Current 93. Yet his dictatorial tendencies soon compelled him to forge his own personal swath of carnage. He rebirthed himself as Foetus, whose gift for sonic apocalypse has been apparent since he self-released Deaf in 1981.

The red-white-and-black graphics and four-letter titles (Nail, Hole, Ache) of Thirlwell’s sick-pun signatures (Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel, Foetus Interruptus, Foetus Inc.) represent a proto-Columbine world-view, best captured on the 1990 live double album Male. If Foetus hits you, it’s a simultaneous slash to the heart and the head. Greased with misanthropy, vile and bile, his lyrics are a crazy, manic tonic, pistol-whipping your subconscious. Eyes-rolling-back-in-the-head possessed, Thirlwell knows that sometimes it’s a triumph to simply maintain a pulse.

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