Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (born Neil Andrew Megson; 22 February 1950) the pioneering and boundary shifting English singer-songwriter, musician, poet, performance artist, occultist, disciple of William S. Byrroughs, transgressive counter-cultural icon and a pioneer of radical performance has died aged 70. after battling leukemia for 2½ years, the Dais Records label announced.
The label shared a statement from P-Orridge’s daughters Careese, and Genesse on their parent who identified as third gender, they wrote:
Dear friends, family and loving supporters, It is with very heavy hearts that we announce thee passing of our beloved father, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
S/he had been battling leukemia for two and a half years and dropped he/r body early this morning, Saturday March 14th, 2020.
S/he will be laid to rest with h/er other half, Jaqueline “Lady Jaye” Breyer who left us in 2007, where they will be re-united.
Thank you for your love and support and for respecting our privacy as we are grieving.
Caresse & Genesse P-OrridgeP-Orridge was born in Victoria Park, Manchester on February 22 1950,, as Neil Andrew Megson and grew up in Essex. As a teenager, he attended Solihull School in Warwickshire, where he was interested in occultism, avant-garde art, radical politics and underground music.After being hospitalised aged 17 following a blackout they decided their life should be dedicated to art. They began to conduct ‘happenings’ designed to spark an “artistic revolution”. Such works were controversial – their Hull University magazine Worm, which published anything submitted without editorial interference, was banned for obscenity by the Student Union.
#s/heisher/forever
S/he left the University of Hull to join the Transmedia Explorations commune in London, leading lights of the counter-culture scene since 1967, leaving the commune after three months to found the controversial avant-garde art and improvisation music collective COUM Transmissions with artist Cosi Fanni Tutti, inspired by the subversive prankery of thee dadaists and the situationists. COUM Transmissions founded its own counter-culture commune of artists and thinkers called the Ho-Ho Funhouse in a dockside warehouse and moved towards more theatrical performance art, such as purposefully turning up to play as gig with no instruments, or encouraging audiences to boo them offstage.Their 1976 exhibition at London’s Institute of Present-day Arts, titled Prostitution, scandalised the art world, and prompted Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn to denounce the group as “the wreckers of civilization”
It was during this time that s/he also began a friendship and correspondence with Beat writer William Burrroughs that wuld last until the authors death in 1997. Soon afterwardsr Genesis and Tutti branched out to form Throbbing Gristle in 1975 with Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson. The band was named after Yorkshire slang for an erect penis.They released "United " b/w " "Zyclon B Zombie," their first single, on their own Industrial Records label"
Releasing their debut album The Second Annual Report in 1977. Crude, uncompromising and deliberately malicious, it was not always an easy listen, – based all-around a number of variations of the music Slug Bait and Maggot Loss of life, which in depth sadistic functions of violence and murder. Only 785 copies were being pressed, but the album was a critical affect on the industrial movement, a a lot more antagonistic cousin of punk. As a member of this seminal band, P.Orridge contributed shock tactics and performance art with subversive, hybrid aesthetics, thus helping to define the nascent industrial genre as an adventurous and edgy one. The hugely influential group traded in harsh, grating confrontational music, white noise, primitive, based samples, drum loops and spoken word poetry and disturbing visuals, that often featured nudity, self- mutilation and images of Concentration Camps were active from 1975 to 1981 and again from 2004 to 2010. Their third album, 1979's 20 Jazz Funk Greats is considered to be one of the most influential industrial albums of all time. A vast array of alternative acts, from My Bloody Valentine,;Killing Joke to Nine Inch Nails and Aphex Twin and Ministry remain firmly in its debt.
The band collapsed in 1981 due to personal issues and P-Orridge went on to found the experimental “video group who does music” Psychic TV with Alternative TV’s Alex Fergusson. They embraced video art, psychedelia, electronica and punk. Delving further into P-Orridge’s interest in the occult, and fetishism they also utilised magical sigils, Tibetan instruments made of human thigh bones, and explored the teachings of LaVeyan Satainism; they hoped reclaim television as a form of eso terrorist” magick rather than a tool of establishment indoctrination, and scored a minimal hit with Godstar, a tribute to late Rolling Stone guitarist Brian Jones.
Psychic TV made their debut in 1982 at a four-day multimedia event in London and Manchester called the Final Academy, which featured artists including William S Burroughs and Brion Gysin.
The band’s output was prolific – releasing much more than 100 albums, and entering the Guinness Reserve of World Data after issuing 14 dwell records in the room of 18 months. From 1988 onwards they became under the influence of acid house.
P-Orridge was also a founding member in 1981 of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth ' anti-cult' TOPY gathered members of the industrial music subculture, artists and occultists, into a loose network with the aim of, in Genesis' words, "changing society through the magical transformation of individuals". TOPY was dedicated to the occult, chaos magic, and ultimately attacking British society, who existed to promote a system ov functional, demystified magick, utilising both pagan and modern techniques..
With these projects, as well as their abundant visual arty, P- Orridge, applied the cut and paste techniques of William S.Burrough and the occult philosophies of Aleister Crowley to cultural work that aimed to corrupt and unsettle the habits of normative consensus society and brazenly confronting power and pushing the boundaries of acceptance wherever they could. “I am at war with the status quo of society and I am at war with those in control and power,” said Genesis in 1989. “I’m at war with hypocrisy and lies, I’m at war with the mass media.”
In 1992, Genesis’s dwelling in Brighton was raided by Scotland Yard’s Obscene Publications Squad after a Channel 4 Dispatches programme claimed to have footage of P-Orridge abusing children in sex-magic rites. The material was later found to be video performance artwork from the early 1980s – partly funded by Channel 4 itself, and featuring no children.programme.
Despite this the artist went into self-imposed exile in the US. Consistently pushing the boundaries of adventurous art, P.Orridge pioneered new ways of thinking around identity, gender and relationships and S/he met the performance artist Lady Jaye Breyer in the nineties. Together the legendary couple moved to New York and began a lifelong project of “pandrogeny”which was Genesis's attempt to virtually "become" Jaye via physical and spiritual transfiguration Breyer and P-Orridge underwent numerous cosmetic, surgical, and medical treatments in order to approximate one another, thus finally merging into a single pandrogynous being named Breyer P-Orridge. “Pandrogeny as a concept is not about gender—it’s about the ending of all binary perception.It’s influenced by the allegory of the path of no distinction—that all definitions, distinctions, values, matters of what could be considered good, bad, delicious, or revolting are all human-made. They’re not innate. That’s true of identity, which includes gender.For for us it’s about erasing the need to even consider gender.”
This pandrogyny project was cut short when Breyer died of acute heart arrhythmia in 2007, an especially painful loss at a time when P-Orridge was beginning to receive highbrow acclaim,triggering a long cycle of grief for h/er partner. Undergoing gender reassignment surgery in the mid-2000s and, according to a 2019 interview in the Los Angeles Times, preferred gender-neutral pronouns in part because of “a desire to include into conversations the voice of their longtime creative and romantic partner Jacqueline ‘Lady Jaye’ Breyer.
S/he had been diagnosed with chronic myelomonocytic leukemia in 2017,a year after Psychic TV recorded their final studio album. It was a diagnosis which s/he took on with the spirit only a true avant-garde, occultist could. Speaking to The New York Times in 2018, P-Orridge had this to say about her philosophy on life:“When you’ve got a terminal illness, you think about what your
legacy might be. My only answer is, we would hope that it would inspire people to see that they can do a life totally as they would like it to unfold. Live your life every day like a page in your book of life, and make that page as interesting as you can. Whenever you have a choice, say: Which is the better page in my book?”
TryMarie Losier’s documentary film The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye was released in 2011,
and in 2016 the Rubin Museum of Art in New York hosted Try to Altar Everything an exhibition of P-Orridge’s paintings, sculptures and installations. In 2018 s/he published Brion Gysin: His Name Was Master, a collection of interviews and essays.
In 2003 P-Orridge had unveiled PTV3, a new band drawing on the legacy of Psychic TV. They released four albums and several EPs between 2007 and 2016. In 2018 they performed at Heaven in London.
P-Orridge is survived by two daughters, Genesse and Caresse, from a first marriage, to Paula Brooking, which ended in divorce.
A daring authentic, uncompromising musical pioneer, cultural engineer, provocateur extraordinary, shapeshifting purveyor of the senses, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is arguably one of the most important icons of Alternative Culture of the latter quarter of the 20th century and beyond who leaves a legacy of much richness, who remains a hugely influential figure on young musicians looking for new directions,a unique persona who has certainly inspired me, may s/he continue to find unconditional love as s/he travels into the infinite. Goodbye to this musical legend, there is beauty and there is ugliness, and angels and demons in every land we tread., Genesis will be missed deeply.
Throbbing Gristle - Almost a kiss
Throbbing Gristle - What a Day
Throbbing Gristle - Dream Machine
Psychic TV - Infinite Beat
Psychic TV - Pagan Day
Psychic TV - The Alienist
Psychic TV - Just Drifting (for Caresse)
