T.A.G.C.
Iso-Erotic Calibration
UK COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR343CD (2024)
This record’s a little out of my line, but Adi Newton is an important figure for any who want to trace the history of the Sheffield electronic music thing; founder member of The Future with Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware in 1977, it was Newton who left the band before they made any official records, and went off to do the Clock DVA thing with his other buddies. Marsh and Ware of course went on to become The Human League, but Clock DVA was apparently a lot more experimental and avant in their approach. It was a duo with Steven Judd Turner, though other musicians came and went in various line-ups of the band; starting with cassette releases in 1978, Clock DVA found its way to Throbbing Gristle’s Industrial Records label in the early 1980s. I never heard any of these records, but Clock DVA are held in high regard by many, and have featured in the Vinyl On Demand reissue programme. Adi Newton also apparently needed a solo outlet to express another side of his musical personality, and hence we have The Anti Group, often abbreviated to T.A.G.C.
Today’s release is a rebake of an item that originally came out in 1994 on the Side Effects label, along with bonus tracks and a first-time-on-vinyl presentation. It’s a rather grim, impersonal listen, with hints of violence at every turn. The Anti Group like to position themselves as a “research project” and want to use the whole thing as a vehicle to express their conceptual and philosophical ideas; nothing so vulgar as being in a “band” with a “record contract” who could perform for an “audience”, which might be why The Human League, with their popular records on a major label and a sizeable following, held no appeal to them. Iso-Erotic Calibration purports to be something to do with “human sexuality”, and the digipak is printed with short texts and illustrations which bolster the musical ideas. No area is off-limits, no blushes are spared, and any area of erotic endeavour from mankind’s cultural history is worthy of quotation, including surrealism, the occult, mythology, romantic poetry, and ancient Egyptian texts.
This pseudo-esoteric aspect of the UK industrial underground has never appealed to me much; Coil and Throbbing Gristle were others who also claimed to be doing “research”, and they too liked to break rules, violate taboos, and seemed to take some perverse delight in upsetting the “straights” or undermining mainstream culture with far-out and obscure ideas that were somehow supposed to change everything we thought we knew. I’m sensing a variant of this strain on today’s record, along with a strong “self-determination” vibe; ‘Neurological Engineering’, for instance, is very insistent with its hammer-blow beats and airless music in reminding us that the entire human race is being systematically brainwashed, whether we know it or not, a trope that goes back to the Cold War period (if not earlier). The stark message is that we alone are responsible for helping ourselves; be strong and resistant, or die.
All the music here is very rich and well-produced, but also quite joyless and lacking in empathy – with its abiding mood of suspicion, anxiety, and paranoia. And yet it’s supposed to be about sex?! None of these mental exertions are disposed to express or enhance the delights of sexuality, and instead we come away with the impression that physical intimacy is hateful and repugnant, a locus for all that’s troubling, strange, and dark. (10/02/2025)