Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
Music pioneer, artist and body evolutionist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge has never let art, life or evolution stand in the way of imagination. As a Fluxus and Dada-inspired performance artist with COUM Transmissions, the post-hippie Breyer P-Orridge determined to revolutionise everyday life. By the late ’70s, Breyer P-Orridge was fronting Throbbing Gristle, a defiantly anti-rock experiment so successful that it launched the entirely new genre of Industrial Music. TG also pioneered a self-determining model for independent music-making that still flourishes today. Breyer P-Orridge’s next project, the music and arts collective Psychic TV, explored a deep interest in fetishism, magick and ritual, with an emphasis on body art. A prime mover in the 80’s Modern Primitives subculture, from which the latter-day mass trend for tattooing and piercing emerged, Breyer P-Orridge has since taken body politics several stages further with pandrogeny, a ‘third gender’ project launched in the late 90’s with wife and life-partner Lady Jaye. After Jaye ‘dropped her body’ in 2007, Genesis remains even more devoted to pandrogeny, which s/he insists is more about consciousness than the body.
