The music of J.G. Thirlwell is, in part, about letting go of preconceptions. At the most facile level, as a listener (inevitably an outsider to any art not self-created), there’s the getting over one’s preconceived ideas of just what kind of artist Thirlwell is. Is he the mastermind of artfully zany soundtracks of perverse and ostensibly subversive cartoons like Archer and Venture Bros., historically indebted shows which strive to transcend their source material and need music that’s knowing and ambitious enough to match? Or is the Thirlwell that one is most familiar with the scabrous provocateur of much of the man’s work in the 1980’s, when he took the stage as Foetus and lurched into industrial-showtunes with titles like “Pigswill?” Or does the listener come to Thirlwell looking for more self-negating noir, be it his Clint Ruin project of doomed-romance duets performed with the no wave queen Lydia Lunch, or his electronic murder ballads that he released as Wiseblood? Maybe the listener is a bit of an aesthete, preferring the lovely claustrophobia coursing through Thirlwell’s Manorexia project, or the jauntily brutalist exotica of Steroid Maximus. Hell, maybe the listener isn’t primarily a listener at all and is just a sucker for impeccably designed album art of the Russian Constructivist school, or comes to Thirlwell with a fanaticist’s appreciation of an auteur’s integrity, buying each album in order to staunchly support the DIY efforts of an uncompromised vision. If the listener expects only one of these aspects of Thirlwell, then they do both themselves and the work a disservice. Because the music of James George Thirlwell is all these facets, and—during every incarnation, spanning the last four decades—it always was. Maybe one aspect would be accentuated; would be the project’s face, but there was one body and one psyche throughout. 

For Thirlwell, when asked what he considers himself, whether he’s more a songwriter or composer, he answers, “a composer,” without hesitation. 

He says this while reclining on a couch, in his DUMBO loft space which is on just the correct side of tidy even if the composer is surrounded on all sides by books, posters, and records and CDs—in shelves and in piles—that are maintained and organized by some presumed system, even as they hint towards spilling over. Onstage, in clips from his performances at National Sawdust, Thirlwell wears an all white suit; the weapon of choice for musicians—of a certain age and discernment—who might sing about death and sex (and all the violence in-between), but who eschew the all black ensemble preferred by their more on-the-nose contemporaries. At home, he favors the louche and cozy; cool and fine shirts, haphazardly buttoned. Without reading too much into any controlled chaos, it can be said about Thirlwell that he looks young for 63, still handsome and still with a rocker’s dishevelment, with the combination of elfen and gaunt often found in those with good genes and (former) bad habits. At certain points, when discussing a collaborator’s passing, or when showing off his room devoted to rock bios, Thirlwell’s expressive eyes take over the rest of his face, and either grief or enthusiasm make him look ten, twenty, thirty years younger; perhaps depending on when his friend died or when he first discovered a particularly juicy hair metal memoir. 

It’s not a shocking (or even particularly interesting) observation to point out that the music JG Thirlwell is making in the 21st Century is different from what he made in the century prior. Besides the fact that neither the ‘80s or ‘90s were half the laughs that those who refuse to creatively leave them would have one believe, Thirlwell has always been in a state of flux. Maybe not as chameleon-like as your Bowies or Madonnas, the Foetus/Wiseblood/Clint Ruin/etc./etc./etc. mastermind certainly operates within that tradition-averse tradition. Rather than a series of rebirths, however, Thirlwell favors evolution, and a staggered evolution at that. In this path, an artsy, already omnivorous teenage Thirlwell can move to London at 18, be transformed, first by punk and synths, then by Nurse With Wound. 

“If punk rock kind of democratized the sense that anyone can pick up an instrument and make music,” Thirlwell explains, “then someone like Steve Stapleton was like… His attitude was more like, ‘You don't need an instrument to make music. You don't need anything of any convention.’” 

From there (and concurrently, or before… the chronological jumping of influence is partly the point), as Thirlwell explored the possibilities and freedom of electronics, noise, and punk rock, his job at a record store led him to Philip Glass, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Merce Cunningham. It was at a Merce Cunningham performance that Thirlwell even had an opportunity to pass off his first 7” to John Cage, with his potential New Music Hustle & Flow moment missed only because he was “too intimidated” to slip the composer his demo (leaving history to ponder what might have been, had the Foetus Under Glass Spite Your Face EP been given the opportunity to be as big a hit as 4’33”).

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Even as Thirlwell was focussed on Foetus, his methodology was closer to the composing he does now than how his contemporaries—whether the improvisationally inclined no wavers, or the punk and/or noise rockers who, for all their denunciations of dinosaurs, still wrote songs the same way Sha Na Na did—typically made art. It was an early exploration, based on necessity.

“I had this complex numerical system figured out where I had the structure of the song, and then the order in which I would record the instruments, and sort of the melodies and stuff,” Thirlwell explains. “So that was already a kind of a form of composition, where it was all blocked out. And then I would build it, because working in an eight track studio, I didn't have unlimited tracks. I might want six tracks of backing vocals. So I'd have to go, ‘Well, if I want to do that on this track, I have to do put down a click track, do all the backing vocals first, then bounce them to one track, and then I have to put on the instruments because if I if I'm going to run out of tracks…’” 

Thirlwell has never rejected all Rock and Roll tropes (conceding that his audience-baiting was more in line with Suicide than, say, Black Flag). And, for good or ill, much of even the more Carl Stalling looney-tune aspects of Foetus was eventually codified as straight up rawk by Cop Shoot Cop and assorted AmRep acts. But, over time, his compositional method in making barn burners like Nail, fed increasingly into “straight” (using the term loosely) composing. With that came commissions, collaborations with Kronos Quartet, at the soundtrack work for which he’s arguably (at least to your average Adult Swim viewer) best known 

But even as Thirlwell transitioned (occasionally back and forth) between worlds, his work maintained a, for lack of a better word, muscularity. But that could be projection on the part of this listener; an inability to separate the noir bop I hear on my TV from Brock Samson and Archer’s latest high body-count hijinks, or the pulses and waves of 2017’s Neopspection from how I imagine Thirlwell composing them. The composer himself doesn’t agree with this perceived consistency, exactly. In discussing his most recent collection of compositions, entitled Dystonia (performed in full on May 16th at National Sawdust), Thirlwell says that “they embody this style of writing I've been exploring….”

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“And that's a kind of like a rhythmic insistence, which it took me a while to give myself permission to do because I felt like it was almost like I didn't want to fall back on that, you know? It’s something that when I started writing string quartets, I didn't do that. You know, I was exploring different areas of phrasing that maybe I hadn't explored in other works. And then I decided, you know, I really want to give myself permission to explore this. Which I did. And there's a lot to be said in that; there's a relentlessness to it, and there's an athletic-ness for the players, certainly. Because this stuff is not easy to play. You know, the scores should come with a warning label.”

So perhaps Dystonia is a rebirth, or a continuation from a path that had been, for a time, diverged from. As evidenced by previous Sawdust performances, with their chamber ensemble reconfiguring-for-strings of old Foetus material,Thirlwell doesn’t mind doubling back and revisiting what he still finds useful. While that project was, as Thirlwell states, born when “I started to think, ‘I wonder what would be like to re-imagine some of my pieces in a more stripped down kind of string or chamber ensemble.’ And I don't know how I came up with that. It just sort of struck me that ‘I'd really like to do it with harp.’ So then I just started thinking ‘harp, acoustic guitar, piano, violin…that's fine. That’s plenty.'’” The utility of his older work is, again, not just for its creator. It is also an unfortunate byproduct of the relevance of Thirlwell’s long standing, reasonably bleak, worldview. 

“It's very now,” he says, speaking of the updated chamber versions. “I mean, it really taps into my feelings now. You know, for a song like ‘I'll Meet You in Poland,’ for example, which is originally about the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, put into the context of a kind of a jilted lover conversation. And we do a version of that live. But now, when I do it now, it chokes me up because I think about what's happening now in Ukraine, and that's what that song is about now.”

Dystonia is new work, part of Thirlwell’s own tradition of forward momentum within a continuity, coupled with that aforementioned disinclination to simply, solely be what he’s previously been. When asked about the new album’s theme, he answers dryly that “they're thematically linked because I did them.” The score, “Ozymandias,” is about his dead friend. The other pieces come from other muses, not unrelated. 

“I've moved away from a lot of subjects I've written about before, but I mean, that seems to be what remains. The fear, anxiety, the obsessions…” then Thirlwell laughs, or at least his eyes do, and the composer looks his age, and simultaneously at least a couple years or decades younger while adding, “...occasionally revenge, retribution…”

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About Zachary Lipez

Zachary Lipez is a freelance writer in NYC, and the Editor at Large for Creem Magazine. He is the author of a number of books with Stacy Wakefield and Nick Zinner, most recently 131 Different Things (Akashic). He sings in the band Publicist UK. 

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