Electronic Resistance

Nigel Ayers Electronic Resistance (2022)
This is a lavishly printed retrospective of artwork, collages, record covers, fliers, and related material by Nigel Ayers of Nocturnal Emissions. I wasn't going to bother, mainly because I still have all  the records and most of the other stuff, plus eighty dollars seemed like a lot of conkers - although to be fair this may be because the numismatic lobe of my brain still thinks an album costs around four quid like they did in 1982, so eighty dollars is probably what I think of as a tenner, maybe fifteen quid at a push. Anyway I saw a copy and noticed that I'd been personally thanked in the foreword alongside a load of other people you probably have heard of; so it seemed like I should probably get one for the coffee table just in case I ever get another visitor.

Actually, it is a good looking book, beautifully put together, and it's nice to have those collages I've known only as muddy black and white photocopies in full colour, along with all the stuff I've not seen before. Nigel Ayers' art has been difficult to quantify, not least because it eludes traditional classification as such and is easy to miss as something wrapped around an album - like punky Max Ernst, more at ease falling from a battered envelope than hung on a wall to be admired by wine enthusiasts. However, this collection goes a long way towards making sense of it all, bringing everything together as a surprisingly coherent picture, and one which emphasises the common threads which unite seemingly disparate areas of focus - from the consumer revolt of the early eighties to the shamanic pastoralism of more recent times. The collection also firmly stamps this visual component as part of the same deal as the music, from which it is arguably inseparable.

Nocturnal Emissions came to the fore, or to a fore of some description, along with an entire wave of similarly noisy avant-garde music groups approximately in the wake of Throbbing Gristle - at least for the sake of argument; but despite sharing certain recording techniques and a penchant for bothersome imagery, they always seemed very much their own thing, aesthetically closer to SPK - at least initially - and informed by a revolutionary and political conscience in comparison to which Gristle may as well have been Pink Floyd delighting their black clad followers with slides of murderers to accompany those trippy flanging effects.

For a little while, there was a gypsy camp out the back, that was good—we filled up their water containers and they scared the burglars off.

This comes from Ayers' account of the early days squatting in abject poverty in south London, and provides telling contrast with Gristle eulogising their own neighbourhood gypsy encampment on Subhuman. Nocturnal Emissions recycled the advertising copy and consumer propaganda, revealing the true intent of the great beast, but it was because they cared and because they hoped to make things better. It was never just some art school game with each reaction gauged as interesting before moving on to the next routine transgression. Electronic Resistance brings a new focus to Ayers' work, revealing it as spiritual kin to the Situationists, Jamie Reid, Crass, and other dwellers on the aesthetic and societal periphery, those who, for the most part, continue to resist assimilation by the machine. More than just a treasury of hits, these artworks retain their power in opposition to a system which is arguably worse now than it was even then, because they're witty, upsetting, funny, and oddly illuminating, like glimpses of the real world seen through the fog of consensus reality.