Vagina Dentata Organ.

Vagina Dentata Organ is the one-person project of Jordi Valls, a Catalan artist born in Barcelona who moved to London in the late 1970s. The project began with the 1983 LP Music For The Hashishins (WSNS 001 33) on Valls' own World Satanic Network System (WSNS) label and has continued, intermittently, ever since. Valls' biography places him in London at the height of punk: between 1976 and 1977 he recorded nine cassettes of live concerts by the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned, Subway Sect, Billy Idol & Generation X, the Slits and the Buzzcocks. These tapes circulated privately for thirty years and were finally published as the book The London Punk Tapes (2009). From punk Valls drifted into the Come Organisation / Throbbing Gristle / Whitehouse circuit, organising an early TG show in Barcelona and, by the early 1980s, managing Whitehouse.

The Whitehouse partnership produced his first recorded appearance. On the 1982 LP Psychopathia Sexualis Valls introduces each track in his native Catalan, the album's only non-English voice. In 1983 Valls voiced the track Catalan on Psychic TV's Dreams Less Sweet (Some Bizzare, 1983); Derek Jarman later directed a short film of the same title which staged the cinematic reconstruction of Valls' car accident using the actual car Valls had been driving. These four early-1980s appearances established Valls inside the inner working circle of British industrial · the same circle the Bureau documents in the Throbbing Gristle, Coil, Psychic TV, Whitehouse and Come Organisation files.

The first VDO LP, Music For The Hashishins (1983, WSNS 001 33), is a record of processed recordings of attack-trained dogs growling and barking, the title referencing the medieval Persian order from whose name the modern word assassin is derived. The LP appeared in a tiny edition on Valls' new WSNS imprint, which Valls christened World Satanic Network System for the period. A later Temple Records reissue (Psychic TV's imprint) brought the LP to a larger audience. The follow-up, The Last Supper (1983, WSNS 002 33), is the catalogue's most-discussed object: a picture-disc LP in an edition of exactly 912 hand-numbered copies, one for each body found at Jonestown after the November 1978 People's Temple mass-deaths, carrying audio of the cult's final hours including the Reverend Jim Jones's closing sermon. The record provokes the question its release was designed to provoke; Valls offers no commentary on whether the work is condemnation, exploitation or both, and offers no caption beyond the title and the edition number.

Triumph of the Flesh (1984, WSNS 003 33), the third LP, is also a picture disc; some copies of the edition were pressed with a quantity of Valls' own blood mixed into the vinyl. The piece Kill, Baby, Kill! on the 1985 Ohrenschrauben compilation (Dom V 77-01) takes its title from Mario Bava's 1966 horror film; the placement on the Heemann / Khan compilation alongside The New Blockaders + Organum, Whitehouse, Current 93, Nurse With Wound, P16.D4, Coil and The Haters places VDO inside the European industrial network the Bureau documents through that compilation. Triumph of the Flesh is the period's catalogue peak; the public outcry around the 1984 La Edad de Oro Spanish-TV performance (Valls destroyed three paintings on air) extends the period's visibility. The Catalan filmmaker Julian Alvarez later produced a video documentary on the first three VDO LPs which won first prize at the 26th Semana de Cinema in Barcelona.

After the initial trilogy Valls' output slows. The arts-and-culture magazine Life Without Sex dedicated an entire issue to VDO in 1997. The 2000s brought a methodological turn: The Great Masturbator (2004, dedicated to Salvador Dalí and named after the 1929 painting) is one hour of bells tolling in the painter's memory; Music For The Blind (2007, WSNS 2007 004 CD, edition of 1000) carries five versions of Enrico Toselli's Serenata (1900) played by Bernarda Jones for solo violin, a record explicitly aiming at beauty rather than provocation. Un Chien Catalan (the catalogue's homage to Buñuel and Dalí's Un Chien Andalou, 1929) takes the sound of a Harley-Davidson engine and treats it as the source · I always thought that a roaring motorbike is more beautiful than Vivaldi, Valls told the Uncarved interview. The catalogue's post-2000 reframing also rechristens WSNS as World Surrealist Network System · Valls foregrounding the Bretón / Dalí / Buñuel inheritance over the earlier shock-aesthetic.

Recent activity. The 2012 picture-disc LP Live in Berlin (Harbinger Sound HARBINGER089) documents a 31 March 2012 performance at NK Project, Berlin (subtitled Allegory of Cosmic Violence). From around 2010 onward Valls has shifted his time toward painting, producing portraits of supermodels using his own blood as the medium · a continuation of the picture-disc-blood gesture from Triumph of the Flesh moved into the gallery space. Live actions in Reus and other Catalan locations continue. The Pulso TV short documentary Underground Coffee and the 2024 article Vagina Dentata Organ en el centenario del surrealismo (parisbcn cultura) place Valls inside the centennial Surrealism programming the Catalan-and-Parisian cultural network ran across 2024.

Citation. The Bureau files VDO at Tier I as the Catalan-London one-person project sitting between early-1980s British industrial (Throbbing Gristle, Whitehouse, Psychic TV, Come Organisation), Catalan surrealism (Dalí, Buñuel) and the picture-disc-fetish tradition the WSNS catalogue defines for itself. Valls' method · field recordings, found audio, blood, hand-numbering, micro-editions, the physical object as part of the work · sits methodologically distinct from the period's synthesizer and tape-collage industrial mainstream and aligned more with the Conceptual / Surrealist gallery tradition. The Bureau's cross-references to VDO across this archive: the 1985 Ohrenschrauben compilation appearance; the 1982 Psychopathia Sexualis Whitehouse-management role; the 1983 Psychic TV Catalan / Jarman film; the Come Organisation circuit. Valls remains the Bureau's entry for the Spanish-and-Catalan industrial / extreme-music tradition of the 1980s onward.