The album the form will not get rid of, and arguably cannot.
I hold Right to Kill at the difficult centre of the genre's documentary record. The album is not the best album Whitehouse made; it is not the most musically interesting album Whitehouse made; and it is, by a wide margin, the album I would most prefer not to be documenting. It is included anyway. The reason is operational rather than aesthetic: the album was and remains, the most-cited reference point in any history of power electronics that takes the form seriously as a form and my view is that the catalogue's value depends on keeping what was made and influential, not on keeping what is comfortable to recommend. The page below is therefore long and the disclaimer-to-content ratio is the highest in the M-series catalogue.
Some background. Whitehouse formed in London in 1980 around William Bennett, then aged 19, who had played guitar in the post-punk band Essential Logic for the previous year and had begun recording solo as Come in late 1978. The Come single (Come Sunday, 1979) had been sequenced and synth-bassed by Daniel Miller, of Mute Records, in what I hold to be the first commercially-released example of the timbral palette the genre would later develop. Bennett established Come Organisation as a label in 1979, modelled on Industrial Records (IR Prospectus in this catalogue) and on Ralph Records in San Francisco; renamed his primary project Whitehouse the following year; and acquired, from his Essential Logic tour-mate Robert Rental, an EDP Wasp synthesiser that became the instrument the early albums are built around.
The Whitehouse name was a double pun: a tribute to the British morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse, whose press clippings the band intended to provoke and a citation of the British soft-porn periodical Whitehouse, in whose pages Cosey Fanni Tutti had, by 1976, repeatedly appeared (COUM in this catalogue). The pun was an editorial position. The albums followed at an aggressive cadence: Birthdeath Experience (1980), Total Sex (1980), Erector (1981), Dedicated to Peter Kürten (1981), Buchenwald (1981), New Britain (1982), Psychopathia Sexualis (1982), Right to Kill (1983), Great White Death (1984), and a brief hiatus. The term power electronics was coined by Bennett on the sleeve of the 1982 album Psychopathia Sexualis and is the foundational term for the form at power electronics in this catalogue.
The lineup that recorded Right to Kill in 1983 included Bennett (vocals, synthesiser), Kevin Tomkins (synthesiser; arrived from Sutcliffe Jugend that year, departed January 1985 to start a family), and Peter Sotos (electronics, lyrics; joined the same year). Philip Best, who had run away from home aged 16 in 1982 to join the band, was a peripheral presence on this album and is documented as a fuller participant on the records immediately before and after. I note the lineup explicitly because the historical record turns on the personnel rather than on the personnel's aesthetic decisions: Sotos's later conviction (documented in below) is the central difficult-legacy issue this entry must address. The album is the album the lineup recorded; the lineup's later history is part of the entry.
The dedication on the sleeve is to Dennis Andrew Nilsen, the Scottish-born civil servant who, between December 1978 and February 1983, killed at least twelve and possibly fifteen young men in two flats in north London. Nilsen was arrested on 9 February 1983, confessed within forty-eight hours, was charged with six counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder and stood trial at the Old Bailey in October-November 1983. The trial was in progress when Right to Kill was pressed. The dedication is the album's editorial argument; the album's audio content is the dedication's working-through. I am not interested in defending the choice of dedication; the choice of dedication is the entire point of the album's existence as an archived object and any history of the form that omits the dedication is editing the record.
The audio content of the album is, in technical terms, eleven tracks across two sides, twenty-eight minutes and fifty seconds, recorded in stripped-down configuration with most material built on a single oscillator pulse, a layered top-end of high-frequency white noise and vocals that range from whisper to scream. The lyrics, on the fold-out lyric sheet that accompanied the original pressing, describe acts of violence against women in language designed to refuse all available comforts: there is no irony in the surface text, no narrative distance, no aesthetic mediation. I will not reproduce excerpts. I note that the album's position is that the listener's confrontation with the lyric content is the work and that any softening of that confrontation by quoting it in commentary defeats the editorial mode the album was issued in. Readers who wish to encounter the lyric content are directed to the original artefact, which remains, by the label's deliberate policy, available only on the 1983 vinyl pressing and the small number of later grey-area reissues.
I find the label's position internally coherent: the album was released in 1983 with an intent that depended on the limited circulation and the physical-object vein of the artefact; reissuing it on streaming services or compact disc would alter the artefact's meaning by altering its access conditions. I will not argue with that position. I also note that the position has the operational effect of restricting the album to a population of listeners who have made a particular effort to acquire it, which the label may be presumed to consider an editorial filter rather than a commercial limitation. Whether the filter functions as intended is a separate question. I record the label's position without endorsing it.
The album's reception in 1983 was negligible. The Come Organisation operated at the edge of the British underground; the pressing of three hundred copies indicates the expected audience; the album sold to subscribers, friends of the band and the small number of independent shops carrying Come catalogue (Rough Trade in Notting Hill; small numbers in Manchester and Edinburgh; in mainland Europe mainly through Bert Versteege's Plurex distribution in the Netherlands). Mainstream press did not review the album. The independent press of the period, including Sounds and the NME, did not cover Whitehouse in any sustained way until the 1990s. The album reached the secondary literature through three channels over the following decade and a half: Vale and Juno's RE/Search Nº6/7: Industrial Culture Handbook (1983), which devoted a section to Whitehouse; Brian D. Duguid's 1990s online noise-music survey (Why Noise?, 1995, originally posted to the alt.industrial Usenet group); and Paul Hegarty's academic monograph Noise / Music (Continuum 2007), which gave power electronics its first sustained university-press treatment.
The album's influence, by the 1990s, was disproportionate to its circulation. I hold that this is the standard pattern for the form: small-edition releases on independent labels at the limit of legality, distributed through cassette-network channels and word-of-mouth, generate status through scarcity and through the willingness of later generations to do the work of acquisition. Whitehouse's influence on the Japanese noise scene, on the American power-electronics revival of the late 1990s and early 2000s, on the harsh-noise-wall scene from about 2005 onward and on the project of extreme music as a category, is among the most thoroughly documented influence-streams in the form's history. Merzbow, the form's most internationally-visible Japanese practitioner, cited Whitehouse repeatedly across the interview corpus from the early 1990s onward. Hospital Productions in New York, the label that has done the most to consolidate the late-period power-electronics canon, programmed Whitehouse-curated festivals in the early 2010s. The influence is fact. The influence is also the reason I keep this entry.
My editorial position, which is the position any reader of this archive should know I am operating from when they look at this page, is the following. The album is a piece of historical evidence; the album is included because it influenced; the album's content does not become less aggressive or less offensive because the album influenced; I do not find the album's content artistically or politically defensible and am not arguing the case for it; I find Bennett's later artistic arc (the Cut Hands project from 2011 onward, the Italo disco DJ work as DJ Benetti, the public reflections on the early period) to be of independent interest and notes them as a separate question. The album exists. The album is documented. The position on the album is documented.
This is the entry I considered not keeping. It is present on the principle the catalogue runs on: an archive that omits the form's most contested document for editorial-convenience reasons is editing the record on behalf of later readers, and the archive presumes readers capable of forming their own positions when given the document and the documentation together. My job is to put both in the same place. Readers can do the rest.
VAGO · c. the interwar period