Sensory Snake Oil From Psychic Television

If the Easter Bunny looked a little dazed and confused Sunday morning, it may be that Saturday night he hopped into the Variety Arts Center, where Psychic Television unleashed a bizarro audio-visual assault that was long on sensory snake oil and short on live music.

You expect the unusual from Television director Genesis P-Orridge, who previously led England’s sonic nightmare-mongers Throbbing Gristle. And you expect the visual, so it was no huge surprise to find eight video monitors and one screen set up on stage, presumably to punctuate the presentation.

But it was surprising that those turned out to pretty much be the presentation, along with tapes of twisting soundscapes and blaring white noise, over which P-Orridge occasionally whispered or howled.

The full import of this one-man show was probably known only to P-Orridge, though the imagery was consistent with the distributed literature, which offered such mild morsels as “Christianity as a religion has outlived its relevance to our society.” But at 14 bucks a head, P-Orridge packed the room. Paging P. T. Barnum.