Hand-numbered edition of 500 copies documenting the first 1971 studio recordings of Genesis P-Orridge’s art/music/cultural liberation ensemble Coum Transmissions. The follow-up to the collection of early P-Orridge juvenilia, Early Worm, The Sound Of Porridge Bubbling feels much closer to the eventual modus-operandi of Throbbing Gristle. Of course, P-Orridge’s vocals are so inimitable and immediately recognizable that he could be talking over almost anything and it would sound proto-TG. But what’s most fascinating about this album is the amount of ground that the group cover, offering an insight into the many diverse sub-cultural strains that P-Orridge intuitively factored into TG. There are improvisatory free-for-alls that pre-date Vibracathedral Orchestra by decades, with P-Orridge revealing in the notes that he was actually taught rudimentary drone theory by a member of The Third Ear Band! Featured heavily are variously processed and disrupted vocal pieces that feel like instinctive investigations of the body sonorities and sense-destroying tactics of the sound poets, though P-Orridge’s amazing deadpan vocal gives it a feel of tedious English monotony on the scale of the early Shadow Ring. Indeed, The Shadow Ring are the closest comparison to much of the material here, especially “Magickal Variants”, with homemade percussion and two voices reading from explicit texts with all of the hypnotic non-emotive weight of Darren Harris and Graham Lambkin. The LP comes with a full colour insert with amazing period pics, ephemera and P-Orridge’s own notes and they’re really inspiring, especially his memories of legendary Coum member Ray Harvey, who P-Orridge describes as the only black person in Hull in the late-60s/early 70s and one of the first ‘modern primitives’ he ever met. He appears here riffing on his own spontaneous lyric creations on a classic sub-Velvets fall-apart jam. It’s weird; there has always been an obvious conceptual connection between early TG and the later UK underground of Richard Youngs, Neil Campbell and The Shadow Ring and this LP makes the most explicit connections to date. But it’s much more than simply a time capsule. The music sounds great, still more radical and fun and challenging and instinctive and smart than the bulk of the ‘noise’ music that came in its wake. A major release, highly recommended.