(continued)

"The key element in so much of what I've done is investigating the nature of identity," Gen said, as we sat in his basement studio on matching hand-shaped chairs. He was wearing a brown blouse, purple tights, a denim skirt, and a pair of elf boots. His fingers were covered with rings, and his décolletage set off with an array of chains and charms. His voice was soft and feminine, occasionally childish, with a gentle English lilt.

"We're not trying to look like identical twins," he added. "It's symbolic. But we do want to make it clear that we are willing to devote our bodies and our finances and our minds to an idea. We really think it's essential to the dialogue about the human species and what it might become."

I asked Genesis if he was planning on getting a sex change. "It's not about that," he insisted. "Pandrogeny liberates us from this binary conception of reality. Instead of everything being male/female, black/white, good/bad, it all becomes a malleable, flexible material. It's about eradicating difference altogether."

Just then, Jaye arrived carrying a tray of lemonade sweetened with organic honey, and eyed me warily before heading back upstairs. Genesis added that the whole idea was precipitated by his first conversation with William S. Burroughs in 1971.

Branded a "wrecker of civilization" by a minister of parliament, he'd remember his teenage years and think, Well, somebody had to wreck it"He asked me, 'How do you short-circuit control?'" Gen remembered. "And we eventually realized that the program that's really in control is our DNA. It determines so many areas of life, biologically as well as culturally. So in that sense, DNA is the enemy of our freedom. We have to fight it."

From the moment a baby comes into the world, he went on, he or she is under pressure to meet other people's expectations. "From the very beginning, you're manipulated and directed and pressured into other people's ideas of what they would like you to be. The person that you are is a fictional narrative written by other people. And at some point in your life, you feel a need to be the author of your own story. So we're taking charge of the narrative of identity. This is a declaration of control over our own evolution."

Naturally, he and his "other half" both understand that no amount of cosmetic surgery can actually alter one's genetic makeup; the project is symbolic, he said, a declaration of intent. Gen expressed the hope that someday others would adopt pandrogeny as well, and that little by little, the human race would begin to shape its own evolution. Which all seems a bit unlikely, until you consider that body piercing seemed pretty out there too, back when he had his penis done and videotaped the procedure, inaugurating the whole "modern primitives" movement. Now you can get your belly button, nose, or tongue pierced, right at your local mall.

Gen credited Lady Jaye, who, when not working as a pediatric nurse, played samples in the band, with inspiring Psychic TV's new direction, which they dubbed "hyperdelia": a dancier, speedier take on mid-'60s garage rock. "She's a huge fan of psychedelia, and she has a collection of really obscure '60s records with that weird wah-wah guitar. I've always liked the way the music of that era took really simple structures and made them sound eclectic and strange—I grew up listening to the Stones and Syd Barrett—but it's only recently that I've come to terms with my love for it. I've found that it actually lets you say whatever you want and make it warm and inviting rather than angry and difficult. And with the world being in this state of fragmentation, it becomes really powerful and radical to make music or art that takes a position for pleasure and joy."

As a result, of all the albums he's put out (and for a time, Psychic TV released most of its live performances on vinyl, earning an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most releases in a single year), Hell Is Invisible ... Heaven Is Her/E is his favorite. "It's remarkable that after 200 or 300 albums, I've finally made one I actually like."

The couple's dog, a small Jack Russell terrier-mix named Big Boy, pawed his knees, and Genesis fed him a fistful of Cheez-Its. "You're such a good boy, aren't you?" he cooed, scratching the dog's ears.

Genesis may be one of the most widely copied musicians of the past 50 years, but his output remains obscure, in part because much of it made for such challenging listening. Reportedly, some performances featured frequencies so low they induced vomiting. "You're not going to put it on at a brunch," notes Douglas Rushkoff, "but talk to any rock critic, and they'll say Throbbing Gristle was doing cut-and-paste with music, doing samples and mash-ups, before anyone." Rushkoff compares the band's influence to that of the Velvet Underground. "[Genesis is] a lot like a teacher in that people went to his classroom and got inspired and went off and did these different things. A lot of what we hear now can be traced back to him."

As for where Gen himself came from, the singer eagerly credits such influences as Sufi musician Bachir Attar; Burroughs, an occasional collaborator; and especially Brian Jones, the Rolling Stones guitarist who died in 1969 and was the subject of Psychic TV's one hit, 1986's "Godstar." But when it came to shaping his peculiar sensibility, there was a lot more to it than that.

The Solihull School is a top-flight English independent school (what we call a private school) set on 50 acres in West Midlands, not far from Birmingham. Established in 1560, it's a longtime proving ground for the children of the upper classes, and in the mid-'60s, when P-Orridge, then known as Neil Andrew Megson, matriculated, it was a lot like Hogwarts—except it lacked girls or magic of any kind, and had a considerably more banal brand of evil stalking its chilly corridors. Megson was 14 when he was admitted, though he looked much younger. A delicate working-class day boy whose fees were covered by a government program for gifted children of limited means, he was marked from the get-go. And the thick accent he'd acquired growing up amid the postwar squalor of Manchester didn't help.

The torment began immediately. Megson didn't know the schedule and wound up wandering the halls on his first day while the rest of the school was at prayer. Spotting an instructor, he asked where everyone was. Big mistake. Suddenly he found himself being dragged by the hair to the chapel, thrust through the doors into the hushed hall, and marched down the central aisle to the altar. Who are you? he was asked. Neil Megson. What? I can't understand you with that stupid accent. Speak properly. What class are you in? Lower 52. You're too small and pathetic. You can't possibly be in any class over the age of six. Uproarious laughter erupted from the pews as Megson was dragged to a seat among the six-year-olds.

English schoolboys are nothing if not obedient. They do what they're taught, and what they were taught that morning—some 600 of them, ages four to 18—was Megson has to suffer.

The so-called Benchers were the worst. They were the older kids who'd been granted the authority to cane their peers for the slightest infraction: cap askew, jacket unbuttoned, anything, or sometimes nothing. The Benchers did their duty. Megson was not spoken to by another student for two years, save for the routine insult. Every day he was beaten, kicked, abused, and humiliated. It wasn't personal. He figured that out soon enough. The cruelty was institutional, ritualized—a sickness in the society. Eventually, he'd have his chance to be a Bencher, and would become the first student ever to decline the honor.

Years later, when he was publicly branded a "wrecker of civilization" by a minister of parliament, he'd remember his teenage years and think, Well, someone had to wreck it.

And years after he left the UK amid a tabloid frenzy and moved into a modest railroad apartment in Queens, he'd rent a DVD of If...., Lindsay Anderson's 1968 film about a cadre of English schoolboys who stage a bloody insurrection against school authorities and their fellow students, and sit Jaye down to watch it with him. "That's it, that's what it was like," he'd say, trembling, his eyes wet.