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Cosey Fanni Tutti

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Cosey Fanni Tutti, “Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes” (Conspiracy International, 2022)

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We seem to be in the midst of a long-overdue Delia Derbyshire renaissance at the moment due to the efforts of filmmaker Caroline Catz, Cosey Fanni Tutti, BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s Mark Ayres, and others. Fittingly, this unusual and inspired album was commissioned back in 2018 as a score for Catz’s similarly unconventional feature-length documentary. Sadly, it seems damn near impossible to see Catz’s film at the moment (outside the UK, at least), but this soundtrack was released earlier this year to coincide with Cosey’s own foray into telling Derbyshire’s story (Re-Sisters: The Lives and Recordings of Delia Derbyshire, Margery Kempe and Cosey Fanni Tutti).

The book, film, and album were all inspired by research into Derbyshire’s archive and the voluminous recordings and writings that became available after the visionary electronic artist’s passing in 2001. Apparently, copyright issues are preventing much of Derbyshire’s unearthed work from seeing an official release (there are some great unofficial ones like Inventions For Radio/The Dreams out there), but this album is a compelling consolation prize: using Derbyshire’s notes on her compositions and techniques, Cosey has achieved a sort of posthumous homage/collaboration in which her own aesthetic is co-mingled with Derbyshire’s singular and groundbreaking techniques and sounds.

While Delia Derbyshire is far from a household name, it is something of a miracle that she ever managed to be revered at all, as her musical career only spanned 15 years and took place at a time when neither women nor electronic music were taken particularly seriously. On top of that, she also had an eccentric personality, a tendency towards alcoholism, and an employer (the BBC) who did not consider her work to be “music” enough for her to be credited as a composer. Fortunately, she was both motivated and fucking brilliant, so she still managed to make a profound impact on the evolution of music despite those incredibly long odds. And it did not hurt that she was responsible for the Doctor Who theme, which made a sizable cultural dent of its own.

It is hard to say whether or not there would have been a Throbbing Gristle had Derbyshire and her Radiophonic Workshop colleagues not forced weird electronic music into the mainstream, but I do think Derbyshire might have traumatized the general populace to a Gristle-y degree in the early ’60s if her gear had been more portable. Obviously, bloody-minded persistence in the face of disrespect and hostility is a relatable theme for Cosey as well, so it is hard to think of another artist who could be more naturally suited for a project such as this.

Due to the aforementioned copyright issues, Catz obviously had a very frustrating obstacle to overcome, as it is a tall order to convey a composer’s boldly unique vision or lasting influence without being able to play any of their major pieces. That is, of course, how Cosey came into the picture—she gamely immersed herself in the archive’s collection (267 reel-to-reel tapes found in cereal boxes, I believe) and Derbyshire’s notes and set about casting a Delia-esque spell in her own way on her own gear (though Delia’s actual voice does make some appearances). As an aside, this is not Cosey’s first homage to Derbyshire, as Carter Tutti’s “Coolicon” took its name and inspiration from a metal lampshade that Delia regularly used to make sounds.

Interestingly, my initial impression of the album was that it captured the whole vibe of Derbyshire’s known work quite well, but it had the (brooding) “ambient” feel that plagues a lot of soundtracks by design (good composers tend to focus on crafting and sustaining moods rather than on tearing the audience’s focus away from the screen images). That said, the album does begin with a piece centered around Cosey’s signature cornet that feels like an excerpt from a lost TG album devoted to soulful sax melodies for lovers (that immediately curdle, smear, and get enveloped in a black ooze of electronic drones, of course). I thought a few pieces stood out as especially good, but I did not fully appreciate Cosey’s vision until I listened to the album on headphones at sufficient volume. That is when I realized that this album had some serious bite and that there was considerably more depth and nuance than I was previously aware of. Apparently, the difference between decent ambient music and a compelling electronic composition can sometimes be remedied with just a volume knob.

In any case, this album is a sustained plunge into a rabbit hole of retro-futurist psychedelia, cryptic voice fragments, and cool electronic sounds. It works nicely as an immersive whole, but several individual pieces come and go quite a bit quicker than they deserve. The one-minute lysergic cabaret of “Psychedelic Projections,” for example, sounds like a would-be highlight from Love’s Secret Domain. Elsewhere, I quite liked the psychotropic air raid nightmare of “Sirens” and the wonky Ghost Box-adjacent cosmic horror of “Four Bebe.” That said, there are plenty of other wonderfully unique and warped moments strewn throughout the album, as my notes are filled with phrases like “a horse dissolves into extradimensional ghost dust,” “a cold wind blows through an empty shack where something bad happened,” “subterranean exotica by nightmare people,” and “sounds like a creepy fairytale about a sneezing gnome.” Anyone who can convincingly evoke even one of those scenes is probably deserving of my undying respect and Cosey manages to nail like ten of them here. This is an impressively alien album.

Listen here.

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Cosey Fanni Tutti, “Tutti” (Conspiracy International, 2019)

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It would be misleading to say that Cosey Fanni Tutti has been a singularly unprolific solo artist, as her oeuvre has never been constrained to simply music, but it is noteworthy that her last original solo album (Time to Tell) was released almost four decades ago. That album was stellar, setting quite a high bar for future releases. Also significant: Cosey’s career has undergone a well-deserved renaissance in the last couple years, culminating in the release of her acclaimed memoir Art Sex Music. 

As a result, Tutti has the somewhat unenviable curse of being an album preceded by months of anticipation and high expectations. For better or worse, Cosey has nimbly sidestepped that situation to some degree, as Tutti is more of a soundtrack than a major new artistic statement—musically, anyway. On a conceptual level, this album is loosely intended as a career-spanning self-portrait built from reworked archival recordings. Cosey took that “reworking” part quite seriously though, so this album often feels like a warmly hallucinatory collection of instrumental Chris & Cosey remixes despite the submerged ghosts of more abrasive and transgressive days.

The initial idea for this album originated as part of the 2017 COUM Transmissions retrospective in Cosey’s hometown of Hull, as she was asked to create a new work for the event. She chose to make an autobiographical film that recounted her early life in the city through family photos and various visual ephemera from the era. She accompanied it, appropriately enough, with a live soundtrack assembled from various audio fragments of her life, visual/performance art, and music. Thankfully, that particular COUM Transmissions retrospective did not scandalize an entire nation or get Tutti rebranded as a wrecker of civilization. It did, however, result in this album, as Cosey later expanded upon the original performance in her studio. 

That said, if I did not know the album’s background, it is unlikely that I would ever deduce its inspirations and hidden depths, as it often feels more like a series of pulsing grooves than a poignant journey through evocative samples or a monument to a life’s work. The title piece is an especially prominent example of that aesthetic, as it barrels along as a throbbing, motorik-sounding bit of propulsive synth pop, albeit one enlivened by a smoky cornet solo and skittering, shuddering flourishes of dub-style production. The rest of the album is a bit less straight-forward than that though, as it often feels more like an indomitable throbbing, thumping groove keeps getting submerged in woozy backwards melodies and eruptions of strange noises, yet quickly fights its way back to the surface each time. Much of the album occupies an interesting gray area that is not quite pop, yet teems with grooves and snatches of melody blurred into something more elusive.

That said, there is a definite structure and arc to the album, as the first several songs are more beat-driven, while the second half steadily grows more abstract and soundscape-esque. Unsurprisingly, those early pieces make the strongest initial impression, particularly “Moe,” which sneakily builds from a hallucinatory flutter of backwards guitar into a sensuously throbbing groove. The preceding “Drone” is noteworthy as well, as a host of gnarled and ugly Gristle-like sounds increasingly blossom from a squelching, off-kilter beat. As I grew more familiar with the album, however, it was the album’s more strange and subtly lysergic fare that began to leave a deeper impact. 

My favorite piece is “En,” which feels like an impressively sophisticated dub-influenced revisitation of Gristle’s murky ugliness, as a submerged groove quietly burbles and simmers beneath a phantasmagoric soup of vaguely sinister buzzes, swoops, and animal-like howls. “Split” is similarly dark, gradually building from a subdued and benign-sounding pulse into a crescendo of massive shuddering sounds that feels like a plague of sky-blackening, mechanized birds with malevolent intent. Between those plunges into Tutti’s darker past, however, lurk a handful of more melodic, tender, and light pieces. “Heliy,” for example, feels like a distant relative to more romantic moments like “October Love Song,” albeit one that has been stretched and blurred into dreamy abstraction. The closing “Orenda” is similarly lovely, unfolding as a languorous procession of warm, shimmering clouds that feel like they have enveloped and softened the sounds of a bustling city.

As likable as Tutti can be, however, I cannot help wishing that I could have experienced these songs in their original and intended context, as this album is kind of a perverse self-portrait on its own. In fact, it verges on self-camouflage, as Cosey’s voice is the most iconic and instantly recognizable aspect of her musical work and it rarely surfaces here (and even then only in heavily manipulated form). That makes this a bit curious album, as it feels more like an impressive feat of production and craftsmanship than it does a bold artistic statement: there are plenty of strong ideas here, but they have been smoothed over by (admittedly skilled) artifice into something more accessible than challenging or provocative.

That said, Cosey is at the peak of her powers in many ways, as this is a catchy, fast-moving, vividly realized, and expertly sequenced batch of songs (even if there are no obvious singles). I just would have expected a solo album to be more personal departure from Carter Tutti (or Carter Tutti Void) rather than a variation of those styles sans collaborators. I suspect that the film got the lion’s share of the vulnerability and emotional depth in this multimedia project though and the music was primarily for color, pace, and mood. I am definitely the victim of my own expectations here. 

Granted, Time to Tell was amazing and this second solo release has been a long time coming, but Art Sex Music and Carter Tutti Void were great and Cosey’s creative energies have been spread in a lot of different directions over the last few years. No one can endlessly churn out bold reinventions and significant statements across several disciplines forever. As such, Tutti is merely another very good album and a solid addition to an already wonderful body of work. Fans will definitely dig it, but it is more of a pleasant treat and a polished, breezily listenable tour of her artistic evolution than it is a fresh masterpiece or culminating achievement.

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Carter Tutti Void, “f(x)” (Industrial Records, 2015)

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Four long years after their seismic performance at London’s Short Circuit Festival, Carter Tutti Void have finally returned with their first proper studio album. Equally noteworthy is that fact that f(x) is the first new music to be released by Industrial Records since 2012’s Throbbing Gristle/X-TG swan song Desertshore/The Final Report. Given those circumstances, it would be hard for any record to live up to the resultant expectations, so it is not especially surprising that f(x) falls a bit short of the mark. 

The problem is not that the trio were lacking ideas or inspiration, however: they have just backed themselves into a very constrained stylistic niche that cannot realistically yield multiple albums of compelling material. That said, f(x) is still quite an enjoyable album, even if it is essentially Transverse Redux (albeit with some of the sharper edges sanded down a bit).

One of the many perils of music criticism is that it is very easy to develop a skewed perspective when I am a longtime fan of an artist. That revelation smacked me in the head when I tried to figure why I was not nearly as thrilled by f(x) as I wanted to be. Upon deeper reflection, it occurred to me that Carter Tutti Void is a fundamentally perverse and unsustainable project: I enjoyed Transverse because it was exciting to see three oft-dormant artists that I like team up for an unexpected, visceral, and explosive performance. 

Only later does it occur to me that Transverse lacked almost everything that I love about Throbbing Gristle or Chris & Cosey: it was not transgressive, it was not sexy, it did not have great hooks, and there were not any actual songs. What it offered instead was Chris Carter’s wonderfully unique lurching, clanking and wheezing grooves; plenty of energy; and the wild spontaneity of Nik Void and Cosey Fanni Tutti’s smoldering and echoing guitar improvisations. 

As it happens, that was more than enough to make a cool album, but it was a very precarious cocktail indeed: Cosey is an iconic vocalist and performer, but I would probably not queue up to buy a solo improv guitar album by either her or Void. Carter Tutti Void are not a band that entirely play to their strengths.

Notably, the trio have not made any significant alterations to their formula with f(x), which is essentially more of the same, except recorded at Chris & Cosey’s home studio in Norfolk rather than at a gig. Even the approach was roughly the same, as they set up for the recording process as though they were playing a live show in the studio—the sole significant innovation being that they allowed themselves three takes and assembled the finished pieces from those components. 

Oddly, the sound quality is cleaner, but not always better—f(x) often feels quite a bit more mannered than its predecessor, even though the grooves are a bit more sexed-up. Musically, however, Chris Carter is in prime form, unleashing six more throbbing and propulsive grooves that sound eerily like a living machine. The best of lot is the opening “f = (2.4),” which sounds like a sinuous and sultry Carter Tutti song warped into a haunted, hallucinatory, and sci-fi-damaged juggernaut. Later on, Carter delves into something that sounds like it belongs in a strip club scene in a film like Escape From New York (“f = (2.2)”), a burbling and insistent Motorik work-out (“f =(2.6)”), and an awesomely throbbing groove that sounds plucked from an ’80s S&M club (“f=(2.7.)”).

Notably, the “John Carpenter Strip Club” song is absent from the vinyl version of the album, but that gets at something very important about f(x): it absolutely does not matter at all. While the best pieces are definitely the book-ends (“Warped Carter Tutti Song in Space” and “Retro S&M Sex Groove”), these six (or five) pieces are otherwise more or less interchangeable due to their hyper-limited palette. 

There are no melodies, no chord changes, no hooks, no real development, and no real vocals (aside from some chopped and heavily processed howling and chanting). The songs are all just vamps that play out for 8 or 10 minutes, then wind to a close once they have run their course. Cosey and Nik certainly make quite a bit of racket on their end, but there is only so much they can do to make a song memorable when playing bowed guitar through a battery of effects pedals. 

For all intents and purposes, these songs live or die by their grooves: the gnarled guitar cacophony over the top just serves to keep things interesting and unpredictable. Also, these pieces are so similar that listening to more than a few at a time yields quickly diminishing impact. All of that adds up to an alternately bracing, exhilarating, exhausting, frustrating, hypnotic, and wild whole (or maybe a handful of very cool (if overlong) singles, if viewed in a more charitable light). 

In any case, my feelings regarding f(x) are deeply conflicted. On one hand, it is always wonderful to hear more of Carter’s weirdly heaving and imperfect rhythms and it is great that this project is bringing Chris & Cosey’s work to new audiences. On the other, I cannot help but feel that Carter Tutti Void have driven themselves into a creative cul de sac and that they desperately need to find a way out: this is not a well that they can viably keep returning to. 

I am hoping that they eventually either take the plunge and write some actual songs or find some way to harness their rhythmic genius into something more immersive and longform. In fact, I was hoping that might happen with f(x). Alas. Maybe next time. For now, however, f(x) is a very likable, albeit minor, album. It may not be the revelation that Transverse was, but the material is not necessarily weaker—it just feels that way because Carter Tutti Void tried to dazzle me with the same trick twice.

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Carter Tutti Void, “Transverse” (Mute, 2013)

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Back in 2011, Chris and Cosey united with Factory Floor’s Nik Void (né Nikki Colk) for an improvised set during London’s Short Circuit Festival. Not very many people got to actually see it (it was a small room), but those lucky few who did were fairly unanimous in declaring it spectacular. Thankfully, someone competently recorded it and everyone involved agreed that it should be released once they heard it. I am sure that Transverse is not nearly as great as being there must have been, but it definitely makes for a very unexpected and satisfying consolation prize.

This album is an anomaly and an aberration in just about every possible way, as absolutely nothing about it is what I would have anticipated. The biggest surprise is probably that it sounds absolutely nothing like recent Carter Tutti. Instead, it resembles a bad-ass abstract hybrid between Throbbing Gristle and early ’80s Chris & Cosey. Part of that makes sense, as the beats and grooves were all harvested from unused Gristle recordings that Chris Carter had lying around. 

The rest is definitely a leftfield surprise though, as I do not understand why Chris & Cosey could not have made this album long ago or why they needed Ms. Void’s involvement to make it happen. I am not saying that Void’s contributions are not great or welcome (because they are great and welcome), but it is certainly bizarre that the involvement of someone in a very dancefloor-oriented band was what it took to steer Carter and Tutti into such ugly and noisy territory. Transverse does not sound at all like the sum of its parts—it sounds like Chris & Cosey from 30 years ago in a particularly hostile mood.

Yet another twist is that the actual sounds themselves on Transverse are unexpected, as both Tutti and Void were wielding guitars for the performance. While I know Void used a bow and Cosey used a slide, there is very little here that recognizably sounds like guitar at all. Instead, there is quite a lot of snarling, scraping, and shuddering and some sounds that seem like they could only emanate from a badly abused, detuned bass. 

For his part, Chris Carter characteristically spent the show hunched over a table full of electronics. It is nearly impossible to determine which sounds emanated from him and which came from the guitars for the most part, but the beats are definitely his and they are quite stellar. There is not much variation between these five pieces, as they all basically cohere into an endlessly throbbing and hypnotic whole periodically interrupted by well-earned cheering and clapping, but Carter’s visceral, mechanized thumps and groans are both unrelenting and darkly sensual.

The final twist is that the music is quite regressive, but better for it. None of these pieces approaches the complexity or craft of either Chris & Cosey’s or Factory Floor’s work, as the trio opt instead for simple rhythmic vamps with virtually no structural evolution or change. There is not anything approaching an actual song at all, just a handful of killer early beats strafed with inspired eruptions of noise and the occasional wordless, digitized moan. Normally, i would I expect such a one-dimensional attack to eventually get boring, but Transverse never does. Nor does it ever get too cluttered or over the top. In fact, it sounds like these three have been playing together forever, as everything unfolds organically and all of the spaces and flurries sounds like they are exactly where they need to be.

The only perfectly logical and predictable aspect of Transverse is that Void, Tutti, and Carter were able to work so well together, as Factory Floor occasionally shares a lot of common ground with Chris & Cosey’s past work. There is not a lot of common ground with Gristle or with anything on this particular album, mind you, but it is evident that there is a lot of stylistic overlap and mutual admiration. Even with that factored in, however, there is no denying that the chemistry between these three was absolutely perfect that night and that something truly unique and wonderful occurred. 

That fact is highlighted by the final piece on the album, a studio version of “V4.” In theory, that should be the best piece, as it was professionally recorded and the trio had time to edit and re-record, but it somehow lacks the magic and energy of the four live pieces that precede it. I have said many times that I do not understand the appeal of live albums at all, but Transverse is the exception to that rule: this album captures a performance that can probably never be replicated or topped.

Listen here.