Cosey Fanni Tutti - Tutti

The Quietus

A follow-up to her only other solo album Time To Tell released back in 1982, Cosey Fanni Tutti describes TUTTI as: "the only album I've made that is an all encompassing statement expressing the totality of my being. A sense of the past in relation to the present and everything in between." It's comprehensible then, that these pieces originated around the time of her writing her autobiography Art Sex Music, and were used initially to soundtrack an autobiographical film Harmonic Coumaction as part of a COUM Transmissions retrospective to open 2017's Hull UK City of Culture.

Unlike Cosey Fanni Tutti's autobiography, there's no straightforward chronology to TUTTI. Both self-titled in the sense of it being the title track and containing one third of her adopted name, the opener 'TUTTI' is tight industrial techno with Tutti's cornet leading the listener through its frenetic pulse like the rogue hand of a friend in a packed rave. Her faraway voice takes the same role on 'Heliy', bringing a more improvisational quality to the hypnotic lurches of its spidery modular synths. When you reach album closer 'Orenda' you've made a post-club excursion down to the North Norfolk landscape where Cosey Fanni Tutti recorded the album and lives.

Through sound sculpting, she makes every piece feel part of the same image: glitchy and stretched metallophones, horns and modular ambience become lorries honking as they drive past in slow motion, somehow sonically in sync with a lapping tide. In his Ambient series, Brian Eno often explicitly captured the sounds of rural East Anglia untouched by human activity, but here TUTTI hints at an industry of agriculture, rumbling vehicles interrupting an otherwise silent A140 road in the dead of night. And in this moment you find yourself back at the very beginning; the opening synth pads of Time To Tell's 'Ritual Awakening' can bleed seamlessly into the gentle bobbing of TUTTI's closure. With the whole album's sense of time and place so skewed, TUTTI's latter ambient tracks 'Orenda' and cornet-intensive 'En' appear more as slowly changing scenes rather than set journeys from A to B.

Despite having worked with Chris Carter under several guises, Cosey Fanni Tutti hasn't had the kind of authoritative musical career that the group's other members have been afforded following the split of Throbbing Gristle. Chris Carter has released nine solo studio albums; Genesis P-Orridge formed and continues to front Psychic TV; Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson helped form that group and later Coil with Jhon Balance. But it's clear from TUTTI - especially from her signature cornet sound - that Cosey Fanni Tutti's musical input and knowledge was just as integral to Throbbing Gristle as the group's other (predominantly male and in the case of Genesis P-Orridge allegedly abusive) members. TUTTI feels retrospective in the sense that Cosey Fanni Tutti doesn't introduce anything strikingly unfamiliar to her sonic palette here, with its ambient closing tracks a retread back to Time To Tell. TUTTI though is essential in that it marks Cosey Fanni Tutti as the auteur of her own sound world, as well as being a strong facilitator, artist and collaborator.

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A Closer Listen

Cosey Fanni Tutti is best known as one-quarter of the seminal Throbbing Gristle, co-founder of Industrial Records, and pioneer of its eponymous style of music. Hindsight may be 20:20. But it also simplifies, especially when combined with rigid genre categories. At a casual backward glance, industrial music seems a direct offshoot of punk. Its shock tactics, iconography, and radicalism are further distillations of the spirit of ’77. But to regard industrial musicians only as avant-garde punks is to miss their enormous contributions to electronic music over the past forty years.

Cosey herself has been looking back. This album (her sophomore solo release) is from the same period as her autobiographical Art Sex Music (2017). As she mentions in the book, TG pulled steadily away from punk before the 1970s were over. They even approached synth-makers Roland (half-jokingly) for a sponsorship deal. We can only imagine how differently acid house might have turned out.

Comparable bands Current 93 and Death in June have since adopted acoustic, neofolk palettes. But the stalwarts of Throbbing Gristle were more often turning knobs and pushing buttons. Under banners including Psychic TV, Coil, and Chris & Cosey, their synthesisers more than their guitars have pulled the worlds of electropop, ambient music, and abstract electronica refreshingly off-axis. In many ways, Tutti feels like a logical, contemporary extension of the music Cosey has made with Chris Carter over numerous decades.

Despite this, Tutti is a surprise. This album is the closest Cosey’s music has come to thoroughgoing techno. The album is driven unarguably by beats, which range from thumping “four on the floor”, through an off-kilter two-step, and on to a subtle pulse. On tracks like “Tutti” and “Sophic Ripple”, her basslines recall Leftfield’s famous “Phat Planet” – a resemblance which makes these unexpected bangers. However, don’t overlook tracks such as “Moe”, with its cerebral techno core, and its swirling background noise of a record playing quietly in reverse. Elsewhere, we get drones, dark ambience, minimal beat structures, and scattered IDM abstractions.

Cosey remains connected to her industrial roots. In “Split,” a phantasmagorical overlay drifts into demonic laughter. “Heliy” features the eerie vocal samples characteristic of TG and of Cosey’s Time to Tell (1982). Cosey has fixated on the body and its limits – in her sex work (discussed illuminatingly in her memoir) as in TG’s imagery and performance art. It is fitting that parts of this album sound like the digestive, respiratory, and circulatory systems of the body mapped into a sequencer. But while TG’s Journey Through a Body (1982) is a torturous aural collage, Tutti is a meditative reflection on where Cosey’s art has been, but also where the legacy of industrial music can take us.  (Samuel Rogers)

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Cosey Fanni Tutti is one of those musicians, like Michael Rother or Tony Allen, who is seemingly ruled by a rhythmic energy, one that beats through their brains and to which their music constantly returns. For Tutti, this is a steady 4/4 beat of around 125 beats per minute: an insistent rhythm hovering near high-tempo, simmering with tension that never quite breaks. Amid the noisy abstraction of Throbbing Gristle in the late 1970s, it sounded through Hot on the Heels of Love; it’s there throughout the synthpop romances she made with husband Chris Carter; it sat beneath Carter Tutti Void, the collaborative dub techno album the pair made with Nik Void of Factory Floor in 2013. And like the heart of a deathless supervillain, that pulse beats on in her first solo album since 1982, originally written in tandem with her Art Sex Music autobiography.

Related: Cosey Fanni Tutti: 'I don’t like acceptance. It makes me think I've done something wrong'