Cosey Fanni Tutti – TUTTI
Thirty-five years on from the boundary-pushing Time To Tell, Throbbing Gristle luminary Cosey Fanni Tutti releases TUTTI – only the second solo album of her career
Cosey Fanni Tutti is industrial music’s high priestess. From the extreme performance art of COUM Transmissions to the groundbreaking ultrasonic experiments of Throbbing Gristle and foreshadowing pre-techno of Chris and Cosey, she's an artist who has remained at the vanguard of electronic music for over four decades.
Given her prolific back catalogue with the aforementioned projects, it’s somewhat surprising that new album TUTTI – originally conceived as the soundtrack to an autobiographical film made for Hull’s City of Culture programme – is only her second solo release to date.
Released on Conspiracy International, a label Tutti runs with partner and long-term collaborator Chris Carter, it’s a record comprised of eight sound sculptures; an audio self-portrait made up of manipulated sound recordings from her life, music and art. “My work is a continuum, the past feeding the present and vice versa,” she explains. “The album is an interpretation of my past and present, of my understanding the shifting perceptions of how they inform one another. One form creating another through a metamorphic process.”
The finest moments are those underpinned by a peculiar spectral quality. The eerie, paranoid transcendentalism of Sophic Ripple; faint demonic cackles of Split; and the album’s highpoint Heliy – which features Cosey’s own ghostlike, indistinguishable vocals – combine to create a timeless illustration of her life as a multidisciplinary artist.
Listen to: Sophic Ripple, Split, Heliy