Cosey Fanni Tutti

Cosey Fanni Tutti, a former dancer and performance artist, was the erotic voice of Throbbing Gristle's industrial music, and then the erotic voice of Chris & Cosey's synth-pop.

Her only solo album, Time To Tell (Flowmotion, 1983 - CTI, 1988), contains three lengthy 1982 electronic compositions originally meant to accompany her art performances. The instrumental Ritual Awakening has a slowly unfolding folkish melody that gets drained by ominous rumbles and dissonances until only creepy drones are left. Initially the 23-minute The Secret Touch appears to be a spoken-word piece over multiple industrial rhythms, but an elegant transition leads to the rhythm being hypnotically streamlined and the spoken voice being replaced by a collage of found voices and elongated distortions; in the third part the recitation resumes but the throbbing (or, better, quivering) soundtrack to her erotic monologue has now acquired strong oneiric and psychedelic qualities. The 17-minute instrumental Time To Tell stages gently rolling galactic drones over an ominous alien pulsation, something in between Klaus Schulze's Irrlicht and a funereal march of androids. This album represented the unlikely meeting of the "music from the death factory" aesthetics with the new-age aesthetics. The subliminal trance of this work is way more original and ambitious than Chris & Cosey's synth-pop.