The past is so present in today’s musical landscape that you can easily connect the dots when an artist looks backwards. A greatest-hits tour on its third go-around or a lengthy set of dates performing a single album from start to finish — both reek of good ideas gone stale, or some form of stasis winning out over creative urges. The difference between a cash grab and a victory lap feels ever more slight. Of course, it’s not always that way. There’s even something to be said for artists approaching their back catalog with a sort of humorous disdain. In the late 1980s, art-punks Wire reformed, only to announce they wouldn’t play any of their older material, instead hiring a cover band, the Ex-Lion Tamers, to perform that function in the opening slot of their shows.
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The approach Wire took for those concerts — essentially not giving fans what they want, even actively antagonizing them — is a feeling with which Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti, founding members of industrial behemoths Throbbing Gristle, are acutely familiar. These are people, after all, who were once deemed the “wreckers of civilisation.” Carter Tutti have been addressing their past, in various tours and reissue programs, for more than 10 years at this point. Their path through it is often inspired, with the dissolution of the reunited Throbbing Gristle leading to the excellent X-TG album. In tandem, their brittle electronic music as Chris & Cosey began to cast a long influence over body music-inspired artists such as Factory Floor, culminating in a fully energized collaboration with that band’s Nik Colk Void.
Since 2011, the pair have been sporadically playing dates where they take a fresh approach to the Chris & Cosey material, stripping it of the production trappings of the various eras they draw on, instead replacing it with something tougher and far more impactful. This is the recorded document to accompany those shows, put together in Carter Tutti’s studio in the English countryside. It’s a sound that meshes elements of their past lives—the fussy electronics speak of Carter’s career as a synth boffin and TV sound engineer, while the pulsing backing and breathy vocals hark to Tutti’s work as a stripper. Tutti even recalled as much in a recent Wire interview. “I was bringing back things like Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder from my stripping,” she said, of Throbbing Gristle’s attempted turn to that sound.
Carter Tutti Plays Chris & Cosey illustrates the extent to which Carter Tutti are still enamored with dousing raw electronics in a seedy, heavily sexualized tone. Much of the album moves at a trance-like pace, strung somewhere between something you can either dance to or zone out on. The opening “Lost Bliss” (from Megatropolis) and “Driving Blind” (from Songs of Love & Lust) are highlights, bringing in a pop edge and much fuller production than the originals—a signature strung throughout most of these reworkings. It’s possible to hear legions of electronic acts from the past decade or so in here, including Zola Jesus, Ladytron, even Fischerspooner, making it easy to conclude that Tutti’s vocal style—masterfully disengaged no matter what the subject matter—might be one of the great unheralded influences of the 2000s.
It’s not hard to see why the Carter Tutti/Factory Floor relationship flourished so fruitfully when working through this material. Both work from a starting point that’s largely unmoveable—rippling Moroder electronics, a pinch of dance culture that’s more observatory than participatory—and drive their point into the ground over the course of an album. The shift from “Beatbeatbeat” (from Exotica) to “Workout” (a 1987 single) highlights how they build with remarkably similar tools then subtly corrupt the formula from within. “Workout” is wonderfully obliterated by Tutti’s railroad guitar lines, which butt up against chunky synth patterns that divert close to the whiteout assault of 808 State’s “In Yer Face” (a track actually released a few years after “Workout”).
Overhauling prior work may not be the most unique tool in the backward facing bandwagon of old lags giving the circuit one last run-around. But the difference with Plays Chris & Cosey is of a duo pushing beyond what came before instead of resting too heavily on things that already exist, in much the same way as it was in the general atmosphere of the X-TG album. They make revisiting the past sound like a creative place to be, where latent potential is given some room to breathe in the noxious, leather-fueled atmosphere of these songs. An important aspect, perhaps, is that Carter Tutti have myriad contemporary projects they’re working on at the same time as addressing material like this. As such, this record reads like an object lesson in how former glories are sometime best served by becoming a malleable part of the present.