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.
Beginning with a trumpet fanfare, that beat quickly rumbles into being on the title track, a stern yet trashy electroclash roller. The buzzing bassline, surrounded by echoing effects, suggests a dub track that is being made to run on a too-fast treadmill – it’s vivid and well-designed, but directionless. The relentlessness begins to pall, as it does later on Moe and Heliy. This has always been a weakness that has befallen her various projects, which work best when there is something swinging around that determined on-beat: the almost dancehall rhythm picked out on Chris and Cosey’s Walking Through Heaven, for instance. Second track Drone thankfully has just that, a stuttering digital signal reminiscent of Ryoji Ikeda.
There are further moments of drudgery – the album is designed to become more and more ambient, and in the end it lapses into forgettable cod-sinister wafting on En and Orenda. But in the central section, as that insistent beat begins to lose its way, there is some drama. Sophic Ripple features a high-speed pulse emitted as if through clouds of fog, with futuristic sirens flitting past – a cyberpunk dreamscape, conjured again in darker tones for the next track Split. These pieces suggest her gift now lies in spatial sound design, rather than industrial pop.
