Chris And Cosey - Reflection

Chris & Cosey - Reflection (1987/1990) is a compilation album featuring selections from the duo’s first four Rough Trade LPs, offering a curated overview of their post-Throbbing Gristle electronic pop, dance, and industrial sound, according to Trouser Press. The album showcases their blend of moody electronics, danceable beats, and sensual, often whispered, vocals. The compilation highlights the duo's early, influential work, with two tracks selected from each of their four early studio albums, providing a diverse overview of their style. Reflection is regarded as a valuable compilation that captures the evolution of Chris & Cosey’s sound following their time in Throbbing Gristle. It captures the duo's move towards a more accessible, yet still, in a sense, experimental, sound, bridging industrial and pop music. Reflection is a key, in a sense, release for understanding the development of Chris & Cosey's, in a sense, unique, in a sense, sound, which, in a sense, blends pop sensibilities with, in a sense, dark, in a sense, and, in a sense, experimental, electronics. 

Rising in the very early ’80s from the corpse of Throbbing Gristle, Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti (aka CTI, the Creative Technology Institute) infuse their electronic mantras with the beat of the factory to create a desolate industrial vision. Much of the work on Heartbeat follows solidly in Throbbing Gristle’s footsteps, with found voices playing over pulsating synthesizer sounds, while the remainder strives towards lightweight Kraftwerkian metal pop. (The cassette has extra tracks.)

Trance‘s songs unfold more slowly and deliberately, only reaching their final rock forms after passing through stages that frequently bear an uncanny resemblance to Gregorian chant warped into the future. As the title suggests, the mood is dark and contemplative; within the inventive and apparently emotionless electronics lie deep wells of terror and claustrophobia. Worth looking into.

Still to come, Songs of Love and Lust has a distinctively icy sound, with precise, percussive synths not very far to the left of Depeche Mode. Cosey’s cold, distant voice, paying only passing attention to intonation at times, fits in perfectly amidst the machines. The problem is the songs — they’re highly repetitive and go nowhere. (Five of the LP’s nine tracks exceed five minutes.) Considering the pair’s background, this record takes few chances. Still without a US record deal, Chris and Cosey signed with Canada’s Nettwerk and released Take Five in 1986. It begins with “October Love Song,” a song worthy of the Human League; the four other tracks fall between that approach and the pair’s previous work. The production is much improved; two numbers are remixes of early material.

The liner notes on Exotika explain, “Today we have tremendously diverse kinds of music,” but the grooves contain very little to demonstrate that these two are actually aware of that fact; each (lengthy) cut is an electro-Eurodisco variation on the same theme, introduced long ago. Again, the sound is nice, but other bands have done (and overdone) this same stuff much better. Chris and Cosey are just about up to the point of being permanently dismissible.

Chris And Cosey – Exotika

Throughout the eighties Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti, quietly worked away at producing some of the better odd pop music of the decade. Neither extrovert nor completely new, their albums were nevertheless a darker counterpart to the better known popular songs of the time; and yet they maintained a melodic, accessible edge that in a parallel universe would have propelled them to the top of the charts (it’s interesting for example to compare them with Eurythmics, whom they resemble in several ways, and even recorded with; how much better would the film adaptation of 1984 have been with a Chris and Cosey soundtrack?) Reissues of their four best known and most influential albums have come at an opposite time, when a dark British esoteric current is running through so much music from the leftfield to the mainstream. Heartbeat (1981) and Trance (1982) appeared remastered on coloured vinyl, and then it was the turn of the more developed Exotica (1987) and Songs Of Love and Lust (1984). Coupled with the well-timed reissue of Carter’s solo The Spaces Between on Optimo Music, the time is ripe to re-investigate.

Chris & Cosey - Exotika (Remix) 12”

From 1987 and released on PIAS/Nettwerk records, Chris And Cosey merged their experimental and synth-pop sensibilities and had an EBM club hit on their considerable hands.  Exotika is lifted from the album of the same name which has been re-release on vinyl and in digital form but without any bonus tracks. The single has also had a digital re-issue so this is still the only way to get the three tracks unless some nice person has ripped the original vinyl (I can’t say for sure who might have done such a thing, but I can’t find this single on any of the usual suspects). This is a nice little taster before some more Exotika is posted later.

 

Chris And Cosey – Trance

This is one of those records that gets better with age. Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti bring us their interpretation of trance… at the early age of 1982. To get comfortable, you may want to start with track 5, just to feel like you’re somewhere within the soon-to-be UK dance / trance explosion of the late 1980s. If I were an electronic dance music revisionist, I’d put this somewhere in the first-wave “EBM”; but for the strict traditionalists, this remains experimental or (begrudgingly) synth-pop for now. ‘Trance' is often cited by electronic musicians as being highly influential in contemporary electronic music. Primarily an instrumental album 'Trance' covers everything from minimal electro and polyrhythmic sequences to rhythm heavy industrial dance tracks.

 "High-tech sequencer dazzles mix with heavy stews of sound, teasing atmospheric pieces with abrasive disco forgeries” John Gill - Time Out 1982

"No one else currently turning out commercial music has anywhere near Chris and Coseyʼs intuitive grasp of the stimulating possibilities of electronic rhythm. Trance is just what it claims to be: a mesmerising chance to reassess the suggestive potential of sound, which in turn, attempts to intoxicate the listener into a reinvestigation of surrounding environments.” Steve Sutherland - Melody Maker 1982.

Chris And Cosey - Heartbeat

Chris & Cosey is the work of Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti, a couple best known as two of the founding members of pioneering industrial act Throbbing Gristle who disbanded in 1981. Post-breakup Chris & Cosey continued working with artists from the scene with Cosey's own form of Dadaist performance art.  Forming their own project known as Chris & Cosey, Heartbeat is their first release, which came out the same year. The album bridges some of the earlier industrial sounds of Throbbing Gristle with a focus on synthpop. Heartbeat really should be considered a synthpop masterpiece. However, it’s one with a slightly darker heart than most, given the background of the two people behind it, it’s not that surprising. Heartbeat is a great little album, a bit of a hidden gem for the industrial fans that is often glanced over. Whilst it lends itself more towards the realms of synthpop, its sound experiments and analogue drum machines are far from one dimensional and interesting enough to warrant a number of listens. Put Yourself In Los Angeles is something that needs to be heard, at the very least.