Press Info:
In the wake of their new album “Carter Tutti Plays Chris & Cosey”, Throbbing Gristle legends Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti present the digital version of their 2014 Record Store Day release “Remix”. Featuring reworks of four classics from their early Chris & Cosey days and a new version of 2000’s ‘Lost Bliss’, the EP reflects the material the duo has been presenting in their live shows. Saturating the 80s versions with contemporary production, Carter Tutti reimagine the sound of their industrial synthesizers, covering them under a veil of eerie ambience – Cosey’s characteristic vocals are drenched in reverb, even their techno pop love song ‘October’ has an uncanny feel to it.
Full Track Streaming:
Special (filmed by fan):
Carter Tutti plays Chris & Cosey – “Live at Schlagstrom 2014”
Press Info:
Seventeen years on from his last solo release, the twenty-five tracks collected on Chris Carter’s Chemistry Lessons Volume One (CCCL Volume 1) were the product of six years spent working on solo material in the Norfolk home studio he shares with Cosey Fanni Tutti. CCCL Volume 1 reinforces Carter’s significant but often under-appreciated role in the development of electronic music – a journey that for Carter started ahead of his work with Throbbing Gristle (alongside Cosey, Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge), and continued through Chris & Cosey, Carter Tutti, Carter Tutti Void as well as his own solo and collaborative releases under his own name.
Here you will find music with a distinctly futuristic leaning, with insistent melodic patterns and a distinct sense of wonderment at the limitless possibilities of science. “If there’s an influence on the album, it’s definitely ‘60s radiophonic,” Carter agrees. “Over the last few years I’ve also been listening to old English folk music, almost like a guilty pleasure, and so some of tracks on the album hark back to an almost ingrained DNA we have for those kinds of melodies. They’re not dissimilar to nursery rhymes in some ways.”
That combination of traditional music and the backing track for exciting, potential futures gives tracks like ‘Moon Two’ and ‘Tangerines’ a sheen of inquisitiveness and quiet euphoria, while ‘Modularity’ and ‘Roane’ have an anxious, sci-fi noir charm. Elsewhere, the skewed voices of the meditative ‘Cernubicua’ add a calming, human note to the album, even if deciphering any specific lyrical content is largely impossible. “That’s completely intentional,” says Carter. “Sleazy and I had worked together on ways of developing a sort of artificial singing using software and hardware. This was me trying to take it a step further. I’ve taken lyrics, my own voice or people’s voices from a collection that I’d put together with Sleazy, and I’ve chopped them up and done all sorts of weird things with them.”
Carter began the foundation work for what became CCCL Volume 1 in the years before Sleazy passed away in 2010, and the death of Carter’s fellow TG journeyman had a profound effect on the development of the album. “I’d been accumulating a lot of material, just tracks and elements of tracks, and I was going to start putting it together just before Sleazy died,” he says. “That’s what completely threw me, and that’s partly why it’s taken so long, because of dealing with the shock of that.” Carter describes going through a long grieving process which manifested itself in some of the darker, more introspective tracks appearing on the album.
These moments sit alongside tracks where melodies have a dissonant, noisy, awkwardness that ties the music on CCCL Volume 1 back to the Throbbing Gristle legacy. “I think that’s because I don’t read music,” laughs Carter. “I have no musical skills at all, and so everything I do is done by ear. I can’t even play keyboards properly. I have to have the letters written on the keys because I’m musically dyslexic. I think maybe that helps in a way. It means I use chords or notes that don’t always, or shouldn’t always, go together. It gives my music a weird offset.” This approach yields results like ‘Uysring’, where sounds flutter ominously around a nagging, muted beat like a faltering electrical current, or ‘Post Industrial’, where mechanistic rhythms vie for attention with murky, noxious sounds and heavy, stuttering repeated half-melodies.
Underpinning all of Carter’s endeavours from the pivotal industrial gestures of Throbbing Gristle onwards is an attitude best described as ’if you don’t own it, make it’. From the legendary Gristleizer home-soldered effects unit through to the Dirty Carter Experimental Sound Generating Instrument and the sold-out TG One Eurorack module designed with Tiptop Audio (issued to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Throbbing Gristle’s Second Annual Report), Carter has never shied away from creating the means to make sounds as well as making the sounds themselves. “It’s about making the best of what you’ve got,” says Carter. “I think that makes you more productive. When there’s a limit on what you’ve got, you tend to get the best out of it. You push it as much as you can, and you find unique ways of using it that it wasn’t designed for.”
That self-sufficient discipline also saw Carter designing the visual presentation to accompany CCCL Volume 1, taking his cues from battered old experimental BBC broadcast LPs that can be found in the racks of charity shops across the land, and echoing the interest in the music that partly inspired the design of these tracks. “It’s just something Cosey and I have always done,” says Carter on this utilitarianism. “People have been getting in touch with us asking if they can do sleeve designs and videos for us for years, but it’s just something we’ve always done ourselves. We’ve always kept it in-house. We’re like a cottage industry, and we always have been. It’s just something that’s part of our process. If we’re going to put something out, we always have a vision of how we want it to be, and how it should be presented to people.”
Despite having been worked on over an extended period between various artistic projects in a variety of different moods, situations and circumstances, CCCL Volume 1’s experiments never feel like Carter noodling around aimlessly in his studio-laboratory. Instead there is an inner coherence and a distinctively Chris Carter approach to sound and execution. It’s an endeavour that places CCCL Volume 1 comfortably alongside everything else that this sonic scientist has been involved in, and yet one that showcases a restless, questing creative spirit forever scouting for new ideas.
Press Info:
Industrial Records are pleased to announce the highly anticipated new studio album from CARTER TUTTI VOID, “f (x)”.
“f (x)” is featuring all new studio recordings.
Chris Carter, Cosey Fanni Tutti (Chris & Cosey / Throbbing Gristle) and Nik Colk Void (Factory Floor) expand and explore onward from their critically acclaimed 2012 debut collaborative album ‘Transverse’. Featuring their distinctive metallic guitar sound, resounding bass lines, electro industrial rhythms and heavily processed vocals this album is not for the fainthearted.
The Compact Disc and Digital editions feature six tracks. The vinyl LP has five tracks and includes a digital download code.
“f (x)” is released worldwide by the legendary Industrial Records label (home of Throbbing Gristle since 1976).
Bonus 01 is exclusive for CD release, Bonus 02 is only available with the digital release.
Tracklist Vinyl: 01) Retrodect
02) Driving Blind
03) Obsession
04) Beatbeatbeat
05) Watching You
06) Love Cuts
07) Sin
08) Dancing On Your Grave
Press Info:
Carter Tutti (Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti) are set to release a new album on their own CTI label on the 17th of February 2015.
‘CARTER TUTTI PLAY CHRIS & COSEY’ is available to download and is released on CD and double Vinyl and features eight brand new reinterpretations and re-workings of classic Chris & Cosey songs from the 1980s and 1990s.
The idea for the album originated from their recent much requested, live performances of ‘CARTER TUTTI PLAYS CHRIS & COSEY’ which led to an unprecedented series of shows in the U.K., Europe, Scandinavia and North America from 2011 to 2014. These dates in turn instigated so many requests for recordings of the live set that they were inspired late last year to re-record this collection of reworked classic versions in their own Norfolk studio.
Each format will feature an exclusive remixed track – Compact Disc copies feature ‘Vengeance’ (Exclusive Remix), the Digital Download album version comes with ‘Synaesthesia’ (Exclusive Remix) and the Vinyl edition includes all five tracks from their 2014 U.S. limited tour merchandise CD.
There is also a video to promote the album based on a new Carter Tutti edit of the C&C track ‘Sin (2015)’, directed by Gavin Toomey from footage he has been shooting and archiving for a forthcoming Chris & Cosey biographical documentary.
Full Track Streaming:
Video:
“Sin (2015:edit)”
Special (filmed by fan):
Carter Tutti plays Chris & Cosey – “Live at Schlagstrom 2014”
Press Info:
Dark Entries Editions is venturing into new waters with a remix EP of Psychic TV’s classic Acid House song “Alien Be-In”. Psychic TV was formed by Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson after the breakup of Throbbing Gristle in 1981. After various line up changes, the band shifted direction to dance oriented songs influenced by the Acid House scene in America. By 1988 experimental electronic musician Fred Giannelli, of Turning Shrines, joined the band and over the next 2 years started to record songs for “Toward The Infinite Beat”. The album was a mix of deep, multilayered tracks full of bright and hypnotic dance numbers, providing the soundtrack to the rave culture that sprung up in the UK in the 90s.
“Alien Be-In” was written in early 1989 on an E-mu Emax Sampler and an Alesis MMT-8 sequencer. Vocal samples were taken from a tape Germs drummer Don Bolles sent to Genesis. A didgeridoo rides throughout the song, heavily modulated by a Gristleizer creating a hypnotic effect. Near the end of the song the breakbeat slides out of time yet the band chose to leave this in because it sounded strange and fit the concept of the track. Genesis played a spaced out Echo Violin and the band used 360 degree panning rotation devices. For this reissue Fred Giannelli takes a stab at remixing the mono mix of the original sequence sourced from the Emax floppy discs. On the flip are two brand new mixes, the first from Los Angeles based producer, Silent Servant, who updates the classic with his modern brand of driving EBM techno. The second remix is a team effort from Silent Servant and veteran producer John Tejada, that re-creates the original melody using a Roland TR-808 and TB-303, paying homage to early Chicago Acid House artists like Lil Louis and Robert Owens.
All songs have been mastered for vinyl by George Horn at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. The 12” is housed in a mind-alerting, metallic silver die-cut sleeve and a neon green label that pops through, featuring the psychic skull transformed into an alien cone head label all designed by Eloise Leigh. Each copy includes a 2-sided 11×11 square insert with black and white photo of the band from 1988 and liner notes by Fred Giannelli.
