Cosey Fanni Tutti – TUTTI (Conspiracy International)

TUTTI is an abstract autobiographical study rendered in dark, sensuous electronics that conveys a hallucinatory experiencing of the past in the present

There’s a commotion at the back of the cinema. It’s difficult to know what’s going on and despite the intrigue, it’s really hard to take my eyes off the screen when watching Cosey Fanni Tutti’s 1977 short, After Cease to Exist. The lovingly paced castration scene presents body shock horror as consensual act; the sort of transgressive normalising that David Cronenberg’s Videodrome reaches for. It’s unnerving, difficult to watch – the emotional equivalent of motion sickness – yet also completely captivating. No wonder it can still cause a commotion, even at the ICA in 2019.

“Can someone get someone from the ICA?” comes a distressed male voice from the back of the room. He appears to be assisting another man, one who proceeds to make a horrible heaving sound. Is this performance art, an action taking place? I imagine the other man must have thrown up, but after he is taken out of the screening, there is no domino-like group vomiting and no smell penetrates the room. All of this is going on and my mind is racing, but I’m still watching the film, caught inside of it. Afterwards I feel as if I was part of one of those apocryphal screenings where fiction bleeds all over reality. It was as if the late 1970s spilled out into now like a testicle cut loose from its sack, allowing Cosey Fanni Tutti to lay claim to past and present.

The second film shown at the ICA’s Cosey Fanni Tutti: On Film and In Conversation event was Harmonic Coumaction from 2017, the score of which became the basis for TUTTI. The film utilises photographs from Cosey’s life – the people she was and the places she lived – and employs video techniques to create a sense of perpetual motion warped to the music. Faces are stretched and manipulated, smiles melting into grimaces and eyes twisting into dead stars. It’s certainly an eerie evocation and examination of the past. Cosey Fanni Tutti’s score feels like it is probing at her personal history, comforting/searing drones pulling the membrane of memory taut across conflicting emotions, permitting nothing to get out unexamined. The result makes Chris Cunningham’s videos for Aphex Twin look quotidian. Cosey Fanni Tutti explodes the everyday.

Harmonic Coumaction is a vivid piece of work. That it is a starting point that led to Cosey’s second solo album, rather than an end in itself, is quite extraordinary. Extrapolating upon the soundtrack for her film, she has crafted an abstract autobiographical study rendered in dark, sensuous electronics. These tracks are reports from altered states caused not by hallucinogenics, but by the hallucinatory experiencing of the past in the present. TUTTI re-transmits personal past events as shared dreams.

A drawling horn welcomes listeners to the naked lunch of “Tutti”, which spills its guts to reveal a seam of richly pulsing almost techno. It gets close up and visceral, yet also offers a distance of perspective. “Drone” delivers on the promise of its title, evoking military helicopters circling suburban family compounds. Surveillance comes home and the war zone is only a reality slip away. Memory is disordered and distorted through “Moe”, as its (an)other time evoking electronica is taken over by Brutalist techno. Meanwhile, plastic dreams are eaten from the inside out on “Sophic Ripple”, where pathways converge and all moments occur simultaneously.

The clamour of industry disconcerts with “Split”, while “Heliy” offers not so much respite as an exploratory continuation from another angle. Voices breathe between the bleeps, pulling in rather than washing over. It’s starkly beautiful, so unbearably lovely that you want to live in it forever and at the same time only remember it as a fleeting feeling. What is soul music.

Human veins are used to demonstrate string theory in a dispassionate alien workshop in “En”, as the bodies’ former inhabitants are rebooted in virtual sensory deprivation tanks. “Orenda” likewise flashes images of death bound up in memory and only permitted to be released when taken a scalpel to. This album is, after all, an act of dissection; a series of examinations reconfigured as visionary works. With TUTTI, Cosey Fanni Tutti has cut into the present to bleed the past and let the future breathe.