Album Review: f(x) by Carter Tutti Void

Featuring Throbbing Gristle's Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti (aka Chris & Cosey) plus Nik Void of Factory Floor, Carter Tutti Void first united for Mute's 2011 Short Circuit Festival in London, offering an improvisational set that was captured on the 2012 release Transverse. As that wonderful LP displayed, this May-December band were simpatico when it came to hypnotic and austere industrial music that seemed to guide itself, and now with this first proper studio album, they continue to be the great ghost in the machine. Six tracks are offered, all of them designed like sound sculptures or tape loops that slowly develop, dissolve, and then return to a robotic heart-throbbing beat.

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The pulse as musical object has been something of a focal point for experimental musicians in recent years. Australian composer/multi-instrumentalist/hurricane Oren Ambarchi has incorporated eternal pulses into many of his recent works (most notably Quixotism), while the ‘motorik beat’ is now part of every layman’s modern music lexicon. Even the recent music from electronic music’s godfather Richard D James has veered closer and closer towards the beat rather than the skewed freneticism of his drill ‘n’ bass years.

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Like "pop-up" shops, cafés and boutiques that have a distinctly permanent air, "immersive experience" is one of the asinine, misleading buzzwords of contemporary leisure activity. These hijack the aesthetics of what was once the leftfield for marketing purposes, a small sidebar in The Evening Standard's continued flogging of a monied vision of a London that's becoming unrecognisable. They're both symptom and microcosm of living in the Capital (and many other cities) today: an immersive experience and endless opportunities so long as you can afford it.

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