CARTER TUTTI VOID - TRANSVERSE @ 10

 

Released on March 26th, 2012, the debut album, Transverse, by Industrial super-group, Carter Tutti Void, turns 10 years old today.

In May of 2011, Mute Records organized a music festival of its artists called “Short Circuit”. For this event, they contacted Chris Carter & Cosey Fanni Tutti and proposed a one-off collaboration with Factory Floor’s Nik Colk Void. The trio agreed to do an impromptu performance for the festival and, after Chris Carter prepared some backing materials and they’d done a bit of rehearsing at Chris & Cosey’s studio in their Norfolk converted schoolhouse home, they performed their set at the Roundhouse in London on May 13th, 2011.

The impact of this performance took both the CTV trio and Mute by surprise with its intensity and enthusiasm. What they had managed to put on stage was a seamless fusion of old school industrial edge with modern electronic sophistication. With Carter manning the machines in the center, flanked by Cosey and Nik on noise guitars, they offered up an atonal, pulsing maelstrom of sound. However, rather than projecting the typical nihilism that has become associated with modern Industrial music, the effect of their performance was transcendent and joyful. All those shards of discordant sounds flailing against Chris’s rhythms were a celebration of unbridled, spontaneous creativity.

Nearly a year after its presentation, the recordings of this performance were finally released. What was intended to exist for a single night had taken on a life of its own, prompting further live performances and, eventually, two more albums to complete a triptych trifecta of soaring, searing electronic exuberance. The trio had demonstrated how challenging experimental music need not be confined by dour depression and hopelessness. They brought it all to life like some triumphant three headed mythological creature, which however briefly, strode across the contemporary musical landscape and left behind its examples of an entirely different disposition within the experimental music world.