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.
