Cosey and Delia

Cosey Fanni Tutti's latest album – a solo album – is based on the soundtrack she created for the film Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes. The film, directed by Caroline Catz (best known for her role as the headteacher in the TV series Doc Martin), is about the life and work of the electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire, who worked at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the 1960s. CFT gives a fascinating account of how she created it in the book, Re-Sisters. Having spent time talking to people who knew Delia, she then visited the John Rylands Library in Manchester to listen to digital recordings of the 'legendary tapes' themselves, which are held there (tantalizingly, they're not freely available because of copyright complications). I get the impression that the tapes are a kind of 'sound diary' of Delia's working life. CFT managed to assemble a collection of old, analogue equipment, which allowed her to explore Delia's way of working:

I'd made copious notes on how I'd go about composing and finding the right sounds that would reflect Delia's style while staying true to myself and to Delia's ethos of obtaining previously unheard sounds. Re-Sisters, p.119

She also had access to Delia's VCS3 synthesizer 'patch sheets' (diagrams showing the positions of the controls and the ways different parts of the machine were interconnected to produce a particular sound). As she said, recreating one of Delia's 'patches' was unlikely to produce the same sound but was at least an interesting starting point. (Elsewhere in Re-Sisters, she talks about Keats' idea of 'negative capability' and the importance to artists of just letting things happen). One should stress that the end result is very much the work of CFT and definitely not a recreation of Delia's music. I suppose one could describe it as a dialogue with Delia's ghost.

I've been a long-time fan of Throbbing Gristle but, until now, I'd not taken the time to get to know the work of Cosey Fanni Tutti outside of the band. It's a voyage of discovery for me, it's still in progress, and I'm enjoying every minute of it.

In addition to her music and performance art, CFT has written two books: an autobiography, Art Sex Music (2018) and, most recently, Re-Sisters: The Lives and Recordings of Delia Derbyshire, Margery Kempe and Cosey Fanni Tutti (2022). 

Full Circle

Full Circle is the latest album by Cate Brooks, working under the pseudonym of The Advisory Circle. It's the sixth album she's produced under the name, the first, Mind How You Go, going back to 2005.

Brooks' music has always owed as much to the music of 1970s public information films as it has to the world of kosmische musik. Poignantly impersonal, and with an edgy sense of unease, it invokes that 1970s world of electronica, sci-fi film and library music. It seems to hover between the past and the present and it's easy to see how it came to be labelled hauntological, evoking an imaginary present, based on the past, that never came to pass.

If you want to know what 1979 felt like, play this music on a Sony Walkman and close your eyes. Part of the magic then, I think, came from the fact that electronics back then had not quite lost its mystique the way it probably has now: people today tend to take it for granted that a chip in a smartphone can hold 170 billion transistors, but back then, a simple circuit using a couple of transistors could invoke a sense of wonder. A synthesizer was something else.

Full Circle is still intent on exploring the hauntological world of uneasy nostalgia explored in the first Advisory Circle album. This is not intended as a criticism: indeed, my first impression is that this album might well become my favourite of the six Brooks has produced so far. Perhaps one could describe it as meta-hauntological? Listening to it, I must say, as much as the 1970s, it invokes for me a poignant nostalgia for the early 2000s and a future based on that time which has never come to pass. Perhaps this is intended. Perhaps the clue is in the album's title?

Full Circle is issued by Ghost Box Records.