Chris & Cosey. Album cover of Trance. 2010 / From open access
Qalam strives to explore the interpenetration of different cultures. To this end, we have decided to launch a series of playlists in which music mediates between different geographical and ideological spaces. Our first playlist is called ‘West to East: One Hundred Best Songs’. It will be updated several times a week, and its curation will focus on how Western pop culture has reflected the realities of the East, whether they are musical, geographical, religious, or political. (The terms ‘West’ and ‘East’ should be taken as broadly and arbitrarily as possible.)
The British industrial quartet Throbbing Gristle produced more musical ideas than music in the traditional sense of the word, and after the group disbanded, those ideas continued to flourish in three offshoot projects: Psychic TV, Coil, and Chris & Cosey. The duo of Cosey Fanni Tutti and Chris Carter began to develop some of Throbbing Gristle’s most playful experiments, such as the song ‘United’. For the most part, they sounded like typical 1980s synth-pop, and it was their distinct chilling, ethereal tones and hypnotic atmosphere that gave them away as sophisticated visionaries. The most convincing album in this respect is probably their Techno Primitiv, released in 1985. One of the songs is an erotic fantasy by singer Cosey Fanni Tutti (who in her youth successfully combined art with being featured in pornographic magazines) about a certain oriental man who dances naked under the light of love.