Carter Tutti
Feral Vapours of the Silver Ether

The summer ends, the twilight atmospheres return, although in truth, it's not as if my summer music choices have particularly shone with brightness.

However, “Feral Vapours of the Silver Ether” cannot be defined as autumnal listening; it's simply a nocturnal album, and the night, unless proven otherwise (unless you live at the North Pole or more simply in Scandinavian countries), exists even in summer. In fact, I listened to this album a lot this summer, in the evening, at night, but not during the day, definitely not, not even on rainy days. So the whole "summer ending" thing was just nonsense, an introductory line like any other, a way to gather courage and reclaim the energy dormant during the well-deserved holidays to kick off this new reviewing season.

And so we start again, revisiting this good album from 2007, the work of these minor descendants of Throbbing Gristle, who for the occasion abandon the industrial attire to caress our minds with elegant, sensual sounds that we would never have expected from the likes of Chris Carter and Cosey Fanny Tutti. Or maybe yes.

Already in the coeval “Part Two: The Endless Not” (also from 2007), the triumphant return for the glorious TG in their original lineup, one could detect jazz moods, noir settings, sonic constructions tending to mystical rarefaction. Not to mention that for some time now, the former honorable colleagues Peter Christopherson and Genesis P-Orridge had begun a journey that would take them outside the barbed wire of the most caustically industrial music: Coil with their ethereal Moon Music, Psychic TV reborn under the star of an acid and psychedelic rock.

Not to be outdone, Chris and Cosey themselves, a few years earlier (it was 2004), had changed their social reason (from “Chris & Cosey” to Carter Tutti) to embrace a new musical paradigm made of melodic research and chaste contemplation.

This approach undoubtedly also bears fruit in the present “Feral Vapours of the Silver Ether,” a new milestone for the English duo, who, on their second outing under the Carter Tutti moniker, manage to produce a mature, fresh work, balanced especially due to its investigative vocation, for its nature halfway between matter and spirit, for the way it develops, supported on one hand by a mechanical, ballast energy that keeps them grounded, and on the other propelled by an opposite force aimed at sensory ascension.

The eternal and continuous mutability of being, the slow process that takes us from life to death and then to a new life, albeit different: because death changes us but does not destroy us, and life destroys us but does not change us in the depths of our being. Man as an integral part and mirror of a larger, eternal, seemingly immobile universe, animated by a dynamism of elements (fire, earth, water, fire) that eternally change position and their combination: the immortal nature, the slow and progressive passing of the seasons, the imperceptible transition from day to night and from night to day, rational schemes created to confer intelligibility to a whole that never assumes a definitive form, but that lives only through a constant variation in the arrangement of the same elements (earth, water, earth, air). Aging, ultimately, day after day, without realizing it, until the fatal acceleration, which is nothing but a human dilation of time, another human construction.

Thus transiting, in a state of hypnosis, a hypnosis rich with smells, sensations, natural elements, from the dreamy notes of “So Slow the Knife,” to the suspended piano (in the style of Brian Eno's “Music for...”) of “Torn Window”; from the badalamentian night of “Woven Clouds” (it seems as if one hears Julie Cruise's voice), to the icy dark d’auteur of “Acid Tongue,” which projects the immortal spirit of Nico into the third millennium; and down again, gently slipping on a mossy mantle, dewy with moisture, to actual death, that put into music by the obscuring concluding tracks, “Black Dust” and “Feral Vapours,” shadows of a past that cannot be suppressed.

From the Factory of Death, we could say, to the Forest of Death and Life, because Chris Carter talks to us about life, death, rebirth, and change, generator of minimal-electro pulsations as well as weaver of enveloping atmospheres, gloomy orchestrations, and Cosey Fanny Tutti, who with her improvisations, with her "controlled anarchy," made of guitar creaks, barely accentuated arpeggios, drunken and out of tune trumpet, her ossianic non-singing, barely whispered (almost all the pieces are sung) provides a lifelike pulse to a work that would otherwise sound too cerebral.

Thus “Feral Vapours of the Silver Ether” ends up escaping all definition (because “Feral Vapours of the Silver Ether” is not ambient, it’s not industrial, it's not jazz, it's not avant-garde, nor is it ethnic music, nor dark or obscure songwriter music), despite its intrinsic polychromy lying not in the variety of atmospheres (the tracks, on the contrary, tend to resemble each other tremendously), but in the research underpinning the creative process, which annexes, synthesizes distant impulses, declining them into a completed and perfectly homogeneous form.

An equilibrium that reassures and at the same time unsettles. So lie back on these notes and let yourself become transparent.