- Cosey Fanni Tutti is best known as a member of Throbbing Gristle and one half of Chris & Cosey. Less familiar, perhaps, is her solo output, and lesser still her work as a topless dancer and performance artist. In Tutti's recent autobiography, Art Sex Music, she mentions a lecture she gave to fine art students at Leeds Polytechnic in 1982, the transcript of which accompanied what would become Time To Tell. She mentions its sonic component almost as a footnote: "a cassette of a solo music recording I'd made in our small studio in Crouch End," which seems self-diminishing considering how innovative this experiment still sounds. Time To Tell was originally released by the zine Flowmotion in 1983 as a cassette and booklet. Now Conspiracy International have given it an official vinyl release for the first time, with a deluxe booklet of colour photos, interviews and other texts.
Unspooling her experiences with eroticism on the title track, Tutti's words weave in and out of resonant synth stabs. The origin of the track's perplexing twinkling noises, puzzling internet users to this day, add even more intrigue still to Tutti's self-assured monologue on the male gaze. On "Ritual Awakening," she echoes certain sonic themes of "Time To Tell" as if they're being played out in an adjacent world, with see-saw noises creating an eerie atmosphere. Again, she directly addresses the listener-viewer, emphasizing the idea that, as she says on the title track, this is "eroticism presented live and spontaneously." The B-side concludes with "The Secret Touch," which, though absent of Tutti's voice, is still confrontational. A chorus of hypnotically sad, swelling strings join forlorn, howling guitars, which seem a worthy substitute for lyrics.
Time To Tell remains remarkably subversive. One might assume that ideas about self-representation and feminism put forth in the early '80s would become stale nearly 40 years later, but what Tutti posited was a meta-aware analysis of her position as a female artist on the fringes of the spaces she occupied. Time To Tell also happens to sound amazing.
Tracklist01. Time To Tell
02. Ritual Awakening
03. The Secret Touch