No.19 – Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith

November 6, 2021November 23, 2021 | humphreyswill

This took so many attempts… 3, 4, 5 – I don’t remember – and I’d got to 39 – but realised this was actually 19…. And I’m still not entirely happy with it. Anyway, KAS is simply amazing, creating electronica wonder in a cascade of brilliant releases.

You might start here:

And so on…

No.37 – Cosey Fanni Tutti

June 2, 2021June 20, 2021 | humphreyswill

Cosey Fanni Tutti (born Christine Carol Newby; 4 November 1951) is an English performance artist, musician, and writer, best known for her time in the avant-garde groups Throbbing Gristle and Chris & Cosey. She has built up a substantial body of important work in her own right, however, and has inspired musicians in electronica, experimental, jazz and industrial music for decades, as well as visual and performance artists and writers across many genres.

Her name came about in 1973, before which she performed under the name Cosmosis. According to Throbbing Gristle biographer Simon Ford, “Cosey Fanni Tutti” was suggested to her by mail artist Robin Klassnick, and it comes from the opera Così fan tutte, meaning literally “Thus Do They All.” (Source: Wikipedia: Cosey Fanni Tutti)

If you have access to BBC iPlayer content, Cosey recently contributed insightful and personal commentary and a spellbinding soundtrack to a collage documentary on Delia Derbyshire, link here.

UK FACT Magazine cited the Throbbing Gristle album ’20 Jazz Funk Greats’ the best album of the 1970s. They wrote that:

“This album is a rupture. It’s an open crack into the unpronounceable dimensions into which tumble important streams of 20th century pop, art and underground culture, to seethe around each other, mingling, festering, sprouting new and unpredictable forms which in turn would ooze out to infest vast sections of what comes after.”
Wikipedia: Throbbing Gristle

Throbbing Gristle – 20 Jazz Funk Greats (1979, Vinyl) - Discogs

Excluding Throbbing Gristle, Carter Tutti or Chris & Cosey releases, her discography includes:

Time To Tell (1983 Flowmotion)
Nicki (1983 AQM) [with John Duncan and Chris Carter]
Electronic Ambient Remixes 4: Selflessness (2004 Conspiracy International)
Mist While Sleeping (2010 Dirter Promotions) [with Philippe Petit]
Carter Tutti Void Transverse (2012 Mute)
Tutti (2019 Conspiracy International)

Here’s a track from Tutti (2019)

I’ve yet to read her memoir, Art, Sex, Music (of which there is an upcoming film), but it’s high on my list.

Art Sex Music: Amazon.co.uk: Tutti, Cosey Fanni: 9780571328512: Books

Available here and from most other booksellers.

No.36 – Cherushii

January 10, 2021 | humphreyswill

Cherushii – Acrylic and paper on Chestnut Panel

I wanted this painting to look as though it might have washed ashore on a Pacific Coast beach. Re-reading Winter Tides by James Blaylock may be influencing me. Cherushii was a wonder – I wish I could have seen her perform and her death was a terrible loss to the world and to music.

Chelsea Faith Dolan, better known by her stage name Cherushii (September 14, 1983 – December 2, 2016), was an American electronic music producer, DJ, live performer, and radio host based in San Francisco. Influenced by house music, Detroit techno, and disco, she released several recordings on the independent dance music label 100% Silk, including Queen of Cups, Far Away So Close, and Memory of Water, reissued in 2017.
KQED named Cherushii’s album Meow Wolf’s Arcade Soundtracks: Wiggy’s Plasma Plex one of the 10 best Bay Area albums of 2016. Fellow electronic musician Maria Minerva has called Cherushii “criminally underrated”.
Dolan was one of 36 victims of a fire that broke out at an underground venue and artist collective in Oakland, California commonly referred to as the Ghost Ship warehouse on December 2, 2016.
Wikipedia Article: Cherushii

Albums

Memory of Water – 100% Silk, 2015
Cherushii & Maria Minerva – 100% Silk, 2019 (posthumous release)

Singles and EPs

Queen of Cups (12”) – 100% Silk, 2013
Far Away So Close (12”) – 100% Silk, 2015
Starlight Express (EP), 2015
Nobody’s Fool (EP), 2015
Manic (EP), 2016

Chelsea died alongside another musical hero – Cash Askew (of Them Are Us Too) who will be the subject of a future portrait in this series. Much love and memory to all those affected by the fire.

Bask in Cherushii’s sounds here: https://cherushii.bandcamp.com/

No.34 Jenny Hval

January 9, 2021January 9, 2021 | humphreyswill

From Hval’s Website:

Jenny Hval has in recent years made a name for herself as a recording artist and writer both in her native Norway and abroad. Multidisciplinary and transgressive are words often employed to describe her art, but Jenny Hval’s polyphonic artistry is in fact seamlessly interwoven between musical, literary, visual and performative modes of expression. Her artistic voice is altogether present, accessible and obscurely complex at the same time.

Hval released her first two albums under the alias Rockettothesky (an alias named after her very first recorded song in 1999, and slayed with the greatest pleasure in 2010). She has since recorded five albums and one EP under her own name: Viscera (2011), Innocence Is Kinky (2013), Apocalypse, girl (2015), Blood Bitch (2016), The Long Sleep EP (2018) and The Practice of Love (2019). Her last four releases have been co-produced by noise legend Lasse Marhaug and herself.

She made her debut as a writer with the novel Perlebryggeriet in 2009 (published in English in 2018 as Paradise Rot). The less genre friendly Inn i ansiktet followed in 2012. Her third book and second novel, Å hate Gud, was published in 2018, and translated & published in English as Girls Against God in late 2020.

She, or who are we kidding, I, have worked on a number of collaborations, sound pieces, compositions, productions and performances.

She lives in Oslo, and doesn’t update her biography very often.

Bandcamp here: https://jennyhval.bandcamp.com/