The Aces on _, _, and _
Few artists have so unapologetically blurred the lines between sound, sex, and self as Cosey Fanni Tutti. A pioneering force in the realms of performance art, industrial music, and radical feminist expression, Cosey's career spans over five decades of relentless experimentation and uncompromising defiance.
From her early confrontational work with COUM Transmissions — where her body became both subject and medium — to co-founding the revolutionary industrial group Throbbing Gristle, she helped birth an entire genre while challenging societal norms around art, pornography, and power.
As one-half of the enduring duo Chris & Cosey (and later Carter Tutti), she explored the emotional depths of electronic music, creating intimate sonic landscapes long before the mainstream caught up.
Now back with her latest solo record, 2t2, Cosey Fanni Tutti continues to expand her sonic vocabulary with an album that feels both crushingly intimate and hypnotically unrelenting. Crafted with a sense of reflection and raw experimentation after a period of profound personal loss, 2t2 draws from a lifetime of transgressive artistry, weaving together ghostly electronics, pulsing rhythms, and a tactile sense of memory.
Whether on stage, in a gallery, or through her acclaimed memoir Art Sex Music, Cosey has remained a fearless provocateur — turning taboo into testimony, and forever reshaping the possibilities of what it means to live as art, and make art from life.
KP: You’ve often described your music as a reflection of your spiritual journey. How has your sense of self evolved over the years through making music?
UMI: My music pushes me to become my truest self. I think our greatest fears are often tied to our true purpose. Sometimes we feel that we may be purposeless because we’re scared to confront the journey of overcoming those unique fears.
My fears included the fear of being seen, stage fright, the fear of speaking up, and the fear of being myself. Overcoming these things was possible because of my love for music. It was the only way that I could be the artist I saw myself to be — I had to rewrite those beliefs.
Now I would say that I feel very confident, self-assured, grounded, and bold.
KP: Your name, UMI, means “ocean” in Japanese. What does the ocean symbolize to you in terms of identity and expansiveness? Similarly, as someone who is both biracial and bilingual, has your relationship with cultural identity ever felt like both a push and a pull? If so, how do you find balance in that duality?
UMI: My name feels true to me because, like the ocean, I follow the flow of my heart to guide my art. I see my music as being universal, like the ocean that touches every shore across the planet. Also, the ocean never stops being itself for anything — a boat, a swimmer, a fish. The ocean doesn’t stop flowing for anything — it just continues to be itself shamelessly. And that’s who the truest version of myself strives to be!
Like the ocean, my relationship to identity has definitely felt like a push and a pull. I think this year was the first year that I finally embraced my cultural identity fully. In the past I just didn’t understand how I could be Black or Japanese! My brain couldn’t comprehend it because I’ve tied being accepted as being Black or Japanese to certain experiences or appearances that I didn’t have. I had my own unique experience — a combination of the two — and I had to learn that being who I am is unconditional.
I find balance in duality by letting go of the noise of the world and accepting myself for the enjoyment of my own experience.
KP: You’ve often spoken about the importance of embracing softness and vulnerability. In what ways has unlearning emotional avoidance and repression played into your sense of self or your work at large?
UMI: To me, emotional avoidance and repression is the highway to getting stuck; it blocks evolution of all kinds. I’ve learned that the deeper I can let myself feel — even my darkest of emotions — the more creativity I can hold. I see it in my head like a never-ending well. Every time you feel the well gets deeper, and with that extra space you can hold more inspiration, clarity, and ideas.
On a scale of 0 to 10 — with 0 being the least emotion and 10 being the most — when we are afraid to feel, we live from a 4 to a 6. When we learn to embrace our emotions, we live from a 0 to a 10 — in those extra numbers, there are more stories and ideas! More of yourself! My work continues to expand because I continue to feel deeper in all directions infinitely.
KP: You’ve experimented with both binaural beats and healing frequencies, which are such interesting modalities of music. Can you speak to how meditation and energy work play into your songwriting or production process?
UMI: On a grand scale, music is being misunderstood and minimized to a form of entertainment or a money generator. I feel that entertainment and wealth are the cherry on top of what music is really about.
Music can’t be seen by the eye, so it’s easy to misunderstand what it carries. Music is this invisible messenger that can carry anything you want directly into people. To me, music can be just as healing as taking medicine or a vitamin — it’s just invisible, so we don’t realize it. Music can carry emotions to move someone to dance or to cry when life couldn’t crack them open. Music can carry love and make you realize that life is worth living or this relationship is worth working towards. It can make the traffic disappear and take you back to childhood. This isn’t by coincidence — this is the power of the invisible medium of music.
It’s the same way that people don’t know how to define love — I feel that many people don’t really know how to define music. It can be hard to understand things that we can’t see, but challenging ourselves to understand music more beyond the eye, I feel, will truly help heal the world and create a new value system for music that actually uplifts masses of people.
KP: I couldn’t agree more. And on that note, music can be both nurturer and healer — do you see yourself as a traditional artist, a healer, or both?
UMI: I see myself as both! I see myself as an artist because my greatest passion is to see the ideas in my mind become reality. Creativity comes as naturally to me as breathing. I love to take people into the worlds both physically and non-physically; it’s where I see myself impacting the world for the better.
I see myself as a healer because my art naturally heals — that’s something that I’ve realized over time. When I write music, I go into it to express my truest self. And when I do that, truthfully, I notice that it heals others who listen. When I sing from my heart, I see that it touches other people, as if I was let into their heart, too. So without meaning to — but also with intention — I have become a healer.
“I am soft because I am strong. Today, the bravest thing that you can do is to feel. And I will continue to do so.”
Photography: Dana Trippe
