There's a kind of cognitive dissonance that kicks in when you're in conversation with Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti. Tune out from what they're saying and you could be listening to an aunt and uncle at a family occasion telling you their latest news, so light-hearted and down-to-earth is their approach to interviews. It certainly doesn't seem to tally with the infamy and influence of their work over more than four decades, which has taken in occultism, pornography and military-grade psychedelia, at one point earning them the title of "wreckers of western civilisation."

Cosey's exploration of human sexuality's fringes (as well as her vocals, guitar and cornet playing) and Chris's self-built electronic instruments were both absolutely crucial to the unique identity of Throbbing Gristle—both in its original lineup and the 2000s TG2 reboot—and in the wake of "Sleazy" Christopherson's death they remain custodians of Throbbing Gristle's legacy along with Genesis P Orridge as X-TG. Their own work through the 1980s and '90s as Chris & Cosey has been just as influential, too, with the likes of Optimo, Carl Craig, Bok Bok and Andrew Weatherall being vocal supporters. Though they have recently reactivated classic Chris & Cosey material, they have never rested on laurels, remaining highly active as Carter Tutti since 2000, collaborating closely with Factory Floor (and particularly Nik Void), and working on any number of one-off projects, including the live soundtrack for F.W. Murnau's Faust at the BFI, which was the occasion for this interview.

How are preparations going for the BFI show?

Cosey: They're great, we're all set to go. We're just getting used to hearing it on the big system there, which is very different to hearing it in the studio.

Chris: It took a while to decide what film to do, because they'd left it completely up to us, so we spent ages looking for something. We didn't want to use something that had dialogue already...

Cosey: ...or that was obvious...

Chris: ...or that had music associated with it...

Cosey: ...or which had been done in that way before...

Chris: So in the end we chose Faust, the 1926 version. But we've had to edit it down to 30 minutes, which was a task in itself.

Cosey: It's a really nice one, because it's very atmospheric in itself, and because it's a silent film the narrative is already there in the visuals.

So you're almost as much adapting the film to your music as vice versa?

Cosey: Yeah—and we had to pick images that would make sense and still tell the story in the time that we had. It's interesting to do, really interesting.

It must have made you see the film in a new way.

Chris: It did, partly just because we had to watch it so many times!

Cosey: I purposely didn't listen to the soundtracks that came with it.

Chris: Obviously over the years it's had quite a few different soundtracks, the one the BFI sent us had two different ones.

Cosey: But I deliberately avoided those to make sure I wasn't accidentally inspired by them.

Faust

Of course your sounds, by virtue of being electronic, are modern—but is there any sense you tried to make them fit this anachronistic world of 90 years ago?

Cosey: No not really, just the mood more than anything. But even though we play electronic instruments, the sounds we've made have always had organic elements and complexity in them.

Chris: We started out on this with a thing that we'd try and make it sound acoustic even though we're using electronics; that fell by the wayside really, but it still doesn't sound overtly electronic as such. Like Cosey says, it's organic.

Cosey: It was nice, because there's a moment in the film when these TG type flashes come on the screen, and you just go, "Oooh that's really nice!"

Chris: We have got samples of different sounds that we're going to throw in live, samples of thunderclaps and stuff which we'll try and put in if we can sync it right, but it's not going to be all precisely synced, it's all going to be quite fluid.

Your music has often responded to spaces. Do you react to the fictional spaces depicted in the film, too?

Chris: Well, it's quite surreal isn't it, because it's Murnau. So it's full of strange angles, and with some you actually just have to pull back a bit with the sound and let just the visuals speak for themselves. You're underpinning what you're looking at really, so it might just be a drone, or tone, with the shadows or the shapes of those rooftops where he gets those weird angles.

Cosey: But it's the interactions between the characters that can inspire you just as often as the shapes on the screen. There's lots of looks that we respond to. There's lots of fast edits, too, so there's no way you could create a sound effects soundtrack; even with the flashes, I'd sooner have something that meant something about flashes to me than be literal with the thunderclaps. And with the ritual where he's summoning the devil, you can kind of relate to that with our history if you know what I mean [laughs]. So you come into that with a different interpretation and ideas for the music you want to make. The same with the burning of the books—that's a cleansing thing to him, but to me, I'm looking at it thinking those were probably actually real books, because they're big old books from the 1920s yet for this film he's really throwing them on the fire.

Chris: And Germans have a history of burning books...

Cosey: That's right. So you have all these benefits of hindsight when you do a soundtrack for a film from way back when, plus all the magical connotations, as well as the direct inspirations from the images and characters.

Do you come up with musical motifs for different ideas or elements in the film?

Chris: Yes totally, there are things that come back throughout the film.

Cosey: Like when the devil appears then keeps coming back in different forms. And all those death sequences, the burning at the stake—that's always a good excuse for a nice bit of electronic crackle [laughs].

Is the process of soundtracking a departure for you, or is it just an extension of your normal work, which has always had audio-visual elements anyway?

Chris: Well, we've been doing soundtracks for so long now, and especially improvised, live soundtracks, that it is part and parcel of our normal work.

Cosey: Though it is a different approach depending what the film is, or the project. From After Cease To Exist, the film, we've done it in so many ways.

Chris: The difference with this one is that it has a narrative. Most of the work we've done before hasn't had a narrative.

What about the audience set-up? Do you have preferences between the cinema context—where everyone is in rows and their attention is directed forward at a screen—or the gig or club situation?

Cosey: It depends what music you're playing in a club.

Chris: You can really play the audience in a club. If you really fine tune the sounds you're using you can lift them up, bring them down, alter their reactions quite interestingly.

Cosey: Well, that's what it's for, that's why people go to clubs. The conjoined experience.

Chris: And I do enjoy doing that.

Cosey: You're feeding off their feelings towards the music, then that comes back out again and sort of accelerates and accumulates to a point where you just don't know what to do—euphoria.

Chris: It's a good feeling, that.

Cosey: We've had quite a few gigs like that lately. I've said it before but you reach a point where you're so excited and euphoric with the people that you suddenly have to go, "Hang on a minute, I'm making the sound that's creating this feeling so I'd better concentrate on what I'm going to do next!"

Chris: We got that at Heaven, definitely. The crowd were really behind us. I'd been concerned about the London crowd—London crowds can be difficult, they've seen it all, been there before, bought the t-shirt and they can be difficult crowds, but that night they were behind us all the way and they loved every minute of it. People mouthing the words that Cosey was singing, they knew all the songs, it was a high-energy gig, was that.

Cosey: It made me want to change the words!

Chris: You can get mischievous. But that was a highlight definitely of this year.

And aside from your own headline gigs, have there been clubs where you've had that kind of experience?

Chris: More so in Europe, actually. It's a different scene out there. At the moment they seem to like what we're doing and it fits in with the scene there.

Cosey: It's quite weird that what we're doing is 30 years old!

Chris: Yeah it is. We were in Madrid recently, doing a festival, and it was quite a clubby crowd—all they wanted to do is dance—then the police got involved because we over ran and the licences clashed with the timing, and we had to stop halfway through. That nearly developed into a riot because people were so worked up.

Cosey: We'd just hit that point where...

Chris: ...you're just changing gear...

Cosey: ...and everyone was going, "No! You can't stop there! You've got to keep going!"

Chris: It was a bit of a rollercoaster.

So you're still "wreckers of civilisation" then?

Cosey: There's moments like that, yeah.

Do you still there's still a mission to be subversive or disruptive?

Cosey: Well no, I don't think there ever was a mission, really. We [Throbbing Gristle] called it "The Mission is Terminated" because it had sort of turned into that kind of thing. The expectation had built that we were going to lead them somewhere, but what we were trying to say was, "There are no leaders, there's only you—that's what it's all about."

Chris: I guess we're enjoying it more now, we don't have to be subversive any more, we've matured, we're older.

Cosey: It's more a case of we're happy doing what we want to do as and when we want to do it—which we've always done, really. That's what's nice about the appreciation of the music we did in the '80s: we're physically experiencing the joy it's bringing to people 30 years later, and we saw it first time around. I don't think a lot of people get to have that—I mean, not in that kind of context, rather than something like an "oldies" tour where they go around going, "Here's the '80s again!" It's not like that, people have taken our music and brought it to the now, and appreciate it in the now for what it is.

Chris: Yeah we're definitely not doing an '80s revival show! The sounds are different. We are playing the old songs, but in a different way. We don't recreate those '80s sounds.

So if people are coming to your music in new ways, and you're playing it in new ways, do you feel like an old act or a new act?

Chris: Neither, really.

Cosey: No, I just feel like me doing the work I've created and seeing the reactions of people. Because when we first did it, say with "October Love Song," which has become quite an iconic track, it got absolutely slammed! Except in Goa, that is. In Goa it was a big summer hit, so loads of people knew it there. But nobody else. Loads of our albums when they came in the '80s, it was just like, "What the hell are they doing?"

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Is that because you were seen as having been as experimentalists, then going pop?

Chris: There was that, yes.

Cosey: That, and also that we were just the first people to be doing that kind of music. It was way before EBM and stuff like that. So the songs didn't catch on until later, and I really think that some of the people who come and see us now, a lot of them don't even know that the songs are that old. I think that's a good sign, really. Because the sound we've got now is now, it isn't '80s kind of pip-pop-pip-pop "Popcorn" sound. I couldn't work with that now, it wouldn't give me enough guts to get into.

Chris: It's quite a hard sound, much harder than before.

Was there a conscious decision to rework the old songs or was it a natural continuation of your working process?

Cosey: Well, we were shocked that the old stuff even took off again. We knew a lot of DJs were playing the Chris & Cosey material because we were getting licensing requests for tracks for compilations—but then a friend of ours who runs Cosey Club had been on at us for about three years to do a Chris & Cosey gig, like, "C'mon, we've been playing the records for years, just come and do them live for us!" and we'd be like, "Ah nahh, it's too much hard work," but then we foolishly said yes. Foolishly because all that old material was pre-hard drive, pre-floppy, it was tape—and we had to go back, and Chris spent six weeks getting these tracks ready to a position where we could work with them and feel good about them.

Chris: And that's when we realised we couldn't really, or didn't want to, do them like they were anyway!

Cosey: So we just did that one gig at the ICA, the Cosey Club gig, then after that we got inundated with people going, "Can you do that here, too?" And it was great fun, it was fantastic fun doing them again, revisiting it, it was long enough that we could really enjoy it for what it was.

Did it start to affect how you saw yourself? You'd been ticking along being Carter Tutti, then all of a sudden you were Chris & Cosey again.

Cosey: In some ways it does. We keep saying, "Oh we've got to get Carter Tutti going again, it's crazy—we've been doing Chris & Cosey for three years solid," but what do you do if people love it and you enjoy doing it? Why would you not?

Chris: We've managed to work on Carter Tutti in the meantime a little.

Cosey: Yeah we've got a Carter Tutti album coming in 2014. And we've got Carter Tutti Void that's on hold because of Factory Floor doing so well and us going out all the time. Getting us together with Nik to do that has proved really problematic for them and us. We're still working on it, though, we still hope to do it next year. We keep saying that, but fingers crossed, I'd love to do it, it'd be great.

How did the Factory Floor connection come about?

Chris: Our manager became their manager, and he made the introduction. But then we got chatting and really hit it off. When Dom's wife had a baby I stood in on keyboards for Factory Floor for about four gigs, then the friendship just developed. Nik moved back to Norfolk, near where we live, and we kept in contact quite a lot more, then someone said could we do a collaboration for the Mute event at the Roundhouse two years ago. They were suggesting other Mute bands, and because Nik had done a thing on Mute years ago with KaitO, we asked her.

Cosey: It would have been easy to go to Vince [Clarke] or someone like that really obvious but we thought, let's do something more interesting as a one-off that'll be really fun. And of course that turned into a whole new project. That's what happens when you do something for fun [laughs].

And are there any other projects on a back-burner that you'd like to get going among all the others?

Cosey: We've got a blackboard at home of projects!

Chris: But we probably shouldn't say anything and get people's hopes up. The glacial rate we work at, if we say something now it might not happen for two years, so we have to keep things quite and then surprise people.

Cosey: The blackboard's got Chris & Cosey, Carter Tutti, X-TG, Carter Tutti Void each with their own bit.

So how does the legacy of Throbbing Gristle fit in among all the other parts?

Chris: It's always going to be part of what we do. There's still more TG stuff to come out, projects that we were going to do with Sleazy, that got delayed for obvious reasons, and then the Chris & Cosey stuff took over. We're going to revisit Throbbing Gristle next year or the year after and go through that new material. No live stuff, just unreleased recordings, projects that we begun when Sleazy was still alive.

That must be daunting, as TG always documented every part of the process, right?

Cosey: It's daunting. Near the end, aside from Desertshore which Sleazy was supposed to be working on, there were so many other things you'd be asking him to do and he'd go, "Ah I can't face it," because when you're talking about that many recordings with video on top, eight hours of video for one project, it was just crazy lengths of time you're expecting someone to sit there working, and then if you've got a spark of an idea for something else, what you going to do? Move away to that for a while?

Are you also delving back into old mental and emotional states by going back into the archives?

Chris: Well, pretty much all the earlier stuff, the TG Mark 1, we've moved on from that. Most of that stuff has been released, put out in some form or another. The stuff we're working on and that could still come out is stuff from TG Mark 2, from the regrouping, so the process is not quite as bad as constantly harking back to the much older stuff. There's a box set or two to come out of the newer material. It's still archival because it's six or seven years old, but it's not like the '70s stuff. That's pretty much done. We're not going back there.

Does that influence your new music? You find stuff and go, "Wow we must do something like this" or "We must pick up where this left off"?

Cosey: What, we influence ourselves?

Chris: Well, we do constantly don't we?

Cosey: Well that's a better situation to be in than being influenced by other people!

Chris: Quite often when we're doing something new we'll go, "Oh no that's X-TG material."

Cosey: Yeah all the time when we were going through ideas with Sleazy he'd pick bits and go, "Oh that's too Coil" and we'd agree, and we'd go through and go, "OK put that aside for Carter Tutti, but this is for TG." You'd instantly recognise where something's going to go, it's not Chris & Cosey, it's not Coil, it's this.

So you just snap a bit up and go, "Ahhh we'll have that!"

Chris: Yeah we do [laughs].

Cosey: Well, less a case of "We'll have that" as "That's us—that can be worked in the way we work," where another bit would immediately be TG or now X-TG.

Does fan expectation come into that? You as a duo, and especially as part of TG, have some pretty obsessive listeners who have strong ideas about the music.

Chris: You can't. Fans are never in our minds when we're doing music and never have been. It's a selfish attitude maybe, but we enjoy doing what we want to do.

Cosey: You're in a position where you have to make them trust what you're going to do and accept that's what is going to be. We've always said, if you don't like it, this is what it is, and you just don't like what we've done—it's as simple as that. I think when people get obsessed they have an idea of TG that's so individual, it's not going to be universal to every TG fan. If you start second-guessing you can't please everyone. The whole point of the music, whether it's TG or Carter Tutti, is not that we please ourselves, but that we work through ourselves and create something that we hope someone else can share in in their own way. That's all that we ask from anyone, and we accept if they don't like it!

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