Chris & Cosey

Originally released to much acclaim in 1981 by Rough Trade, Heartbeat was the first in a long line of groundbreaking albums by Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti. 'Heartbeat' is one of the holy grails of electronic music. Nearly 40 years after initial release, Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti's masterpiece is reissued on their CTI imprint, putting a mountain of recent dark/cold/new wave revisionism into much needed context. The album was the first of C&C's post-Throbbing Gristle missives which would define the electro and synthpop underbelly of the 1980s and cast a towering shadow of influence over so much machine made music to come, from Juan Atkins and Drexciya to successive waves of synth music ever since. 'Heartbeat' established the duo outside of TG, further developing the careening sequencer settings which Carter had welded into the band, and feeding into a new wave of post-punk pop with uncompromising minimalist aesthetics and a darkly crooked intent. Between the sinister baroque paean 'This Is Me' and the foundational electro of the title track, these eleven tracks form a shadowy cornerstone of unterwelt electronic pop and dance music, and should be considered as creatively important as Kraftwerk's 'Computer World' or Human League's 'The Dignity Of Labour'.