In the exchanges that comprise Coh Plays Cosey, Ivan Pavlov and Cosey Fanni Tutti test their willingness to be vulnerable, to make gifts to and trust the other rather than their own agenda and agency.
The latter's diary of voice sounds were presented to the scrutinizing eye of Pavlov, who explores all of their possibilities of reconfiguration like a gambler trying to exhaust all of the possibilities in a game of chance. Herein the relationship is clearly asymmetrical. Cosey's head is essentially cut off; she's halted in her spontaneity; deflected from her ends; removed from the thrall of her desire to be the center that owns itself.
Her lyrics, reprinted in the linear notes, display a concern for a gamut of issues — identity, gender, sex — but Pavlov's vivisection is more intent on cracking them open like a jail of ribs. He focuses on the sonority of the words rather than their meaning, revealing in the manner of their intonation a subterranean current of impressions and correspondences that exist independent of and even counter to their explicit meaning. Cosey's pearls of passivity seem anything but passive on "Sin-King", for instance, as Pavlov builds a mathematically precise rhythm out of their repetition that grates to startling effect against the agitated sonic ephemera that surrounds it.
The rest of the disc proves an effective indication of the seemingly limitless potential lying in such a deconstructive method and is littered with unusual tones that shift, split apart, and fan out. Cosey's voice continues to arise as overlapping bursts and swells of sound, seesawing back and forth as though Pavlov were desperate to avoid anything that could be considered stable or fixed. In the odd place, such as "Crazy", amidst detonated streams of arbitrary harmonics and thickly discordant fug, her almost Diamanda Galas-like croaking and crackling appears in sharp relief, thus throwing Pavlov back upon himself and his status as illusionary subject in the proceedings. In this light, the disc bears resemblance to the complex and indistinct acts of submission and transgression in sex. Coh Plays Cosey constantly winds itself up to these moments, but without ever sounding schematic or premeditated.
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