X-Rated Trance Textures From Chris & Cosey

Steve & Eydie. Sonny & Cher. The Captain & Tennille. Chris & Cosey.

Chris & Cosey? This pair of X-rated, industrial-strength English multimedia manipulators probably won’t be joining those show-biz couples in any Vegas showrooms in the near future. But like many other show-biz couples, Chris and Cosey have developed an act reflecting the tastes of their particular audience, and their performance at Bogart’s on Friday night was pretty much the same show they’ve brought to past Los Angeles appearances.

Against a video collage featuring images of sexual play and subconscious disarray, the stone-faced Chris Carter created a synthesized series of sensual, cyclic, rhythm-heavy trance textures while Cosey Fanni Tutti, dressed in Spandex/bondage finery, whispered dire nothings, blasted a trumpet for a note or two, pulled a series of white noise clusters from a guitar, thwacked a drum machine and moved and grooved like a dancer in the London girlie bars where she once worked.

Nowadays there’s a slightly sinister sub-text to the couple’s sex-and-psyche explorations; hearing Cosey murmur “Infectious” against a throbbing, midnight-blue sound track has obvious implications. Yet Chris & Cosey are not celebrating death; if anything, the physicality of their subterranean dream drones investigates the most primal of life forces. And for some, that’s entertainment.