CABARET VOLTAIRE - MICRO-PHONIES @ 40

 

Marking its 40th anniversary today is the sixth full length studio LP from Cabaret Voltaire, Micro-Phonies, which was released on October 29th, 1984. It's the album that effectively marks the bands full transition from avant-garde industrial provocateurs to EBM dance-floor domination.

Cabaret Voltaire had started out their career in the early 1970s as an exploration of electronic music created using non-musical tools. Their early works were primarily abstract tape loop experiments and forays into hand made electronics, like custom oscillators. Gradually, however, they began to incorporate more traditional instrumentation into their sound, especially the use of percussion, drum machines and actual drum kits. A sense of rhythmic awareness soon started to indicate a penchant for making music that people could actually dance to. This latent funkiness would start to manifest from their first LP release, Mix-Up, in 1979, but by 1982's 2x45, the focus on rhythm had become explicit. The departure of co-founder, Chris Watson, during the middle of that album's production was a key point of departure for the band to shed their experimental skin and move into something entirely more dance-floor friendly.

The release of the John Robbie remixed version of Yashar as a 12" single in July of 1983 was the first proper disco salvo from the group, as their intention of invading the alternative dance-floors of the club scene became explicit. This was soon followed by the release of The Crackdown LP in August of that year. That album offered up an entirely revamped version of the group. Their "glow-up" came courtesy of some key innovations in the realm of electronic music making. A new generation of drum machines, sequencers and synthesizers, along with the introduction of digital sampling, had caused a C-change on the landscape of electronic music, supplanting the wobbly inaccuracies of voltage controlled step sequencers and synchronization architecture with the precision of digital interfaces, MIDI, that offered pin-point accuracy when it came to creating percussion and drum patterns and the attendant bass and melodic sequences that accompanied them. The Crackdown was a solid step into that arena, while Micro-Phonies was the group fully making themselves at home in their new domain.

The album features the single, Sensoria, which thanks to a particularly innovative promotional video, became an MTV staple in the mid '80s. The video incorporated some particularly impressive camera work, which involved the use of a pivoting camera mount that created some gravity defying camera movements, baffling viewers who tried to figure out how the effect was achieved. It was voted Best Video of the Year by the Los Angeles Times in 1985, and was later procured by the New York Museum of Modern Art. By this point, Cabaret Voltaire had invested a lot into video production, even launching their own company, Doublevision, for releasing their works and those by others, like Chris & Cosey, who released the live VHS, European Rendezvous, and the video art ambient compilation, Elemental 7.

The group would remain dedicated to the creation of electronic dance music for the duration of their active career, up to their final group effort, The Conversation, in 1994. With The Crackdown and Micro-Phonies, Cabaret Voltaire set the template for the underground dance music of the era, providing the foundation stones for countless artists who came in their wake.