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.

CABARET VOLTAIRE - MIX-UP @ 45

 

Released on October 23rd, 1979, the debut LP from Cabaret Voltaire, Mix-Up, turns 45 years old today. While it is often crude and difficult listening, it provides a critical intersection between post-punk and the emerging Industrial music scene that was happening with bands like Throbbing Gristle.

Taking their name from the short-lived Dadaist nightclub in Zürich, Switzerland, founded in 1916, The band had begun to take shape around 1972, with Chris Watson, a fan of Brian Eno, looking to explore the creation of electronics based music without the use of traditional instrumentation. His training as a telephone engineer enabled him to work on building home made gear, like oscillators and modified tape machines for creating loops. He soon encountered fellow Eno devotee, Richard H. Kirk, and the two began working together on their sound experiments, many of which can now be heard on the retrospective box set, Methodology '74 - '78: Attic Tapes. Kirk also began to introduce some traditional instruments, like guitar and clarinet. With the addition of Stephen Mallinder in late 1973, who contributed bass guitar and vocals, the trio began to move gradually towards something almost resembling regular music, incorporating drums and drum machines, and electronic organs.

The trio also began performing live, with their initial gigs being not much more than sonic pranks. The trio would deploy to various parts of Sheffield with their portable tape recorders and play their experimental compositions in places as diverse as public toilets and on the streets from loudspeakers on the top of a friend's van. This raucous attitude followed the band onstage to great effect; their first live concert in May 1975 ended in a fight between the band and the audience that sent Mallinder to hospital.

As the band began to settle into a more conventional onstage presentation, performing actual songs with identifiable structures, they found themselves frequently opening for bands like Joy Division or TG. This got them enough exposure that they were approached with a few different offers for record contracts. Factory Records had come knocking, and TG had approached them about being on their Industrial Records imprint, where they would actually release a cassette of early works in 1980. But it was Rough Trade who sealed the deal by offering the band a 4 track Revox tape recorder in lieu of an advance.

In 1977, Watson financed the establishment of the band's own recording studio on the second floor of a building called the Western Works on Portobello Street in Sheffield. The "Western Works" studio served as the band's studio for many years as well as providing a social gathering spot for the local Sheffield scene. Western Works produced some of the earliest recordings of pioneering local bands including Clock DVA, The Human League, and New Order.

By the time the group got to the point of recording Mix-Up, their most extreme experiments were somewhat behind them, but what they were creating was far from mainstream, incorporating atonal sounds against their often broken sounding rhythms. Like Kraftwerk before them, their early sound is entirely separate from the slick electronic dance music that would ultimately become their stock-in-trade. But while they retained a sharp experimental edge, there were always clear indications that the group had a funkiness buried in their DNA that was just waiting to come to the fore.

With the release of Mix-Up, the band were met with mostly negative criticism, with their sound being a tough cookie to swallow for most folks. Its brittle distortion and intensity made for some challenging listening, offering punters little respite from its grind and grit. The group's Nag Nag Nag single, released prior to the LP, had managed to sell remarkably well, and despite the overall critical aversion to the group, journalists like Andy Gill still saw their potential. He wrote of the band in the June 27th, 1978, edition of NME, "I firmly believe Cabaret Voltaire will turn out to be one of the most important new bands to achieve wider recognition this year. Wait and see". Subsequently, "Nag Nag Nag" sold 10,000 copies.

Of course, this was just an early chapter in the story of a band that would go through some striking evolutionary changes over the years of its existence, from abstract experimentation to dominating the dance floors of alternative nightclubs throughout the next decade. Connecting those dots may not seem intuitive at first glance, but when you put it all together, it's a fascinating story, one which essentially beings with Mix-Up.

CABARET VOLTAIRE - THE CRACKDOWN @ 40

Celebrating its 40th anniversary today is the fifth studio LP from Industrial music pioneers, Cabaret Voltaire, with The Crackdown being released on August 18th of 1983. It's the album which saw the band take a decisive turn away from overt experimentation and fundamentally lay the cornerstones of what would become known as "EBM" (electronic body music). Its funky electro-grooves became the signposts for bands like Font 242, Front Line Assembly and countless others.

Recorded late in 1982 at Trident Studios, London, England, the band were now paired down to a duo, with Chris Watson having left part-way through the recording of their previous album, 2x45. With Watson's "Musique concrète" contributions now absent, the group leaned more into the latent groovy essence which resided in its remaining members. It was also the era when MIDI based electronic drum machines and sequencers were making their mark on the electronic music scene and the Cabs were on the bleeding edge of incorporating that tightly synchronized syncopation into their music. The wobbly sync of analogue gear was gone and the rhythms subsequently became tough and tense.

The album was produced by the band themselves, along with Mark Ellis (aka, Flood), who would become a stalwart producer in the genre of electronic pop, working with artists like Gary Numan, Depeche Mode, New Order and Orbital, among many others. The result was a genre defining shift from a band which had come from oblique avant-garde obscurity into now setting themselves up to lead a new revolution on the underground dance floors of the UK, Europe and North America. Taylor Swift would never be the same!
 

CABARET VOLTAIR - 2 X 45 @ 40

 

Released in May of 1982, Cabaret Voltaire’s fourth studio album, 2x45, is marking 40 years on the shelf this month. It was the transitional album between their early experimental work and their more dance floor friendly fare which would dominate their career going forward. It also marked a downsizing of the band’s core members from a trio to a duo as Chris Watson left the group half way through its production. The first disc of the set was recorded with Chris at the group’s Sheffield Western Works studio in October of 1981 while the second disc was recorded without Watson at Pluto Studios, Manchester, in February of 1982.

The title for the album is a direct reference to its original format, being a set of two 45 RPM 12” EPs enclosed in a black textured foldout card stock sleeve with Neville Brody graphics concealed on the interior. As the album focuses on a set of long rhythmic tracks, the higher fidelity afforded by the format offered optimum sound quality for the material. Though they were decidedly moving into a funkier groove, the music beyond the beat felt more “jazz” inspired, though still thick with the group’s experimental discordance. They hadn’t quite landed in the “EBM” zone which would define their next LP, The Crackdown, but the remixed single version of Yashar by John Robie would create a direct bridge to that era. For 2x45, however, the rhythms are primarily provided by real drums and the use of electronics is surprisingly limited.

Because the album moved so far outside the “industrial” framework of its predecessor, Red Mecca, and didn’t quite arrive at their eventual EBM destination, it tends to be overlooked by both of the band’s fan camps for their early vs later output. Initial reviews for the album saw it as a lesser success than Red Mecca, but the benefit of hindsight has shown that what the group were doing was still very much outside what anyone else were up to at the time and still on the cutting edge of experimental pop. As such, it remains one of their most idiosyncratic releases.

RICHARD H. KIRK - RIP

 

The unexpected passing of experimental electronic music pioneer, Richard H. Kirk, has got me thinking about how his work has impacted my own personal musical journey through the decades. Not only since I first came across Cabaret Voltaire so long ago, but also because I kept rediscovering him over and over through his solo works released under their innumerable aliases. I first heard Cabs way back in 1981 when a high school buddy and band mate in my first band, Mark, bought a copy of Voice of America. He’d special ordered the album based on a recommendation from his cousin. Mark had sent him a cassette of some demos we’d recorded and he’d told him we sounded a lot like this band from Sheffield in the UK. So Mark ordered the album and, when he eventually picked it up from the shop, we ended up going back to his place to check it out since he had a proper hi-fi stereo system. After our first listen, Mark was a bit ambivalent about the album, but I heard something in it that I instantly took a shining to and offered to buy the record off him. That’s how I acquired my first proper “Industrial” album for my growing little record collection.

Voice of America was an album that clicked with me for a number of reasons, mostly down to the way the drum machines sounded, Mal’s deep bass throb, Chris’ cheesy organ & disorienting tapes and Kirk’s piercing guitar & clarinet stabs. My full-stop favorite record at the time was PiL’s Metal Box (Second Edition), and there was a definite kinship between the two given the atonal, metallic din of CV’s sound. But there was a lot more experimentation going with Cabs than even PiL were up for and that started opening my mind up to all sorts of new possibilities in terms of structure and sounds. Plus the band looked absolutely miserable on the cover with their long black overcoats, frazzled fringes and glowering glares. It was all very appealing to my sense of teenage post-punk angst.

From there, I next encountered some of their singles like Nag Nag Nag, which sounded like this amazing fusion of electronic and punk and showed just how simple you could keep things and still whack out a catchy, furious ditty. Then there was Seconds Too Late, which I heard shortly after moving to the big city and discovering my first underground after-hours warehouse nightclub. This was in early 1983 and I can clearly remember that immense bass sound pulsing through the PA while its ghostly synths drifted over top. Seeing all these wild looking spiky haired Goths dancing away in the dimly lit shadows of this hidden nest of subversion was one of those magical experiences that stays with you for your entire life. I felt like I was in a post apocalyptic sci-fi movie, which was aided by the chemical enhancements that were available at the time. This was soon followed by encountering the single version of Yashar in a more mainstream, legit nightclub. It's a song that would set the template for the group’s metamorphosis into something truly “club friendly”.

Of course, this was the shift into serious dance music with the release of The Crackdown. It became the root DNA for all the electronic dance music which would come to dominate the more hardcore dance clubs throughout the ‘80s. Everything that would become “EBM” or “cyber-punk” was rooted in The Crackdown’s pulsing beats and riveting synth-bass. For me, they did it first, they did it best and they were the godfathers of that sound. That was, however, a bit of a double edged sword. As that style became more codified, popular and ubiquitous (and ultimately cliched), it started to drive me away from Cabaret Voltaire’s subsequent works, though I would continue to delve into their earlier catalogue and fall in love with everything from Mix-Up to Red Mecca to 2x45 and compilations of their early singles and EPs like Eight Crepuscule Tracks, which kicked off with the massively inspirational, Sluggin’ For Jesus.

For the most part, however, the later half of the ‘80s and most of the ‘90s had me leaving Cabs behind and going into the worlds of Chicago Acid House and UK & European electronica. It wasn’t until 1998 that I spotted this CD by Sandoz called “In Dub - Chant to Jah”, that I would chance to cross paths with Kirk again. I didn’t even realize he was behind that project at first and bought the CD purely because I’d seen the name Sandoz associated with Psychic TV and knew that it was an LSD reference. When I got around to looking at the album’s credits, seeing Kirk’s name attached was a most pleasant surprise! The album’s fusion of electronica and reggae made it a frequent listen in my home and I ended up picking up anything I came across with that name on it.

What I didn’t realize was that Kirk had become a shape-shifter and was putting out obscure titles under a plethora of pseudonyms and it wouldn’t be until early in 2020 that I finally sat down and seriously started trying to put all the pieces of that puzzle together. Thanks to Discogs extensive database and cross-referencing tools, I was able to ferret out innumerable side projects, collaborations and one-off gems strewn about from releases issued throughout the last three decades. That got me on a binge of it all since I was able to find a good deal of it on YouTube. There was a wide range of styles to explore from straight up dance techno to ambient to noise to downtempo and everything in between.

This foray into his obscure solo catalogue was preceded by a re-examination of Cabaret Voltaire’s later works after The Crackdown up until their last album before going into hiatus, The Conversation (1994). While some of the more mainstream leaning albums like Code and Groovy, Laidback & Nasty now show a bit of their age since their release, CV’s releases in the 1990s returned to something that now sounds more timeless and hold up well compared to anything released by their contemporaries of that era. The 1992 album, Plasticity, in particular works exceptionally well in the realm of underground electronica.

Finally, in late 2020, Kirk formally revived Cabaret Voltaire with the release of Shadow of Fear. It’s an album that hearkens back to the earlier edgy grooves of albums like Voice of America while bringing it all forward to the 21st century and the zeitgeist of the current times. With the specter of pandemics, war and environmental collapse infusing the music, it has a familiar sense of dread and anxiety while also making you want to tap your toes. It was, as it had been in the beginning, dance music for the end of the world, but now with 45 years of experience and living built into its essence. It was clear that Kirk was still on the edge of the curve and able to create music that was able to build on the past while looking forward and eschewing any sense of nostalgia, a concept Kirk often made clear was anathema to his process.

I suspect there’s a lot of material in Kirk’s vaults which remains unreleased, both in terms of older material and projects that were just completed or nearing completion. I expect we’ll be able to enjoy his works for some time to come, but it’s still very sad to know he was hardly at the point of losing steam in his creative career and that he was cut off while still rolling down the tracks. But one thing is certain. He’s left a mammoth legacy of incredibly varied and influential music that’s had an impact on generations and it will continue to do so for generations to come.

CABARET VOLTAIRE - RED MECCA @ 40

 

Released in September of 1981, Cabaret Voltaire’s third full length studio album, Red Mecca, is celebrating its 40th anniversary this month.

Before becoming dance floor staples in the mid 1980s Industrial/EBM club scene with their breakthrough album, The Crackdown, Cabaret Voltaire were pursuing a strange brand of discordant pseudo-free-jazz funkiness that drifted between fractured syncopated grooves and flat out noise. The pinnacle of that strand of their early career is centered on the Red Mecca album. It’s where they managed find the perfect balance between accessible grooves and atonal dysphoria. While their earlier efforts had their moments of genius, they also had experimental misfires or moments that just came across as merely academically interesting, though not necessarily “enjoyable” or emotionally engaging. Red Mecca offers up a much more consistent collection of tracks that straddle the eccentricities while clinging firmly to the rhythmic core driving the music forward.

Thematically, the group were very much influenced by their recent tour of the US and the looming totalitarianism evident in the American Christian Evangelical movement which formed a counterpoint against the erupting fundamentalism of Islamic states like Afghanistan and Iran. How prophetic is it that, here we are, four decades later, and we’re still witnessing these ideologies thrashing against each other on the world stage with the US even more threatened by religious fundamentalism than ever before. In that sense, the album’s themes have remained just as vital and relevant as ever.

This was the last full album to feature the founding trio of Stephen Mallinder, Richard H. Kirk and Chris Watson. Though Chris would be around for the beginning of the 2x45 sessions, he’d be gone half way through working on that album, which was a record where the first steps towards more conventional dance floor grooves would be emphasized. As such, Red Mecca is the natural end point for the evolution of the band from its early experimental roots to their fullest sophistication within the avant-garde musical arena. It’s an album of spiky beauty and razor sharp charms.

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - THE INDUSTRIAL RECORDS STORY

1984 was the year that I became deeply infatuated with all things Throbbing Gristle. Thanks to a few all night "altered states" listening sessions, my perception of their music and how it was created was completely reconfigured. With this neural rewiring in place, I was able to appreciate aspects of their sound and techniques I was never able to perceive before. But TG were more than just a band, they were the architects of a movement and used their independently operated corporate identity, Industrial Records, to help give other artists exposure and a leg up on getting their products out in the market as well. I wasn't really aware of the full extent of this aspect of their activities until Illuminated Records issued the retrospective compilation album, The Industrial Records Story, in 1984.

The album collected together several singles and a selection of album tracks from the various artists who had been released by Industrial Records in the last few years of its initial phase of activity, ending in 1981. As well as a couple of TG singles, the LP featured Monte Cazazza, The Leather Nun, Robert Rental & Thomas Leer, SPK, Cabaret Voltaire, Elisabeth Welch, Clock DVA, Dorothy & William S. Burroughs. With the exception of Cabaret Voltaire, this album was my initial exposure to pretty much everyone else present. And it was much more than just a collection of "industrial" noise. There was an astonishing variety of music and sound on the album, demonstrating quite clearly the range of interests within the label and the people behind it.

Though the LP kicks off with TG at their most abrasive, blaring forth with the infamous, We Hate You (Little Girls) and then serves up a nightmarish junkie fever dream for Mother's Day from Monte Cazazza, things start to diversify with the dirge of burn victim post-punk from The Leather Nun. Next up is the synth-pop dreaminess of Rental & Leer, but the biggest shifts are saved for the arrival of Elisabeth Welch and her heartbreaking version of Stormy Weather. The single was released because it was used by experimental film maker, Derek Jarman, in his film, The Tempest. Recorded in 1933, the song is a stark contrast to the rest of the album, yet still manages to work in context with its mood of gloom and loss.

The album concludes with a section from William S. Burroughs' album, Nothing Here Now but the Recordings. On its own, this track became my introduction to his works and represented a sample of something which had never been given serious consideration before. It was a concrete example of the "cut-up" theory in its earliest incarnation. The story behind the manifestation of this album is worth an entire book on its own as Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson were the first to be given access to this material by Burroughs, who considered the experiments of no real consequence until he was convinced otherwise by Gen & Sleazy. It was a critical introduction to a vital and expansive technique, easily adaptable to nearly any medium.

The album has never been reissued since its initial release, though all the material contained on it has been reissued separately.