Cabaret Voltaire - Industrial dada

Cabaret Voltaire, founded in Zurich in 1916 by theatre director Hugo Ball together with a group of German artists, was the cradle of Dadaism, a movement that broke with and renewed traditional artistic logic. The Cabaret hosted exhibitions of Russian and French art, dance performances, poetry readings, and performances of African music. Provocative, irreverent shows that turned into genuine cultural "events".

Almost sixty years later, in Sheffield, England, three university students with a passion for punk, funk and electronics dreamed of retracing, in musical terms, the experiments of the Dadaist pioneers of Zurich. They were Stephen Mallinder (bass/vocals), Richard H. Kirk (guitar) and Chris Watson (tape manipulation). In 1973 the three founded Cabaret Voltaire, a band destined to leave a deep mark on the entire evolution of industrial music to come.

The trio's goal was to capture in music the urban landscape of Sheffield thirty years after the war, still scarred by the bombing and by decades of urban neglect. You could say Cabaret Voltaire are to Sheffield what Joy Division are to Manchester. "Our project," Richard H. Kirk recalls, "came out of boredom, out of having no future, and out of the need to cause trouble." In their early performances, the trio took the stage with synths, rhythm generators, horns, and sounds recorded and manipulated on tape-recorders. Standing at the crossroads of avant-garde futurism and pop, these performances earned Cabaret Voltaire a significant place within the emerging industrial scene alongside Throbbing Gristle and Clock Dva. The trio's early demos fused electronics, funk, punk, psychedelia and world music, pushing the "alienating" qualities of each to the fore. Their experiments with synthesizers (pioneered by Kraftwerk, Schulze and Neu!) combined with the sprawling psychedelia of early Pink Floyd and with exotic sounds, largely drawn from Asian music. Evidence of this can be heard on the single "Nag Nag Nag", the "distorted" cover of the Velvet Underground's "Here She Comes Now", and the EP Extended Play.

Riding the wave of success enjoyed by the "noise"-driven new wave spearheaded by Throbbing Gristle, the Sheffield band landed a deal with Rough Trade, who released the trilogy made up of Mix-Up (1979), Voice Of America (1980) and Red Mecca (1981).

Their arrival on the album format with Mix-Up (1978) marks one of the most dazzling debuts of the entire new wave era.

A kind of claustrophobic video game, an electroshock set to music, the album is, precisely, a blend of funk and electronic music, disrupted by bursts of noise, hiss, metallic voices, drones, mangled horns, clangs and obsessive pulses. All of it filtered through an experimental, dark, visionary sensibility. A sound that drags the listener into a chaotic spiral, continually pulling them in and pushing them away from its centre, in a kind of perverse game.

Across the nine tracks of Mix-Up, the synthesizer experiments of the German school (Kraftwerk, Schulze and Neu!) combine with the jittery electronics of Suicide and Throbbing Gristle, and with exotic sounds, largely drawn from Asian music. Also recurring is the use of sound cut-up techniques: samples of sound, noise, and voices lifted from the street or the mass media are treated to create sonic and rhythmic backing tracks through loops. The settings are worthy of an urban sci-fi thriller: a "day after" scenario populated only by crazed machines and replicant robots.

The opening is already a masterpiece thanks to the relentless "Kirlian Photograph", built on obsessive percussion and a simple bassline, over which noises and synthesized sounds are layered, while the voice remains in the background, electronically treated and filtered. If "Fourth Shot" echoes the most morbid atmospheres of Velvet Underground, with its solemn, "black mantra" gait, no less chilling is the minimal electronics of tracks such as "Heaven And Hell" and "Expect Nothing": ghostly filtered vocals, obsessive percussion, atmospheric synths and a chaos of reverb. The suspense of "Photophobia", meanwhile, is built almost entirely on the spoken vocal, worthy of a dying man's death throes (do you remember "Frankie Teardrop"?). The cover of the Seeds' "No Escape" is so claustrophobic that it materializes one of Suicide's most chilling nightmares. And it's crazed machines that seem to have taken over the sound by the closing "Capsules".

An original hybrid of industrial music, dark-punk and atmospheric dance, Mix-Up is an alienating journey into the human psyche, a succession of chills, shocks and trance states. It's the record that allowed Cabaret Voltaire to win over international critics and also achieve a fair degree of commercial success, as shown by its long run on the UK independent charts.

In 1979 the Sheffield trio released their first live album, Live At The Y.M.C.A., which captures the fascinating impact of their performances and includes several tracks already released as singles, among them "Nag Nag Nag" and a cover of the Velvet Underground's "Here She Comes Now".

The following EP, Three Mantras (1980), marked the band's first foray into non-Western musical structures: Arabic vocalizations and Indian sonorities entered their sound, symbolically uniting Asia and Europe under the banner of the "mantra" ("Western Mantra", "Eastern Mantra").

Right after the release of "1974-1976" on Industrial Records, the label run by Throbbing Gristle and one of the most prominent cult labels of the entire underground music scene of the last thirty-five years, and a year on from their overwhelming debut, the three sound-deconstructionists Kirk, Mallinder and Watson - who had deliberately thrown the Cabaret Voltaire myth into the suffocating cauldron of the "industrial revolution" - offered further, valuable confirmation of their experimental attitude with their second album, The Voice Of America, once again released by London's Rough Trade (whose love affair with the band would end two years later with the release of "Hail! Live In Japan", before the move to Some Bizzarre and Watson's departure from Voltaire, as he went on to found Hafler Trio with Andrew McKenzie in 1983).

The relentless presence of rudimentary collages on both covers of The Voice Of America and in the inner booklet isn't merely a nod to (genuine) punk aesthetics and the "Do It Yourself" philosophy that defines it, but also reflects the compositional approach of the album itself, largely built on the use of tape samples of various kinds, with the aim of generating a cut-up of sounds and noises in full Burroughs style (Cabaret Voltaire were among the first to use this technique to create wholly unusual analogue sounds as well), not to mention the subtle cinematic reference to the paranoid atmospheres of "The Conversation", Francis Ford Coppola's celebrated 1974 film starring a memorable Gene Hackman.

This idea is fully realized in the mysterious, brooding title track, where the recorded voice of a policeman giving instructions to a riot squad is paired with stripped-down drums, Mallinder's dubbed-out bass and Watson's sound manipulations; Mallinder's altered voice (which enters after a good three minutes) acts as the (un)natural counterpoint to Kirk's narcotic guitar.

"Partially Submerged" is unsettling from its title alone. The abrasive Gristle-esque trademark is easily recognizable, and the relentless tape manipulation gives rise to a nauseating, dark mantra. "Kneel To The Boss" initially seems like a "pop" listen, thanks to its frivolous opening of synth and electronic percussion, but that impression is promptly overturned by the dragging vocal and the relentless rhythm, which leaves the mind in a hypnotic state.

The stench of the oppressive electro-industrial produced by Watson's filthy sonorities and the martial, snarled vocals make the fourth track the real "Premonition" to which that lo-fi, electronic-based tendency from across the Atlantic - born and developed between the 80s and 90s, and hopelessly relapsed into mannerism in more recent years - owes a constant debt. "This Is Entertainment" boasts an alienated intro that rides the same wave as Chrome's "Alien Soundtracks" and stretches out across all six minutes of its runtime. Then comes "If The Shadows Could March? (1974)", a brief, cramped drone interlude notable for being the oldest track on the whole album.

The warning repeated in "Stay Out Of It", with its recorded voices, acidly sixties guitar and synth mimicking a lopsided accordion, projects us into atmospheres steeped in noir dreamlike surrealism - the antechamber to the sinister "Obsession", a lethal blend of funky bass, piercing electronic incursions and analogue manipulations that heighten the overall sense of paranoia, the fil rouge running through the entire album.

The final rush comes in the shape of "News From Nowhere" and "Messages Received". The first is a cacophonous explosion in which Mallinder's slowed-down voice and Kirk's delirious horn playing fall perfectly in line with Haydn Boyes-Weston's powerful drumming, while the second is a less convulsive, more phlegmatic "Nag Nag Nag", partly drained of its relentless fury, with a decidedly abrupt ending.

In the wake of the hurricane that was Mix-Up, Cabaret Voltaire enviably steered their musical theatre towards almost cinematic horizons, making their unhealthy sonorities even more recognizable, and in doing so rose to the role of undisputed avant-garde pioneers within the dark-punk, industrial and electronic currents.

Even more incisive is the EP 3 Crepuscule Tracks (1981), a transitional work between their "art-noise" beginnings and their subsequent, more "danceable" course: standing out is "Sluggin' fer Jesus (Part One)", which rails against reactionary televangelists to a dance rhythm, with a hypnotic synthesizer lurking in the background.

But it's with the album Red Mecca (1981) that Cabaret Voltaire recapture the truest sense of their "mission". The three industrial guerrillas from Sheffield unleash a violent, abrasive work that echoes the sonic disfigurements of Chrome, while at the same time ramping up the dance pulse. Their music veers towards less hallucinated, less avant-garde forms of electronics, arriving at a more polished, rhythmic sound that takes shape in a song-form, albeit an "alienated" one.

Over a monotonous, relentless rhythmic backdrop, a continuous stream of sonic events unfolds, amid clattering guitars, synthetic melodies and metallic clangs. What emerges is a kind of electro-industrial for dark discotheques, sublimated in tracks like "Red Mask", "Sly Doubt" and "A Touch Of Evil" (a cover of Henry Mancini's theme for Orson Welles's film of the same name).

The double EP 2 x 45 (1982) moves towards a more acoustic rock sound, introducing instruments like saxophone and clarinet, with interesting episodes such as the obsessive "Protection", the Eastern-tinged raga of "Yashar" and the metallic funk of "Get Out Of My Face". The record marks Chris Watson's departure from the group: at odds with Kirk and Mallinder over the direction to take, he chose to devote himself to the Hafler Trio project. Johnny YesNo is the soundtrack to a film by Peter Care, while the live project Pressure Company sees the band standing alongside the Solidarnosc trade union, a key player in the "Polish revolution".

In 1983 the remaining duo signed with Some Bizzare and collaborated with Dave Ball (formerly of Soft Cell). Their style inevitably changed, moving away from the electronic industrial of their beginnings and ever closer to dance. Crackdown (1983) is the finest result of this new direction, featuring evocative, "dark" tracks like the title track, "24-24" and "Just Fascination", which boasts a particularly catchy pop melody. Once again ahead of their time, Cabaret Voltaire forged a kind of industrial-funk (that is, funk-rooted music contaminated by electronics, early sampling and dance) that would pave the way for the multitude of house and techno acts of the Nineties. At the same time, however, the synthetic polyrhythms of Crackdown offer a first glimpse of the techno-pop that would grow increasingly formulaic on subsequent records, before finally being abandoned at the end of the Eighties with the arrival of house music.

The follow-up Micro-Phonies pushes the rhythms even further, brushing against pure techno on the singles “Sensoria” and “James Brown”. The Covenant, The Sword And The Arm Of The Lord (1985), named after an American neo-Nazi organization, completes the Bizzarre trilogy, marking a further slide towards easy-listening dance music: “I Want You”, “Motion Rotation” and “Kickback” have many fans crying “betrayal”.

This leaning towards catchy electro-disco also surfaces on the 1986 Ep Drain Train (especially on “The Whole Thing” and “Electro-Motive”) and on the following album, Code, made in 1987 for Emi in collaboration with Bill Laswell and Adrian Sherwood. Stuffed with bland melodies and devoid of any experimental intent, the record marks the lowest point of the downward arc begun with Micro-Phonies. The singles pulled from it, “Don't argue” and “Here to Go”, also prove to be flops.

Having filed away this “second phase” of their career with little honour, Cabaret Voltaire find themselves three years later in Chicago, where, alongside house music guru Marshall Jefferson, they conceive the project for their new record. It's the start of the “third phase”: the house phase. Groovy Laidback and Nasty comes out in 1990 and largely just recycles the very house stereotypes Cabaret Voltaire had once pioneered. The disco-soul of “Searchin'”, the rap (!) of “Runaway” and the dated synth-pop of “Keep On” make little impression. If anything, it's the more “classic” “Easy Life” and “Magic” (entirely instrumental) that redeem the album, which nonetheless turns out to be one of their biggest successes, thanks mainly to the single “Hypnotized”.

1991 brings the Ep Colours, a kind of sonic puzzle documenting their production process, swiftly followed by Body And Soul (1991), on which the band abandons traditional instruments to make room for electronic keyboards alone.

Between 1992 and 1994 a new trilogy comes out on the Instinct label, veering decisively towards ambient-house, in the vein of Aphex Twin, Orb and Autechre. The first instalment, Plasticity (1992), almost entirely instrumental, mostly echoes the electronic minimalism of Kraftwerk (“Inside The Electronic Revolution”), while also winking at ambient and new age (“Deep Time”, “Soul Vine”). The following International Language (1993), once again purely instrumental, retreats into easy-listening electronics (“Everything Is True”, “Radical Chic”, “Afterglow”). 1994's Conversation closes the trilogy with the long Schulze-style suite “Project 80”.

From 1994 onwards, Cabaret Voltaire effectively cease to exist: Kirk carries on as a solo artist, also devoting himself to the side projects Sandoz and Electronic Eye, while Mallinder moves to Australia.

The classic period of Cabaret Voltaire would be summed up in the anthology The Golden Moments (1987). The Living Legends (1990) collects the singles released up to that point. Listen Up (1990) gathers unreleased tracks and rarities from the early period. The Original Sound Of Sheffield '78/'82 (2002) instead celebrates the group's first phase of activity, which ended in 1982 with their split from Rough Trade. Also worth noting are the collaborations with Clock Dva, “Box” and “Antigroup”.

Richard Harold Kirk revived the Cabaret Voltaire name in 2014 for a series of live shows. It all started again with a performance at Berlin Atonal. In 2020, a new album finally arrived under the Cabaret Voltaire name, made by Kirk alone, Shadow Of Fear (2020). It's a work that stands as the logical continuation of forty-five years of research in electronic music. This isn't a nostalgic comeback but a new incarnation of a musician who, even in his solo career, has given us incredible albums like Disposable Half-Truths, Black Jesus Voice and Virtual State, not to mention his many works under various aliases (Sandoz, Electronic Eye, Agents With False Memories, Al Jabr etc.).

“Be Free” and “The Power (Of Their Knowledge)” are probably the tracks that will make old fans of the industrial group happy. While crafting a less rough and raw sound, all the electric paranoia of early Cabaret Voltaire comes through, from Mix-Up to Voice Of America. If, back in the late Seventies, one could already glimpse the nosedive of modern industrial society in its skeletons of abandoned factories and mines, today one looks out onto other urban and social wastelands. “Night Of The Giacal”, on the other hand, aims for bleep-techno shores reminiscent of Warp's early output. “Microscopic Flesh Fragment” reworks part of the live session recorded for Berlin Atonal. Here, and on the following track, “Papa Nine Zero Delta United”, the English artist explores the more experimental dub side of Cabaret Voltaire, recalling a little of “Yasar” and the murky atmospheres of Red Mecca, an electro-dub cut-up, full of sudden slowdowns and forward surges.

“Universal Energy”, too, is a track already aired live at Berlin Atonal, a long techno-industrial suite that, together with the following “Vasto”, confirms, if there were still any need to, that Kirk is also one of the undisputed fathers of techno. “What's Goin' On” closes the album with an electro-funk track recalling the soundtrack to “Johnny Yesno” made by Cabaret Voltaire in 1983, the last work to feature Watson.

In short, the album weaves together the experience of Cabaret Voltaire with Kirk's solo output, giving space to the various artistic phases of a true pioneer of electronic music. At the same time, Shadow Of Fear sounds like a contemporary record, paranoid and fitting for the dark times we live in, yet charged with energy and a drive to move beyond the shadows of fear, beyond the barriers. A kind of musical vaccine for surviving a society that increasingly recalls the books of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.

“We never really had commercial success,” says Richard H. Kirk, “but some of our ideas did spread and influenced quite a few people, even in the visual arts.” It's hard to argue with him. Pioneers of industrial rock, forerunners of techno, visionary avant-gardists of pop, Cabaret Voltaire are one of the most influential acts of the British new wave. Their noise-based insights kickstarted the entire industrial scene (from Ministry to Nine Inch Nails), while their dance polyrhythms were the launchpad for excellent synth-pop bands like Depeche Mode and New Order.

Contributions by Marco De Baptistis (“Shadow Of Fear”)

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