Cabaret Voltaire

Cabaret Voltaire, founded in Zurich in 1916 by theatre director Hugo Ball, was the cradle of Dadaism, a movement that broke with and renewed traditional artistic logic. Almost sixty years later, in Sheffield, England, three university students obsessed with punk, funk and electronics dreamed of retracing the experiments of the Zurich Dada pioneers on the musical stave. 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 subsequent evolution of industrial music.

At the crossroads of avant-garde futurism and pop, Cabaret Voltaire carved out a significant space within the emerging industrial scene alongside Throbbing Gristle and Clock Dva. Their arrival on the LP format with "Mix-Up" (1979) marks one of the most dazzling debuts of the new wave era. A sort of claustrophobic video game, an electroshock set to music, the album is a blend of funk and electronics disrupted by bursts of noise, hiss, metallic voices, drones, mangled horns, clanging and obsessive pulsations. All filtered through an experimental, dark and visionary sensibility. A sound that drags the listener into a chaotic spiral, continually pulling them in and pushing them away from the 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, alongside exotic sonorities drawn mainly from Asian sources. The use of sound cut-up techniques also recurs throughout: samples of sound, noise and voices stolen from the street or the mass media are treated to create sonic and rhythmic beds through looping. The settings are worthy of a metropolitan 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 shivers, shocks and trance states. It's the record that allowed Cabaret Voltaire to win over international critics and achieve a fair degree of commercial success, evidenced by its long stay in the UK independent charts.

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27/10/2006