Or: the origins of a sound
It all began in 1972 in red Sheffield, the industrial steel hub of the United Kingdom, when for a group of teenagers, the natural antidote to boredom became gathering to share their passions: writers like Burroughs, Gysin, Ballard; American garage music, glam, the soundtracks of Walter (Wendy) Carlos, the Barron brothers and Leonard Rosenman, records of the new German rock (Can, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream), sci-fi TV series like Dr.Who. Among their great common passions was also the Dada art movement, loved because it represented a break from the past, so much loved that the group of kids named themselves after the Zurich venue that hosted the first provocative performances by Dadaists: Cabaret Voltaire.
By the first few months of 1974, the group had reduced to a trio: the eighteen-year-olds Richard H. Kirk, Stephen Mallinder, and Chris Watson would meet a couple of times a week in the attic of Watson's house to create music solely for personal pleasure, without any ambition to publish it. Armed with second-hand or homemade musical instruments, the trio recorded dozens of tracks for nearly five years before belatedly debuting on record in 1978 with "Extended Play," published by the London label Rough Trade. For a long time, the pieces remained unreleased until Mute, with Kirk's collaboration, released a selected part of them in a three-CD box set released in 2003.
DISC 1: 1974-1975
Despite the lack of means and experience, already in their first sound testimonies, the Cabs demonstrated a certain mastery of instruments and a good dose of creativity: the tracks "Treated Guitar," "Treated Clarinet," and "Treated Drum Machine" are little more than sound checks in which what would become the trademark of future CV starts to emerge, namely the manipulation and distortion of classical instruments; particularly the guitar and clarinet, loaded with delay and reverb effects, would become distinctive traits of their sound and would be imitated by many groups to come. "Exhaust" is instead a cover of avant-garde musician Jan-Yves Bosseur: a voice passed through a vocoder mechanically repeats the title while synthetic wind blows in the background: too simple, banal one might say, yet it is a terribly disturbing piece that already encapsulates a bleak and black-and-white vision of things. Naiveties can be heard in "Jet Passing Over" (nothing more than the sound of a modulated jet) or in "The Single," a sort of distorted 50s silly song, the "Synthi AKS Piece" No.1 and No.2 reminiscent of science fiction soundtracks, "Sad Synth" is more meditative electronics in line with German Cosmica. "Possibility of a Bum Trip," "Jack Stereo Unit," and "Speed Kills" are experiments of radio frequencies and spoken voices, to be honest, a bit sterile even though they have a certain vintage charm. What strikes more though is "Space Patrol," a very short synthetic track that already has the urgency and brashness of punk a few years ahead, the same can be said for the slightly slower but heavier and menacing "Makes Your Mouth Go Funny," which is already a preview of industrial music right in the year that saw the birth of Throbbing Gristle. In "Jive," instead, there are the harbingers of the android funk that will appear several times in their official discography.
DISC 2: 1975-1976
Despite still being resistant to the idea of publishing anything, the boys' desire to amaze led them to debut live in a disco in 1975 by selling themselves to the organizers as a traditional rock band. The audience's response (who probably expected something like Deep Purple) is not the best and would culminate in a brawl with Mallinder hospitalized with a chipped spine. Despite the experience, the Cabs in this period do not make their music more physical to increase its live appeal; on the contrary, the recorded tracks are longer and more ambient and make extensive use of noises, manipulated voices, and frequencies vaguely reminiscent of Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète ("Data Processing Instructions," "Calling Moscow," "Henderson Reversed Piece Two," "Bed Time Stories"). Here too are more "cinematic" works with grim ambient tracks that wouldn't have been out of place in some B-series sci-fi horror (the "Dream Sequence" Number Two and Number Three, "The Attic Tapes"). The only testimonials of what we would now call Industrial music are found in the triptych placed at the closing of the CD: the disturbed techno-synth of "Loves In Vein," the early version of what would be the "famous" "Do The Mussolini (Headkick)," and the rhythmic bombardment of "She's Black part.2," tracks that more than any other predict where the trio's musical direction will go. The overall atmosphere, in any case, is murky, blurred, sometimes gloomy and is the characteristic that now unites all the tracks.
DISC 3: 1977-1978
CD mostly dedicated to early versions of tracks that would see the light on record. Punk explodes, and with it the awareness of the concepts "do it yourself" and "everyone can do it," which to be honest had always been present in the minds of our guys. Always fascinated by the impact of sixties garage music, they suddenly find themselves at ease with the basic telluric nature of the new youthful music, recording their most "rock" tracks: thus, the early version of "No Escape", a cover (rather faithful in structure but distorted in sound) by the Americans The Seeds emerges, and the ultra lo-fi punk anthem of "Nag Nag Nag," where they unleash all their arsenal of filters and distortions, making the sound of Crass seem convoluted. The cover of "Here She Comes Now" by Velvet Underground is instead completely overturned, turned into a monstrous alien funeral, so dark and oppressive that it makes the original by Lou Reed & Co. seem like a merry strumming among friends. "The Set Up," despite its originality, is instead the most orthodox guitar track in its own way catchy, with splendid minor reverberated riffs that imprint themselves indelibly in the listener's mind. "Do the Mussolini (Head Kick)," another of their little classics inspired by the desecration of the Italian dictator's corpse, instead sounds like a goofy mechanical ballet without anything suggesting something dramatic or macabre; here also emerges one of the main expressive styles of the Sheffield group, that of taking fragments from reality (in this case a historical event) and remasticating and vomiting it blurred, distorted, deformed: practically the same manipulation work they technically performed on the instruments. Also part of this reinterpretation/deformation of reality is "Baader Meinhof," inspired by the "suicides" of the German RAF terrorist group, a nightmare made of voices from beyond the grave and filtered clarinet laments. Worth a mention is also "Oh Roger," an example of a more ambient track but not relaxing, where everything sounds distant, lost in the void of large spaces, giving a sense of disorientation that will always be present in their works.
The sound of Cabaret Voltaire is now mature, in November 1978 they will debut in short format with a seminal EP before quickly releasing fundamentally important works such as "Mix Up," "The Voice of America," "Red Mecca," and "2x45," which will enter the history of electronics and music as a whole, acting as the missing link between the Krautrock of the '70s and the Techno of the '90s.
Tracklist
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