Cabaret Voltaire
Mix-Up

THE REVIEW

Cabaret Voltaire: futuristic pioneers of electronics from Sheffield (UK).

“To launch a manifesto one must want: A, B, C, throw invectives against 1, 2, 3, get excited and sharpen the wings to conquer and spread big and small a, b, c, sign, shout, blaspheme, impress one's prose with the accent of absolute, irrefutable banality, demonstrate one's non-plus-ultra and maintain that novelty resembles life as much as the latest appearance of a cocotte demonstrates the essence of God.”
(from the "Manifesto of Dadaism" of 1918, by Tristan Tzara)

We are in 1973. England is the usual rainy monotony. Fog. Layers of fog. A neo-grey sky. A perfect poetic, sick, industrial scenario. Stephen Mallinder (bass and vocals), Richard H. Kirk (guitar) and Chris Watson (sound manipulation) invent one of the most interesting pages in the music encyclopedia: the one titled "Cabaret Voltaire".

A collective born “from boredom, from the lack of future, from the need to create problems”. Objective? To reproduce the urban "melodies" of modern Sheffield, still scarred by bombs and rubble, in a sound context made of synths, winds, tape recorders, rhythm generators. "Mix Up": 1979. The revolution had begun. “Kirlian Photograph” starts: a "song" fully played on distorted winds, a disturbed bass that presses on for five minutes and fifty-two seconds leaving little respite in this claustrophobic scenario. Just like in the Seeds' cover, “No Escape” and its metallic clangs that anticipate the minimal drums of the Jesus And Mary Chain. Songs that retrace the tracks of the most hallucinated Velvet Underground, like “Fourth Shot”: an ideal line of conjunction between an amplified and distorted "Heroin" and "The Gift" passing through "Maggot Death" by London's Throbbing Gristle.

The paranoid trip “Expect Nothing” is a dark psychedelia that owes much to the Pink Floyd of “Breathe In The Air” and the atmospheres of “Ummagumma”. Not forgetting the Van Der Graaf Generator. Dreamlike winds and percussions that follow one another creating an obsessive and twisted rhythmic base. Voices, noises, onomatopoeia snatched from the street or mass media are reworked to become music bases, loops, samples. Sound “Cut-up” in power. Dadaism and “ready-made” in music. With this record, the three university students from Sheffield were positioning themselves to become the dividing line between the electronics of Kraftwerk, Neu, Einsturzende Neubaten and the avant-garde experiments of Suicide, of which an example is "“Photophobia”: an ideal continuation of “Frankie Teardrop”. The same delirious, rhythmically accelerated and decelerated pentagram. A rough surface on which muffled percussions and terrifying echoes pulsate. A thriller scenario, an ideal soundtrack for an eighties splatter like "Poltergeist". But the real gem of this record, the one that paves the way for "Cabaret Voltaire" to become undisputed prophets of electronics, is "“Heaven And Hell”: mad machines, electronically filtered and manipulated voices, robotic and distressing nightmares. The concluding “Capsules” is a mixture of industrial poetry, dark wave and, once again, robotic and visionary dance.

A universe populated by mutants, videotapes, and circular saws seems to have taken over this vinyl obsession.