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Really sad to hear of the death of Richard H. Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire fame aged 65. As someone who has family links to Sheffield and did my degree there, and even used to hang around the very cemetery where the Sensoria video was filmed (Meersbrook represent! Well, no-one was there, it was dawn) there are personal and musical reasons why the music of Cabaret Voltaire and the later WARP electronica affected my musical ‘career’ and artistic life.
Earlier music of Cabaret Voltaire reflects the themes of the time especially in industrial and dark wave music – religion, cold war, the state, dystopia – like Do Right from 1984’s Microphonies, one of the tracks I had already earmarked to play on the podcast (UMG allowing cos they were on Virgin and EMI for a while).
Cabaret Voltaire later like many industrial acts moved into the realm of acid, house and techno – like Psychic TV he was an early adopter of acid house as Wicky Wacky – and more famously he went into the burgeoning bleep techno scene in Sheffield as Sweet Exorcist with DJ Parrot.
The various Test Tones are amazing examples of bleep techno, and all worth checking out as the best examples of that time, of IDM generally but that genre. His fingerprints seemed to be everywhere at this point – trance (the original sort, not the German/Dutch reboot), electronica, techno, house….check out the list of aliases on his Wikipedia page! There are too many to list and too many to check out…but I will try to before I do the next podcast.
I know some might kvetch at posting the next one (and risky since we don’t yet know how he died) but ‘Why Kill Time (When You Can Kill Yourself) is my favourite track from my favourite Cabs album, The Crackdown. There is a darkness in their music that some ignore and head for the house-inspired later tracks; but the idea of this is if you are wasting time, why are you here? I remember Pete who was or maybe still is a guitarist in industrial bands explaining it to me at art school.
It’s a really dark paean that actually has a positive hidden message, like a goth stealth inspirational meme – and a track that I hold very dear to my heart.
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