Cabaret Voltaire Go Back to the (Mid 80s) Future
Click on the picture to pre-order the collection
Industrial electronic music pioneers Cabaret Voltaire are to release another collectors’ edition package, this time comprising vinyl, CDs and DVDS including 12 unreleased tracks as well as remastered versions of four of their albums recorded between 1983 and 1985 (click here to pre-order the collection)
#8385 (Collected Works 1983 – 1985) includes newly mastered versions of The Crackdown (1983, on the 30th anniversary of its release), Micro-Phonies (1984), Drinking Gasoline (1985) and The Covenant, The Sword and the Arm of the Lord (1985) with the first seven hundred autographed by Cabs co-founder Richard H Kirk.
Forming in the mid 70s, the self-taught Sheffield experimentalists used cut up pieces of reel to reel tape and cassettes to copy and paste together startlingly original electronic music which became even more leftfield as punk swept Britain.
Signing to Rough Trade in 1978, they released a number of critically adored alternative club hits including ‘Nag Nag Nag’ and ‘Three Mantras’ though as Richard H Kirk recalled in an interview with Skrufff ten years ago, never made any money off the back of their underground credibility.
“When we started Cabaret Voltaire, never in a million years did we think ‘this is going to make us rich or we are going to get signed up to a label’ It was done just because it was fun to do, we were very, very into music,” he recalled.
“Obviously when you are young you don’t really give a fuck and you don’t have bills and mortgages to pay and all this shit that you get landed with later.”
In the same interview he blasted the already parlous state of of mainstream music culture, admitting ‘what I find is that people don’t seem to know anything about the history of anything, anymore.’
“Everything is soundbites, everything is condensed down to the lowest common denominator. That’s kind of worrying, everything seems very disposable. It is a very Warholian world. Old Andy, he was a genius. He saw it all coming,” he said.
He was even more prescient about the Orwellian nature of today’s high tech world.
“The internet is almost perfect for spying on people,” he noted. “That’s why it was invented, because if we get everyone using this it’s very easy to keep tabs on what people are up to.”
http://bit.ly/14RbV99 (click here to pre-order the collection)
Jonty Skrufff: https://twitter.com/djjontyskrufff
