There is so much beauty mixed in with the ugliness, rivers of awe and solace swirled in with all the angular features of hell. There is grace in industrial rigidity, elegance in these roughened, blackened edges. There is beauty in the music of Cabaret Voltaire.
Music can be dangerous. When you open up an album, you also (unavoidably) open up yourself to the contents that lurk inside, exposed to anything and everything that crawls out of those speakers. There’s no way to map out the chasm without willingly falling in head first. If you continuously subject yourself to to an artistic artifact that is by some measure perverse, and enjoy doing so, you will eventually alter yourself in ways that are not entirely un-perverse in their own right. This is the gamble. his is the price of being an aesthete. This is why the music of Cabaret Voltaire is one big grim joke. You have to let them screw with you if you want to reap the pleasure cooked up in their post-punk experiments. But, fuck, it is so worth it.
As FACT report, seminal electronic label Mute is set to reissue a bulk of Cabaret Voltaire material, beginning with arguably their greatest achievement, Red Mecca, on July 22. Red Mecca’s re-release will be followed by #8385 (Collected Works 1983-1985), a collection that will include The Crackdown, Micro-Phonies, Drinking Gasoline, and The Covenant, The Sword, And The Arm Of The Lord. An even larger collection, #7885 (Electro Punk to Techno Pop 1978-1985), is scheduled for a 2014 release.
Don’t forget… in fact, go ahead and set your PalmPilot’s calender now for a July 22 alarm, as you don’t want to miss out on a chance to snag a fresh, minty, tasty, sexually arousing copy of the Red Mecca reissue. Better yet, lock that shit down now and preorder it here.
• Cabaret Voltaire: http://shop.cabaret-voltaire.net
• Mute: http://mute.com
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