Cabaret Voltaire - 1974 - 1976 Mp3

An essential if you enjoy true early industrial music. For those who came to the The Cabs as fans of their more danceable recordings, this might not be the one for you. I suppose you could dance to it, but you might get hurt.

I like to spin this album up when I need to get work done. The Cabs had a way of putting sound together to create an all encompassing atmosphere. Like a big noisy blanket that wraps me up in a state of perfect mental focus. 1974-1976 and Methodology are two of their finest in this regard.

When you aren't interested in getting work done, get on a crowded freeway at high speed with all the windows down and the volume cranked. The whole "industrial" sound reaches perfection. It's the original trance music.

Important as a historical artifact, no doubt, but there is a lot of noodling and experimentation. It sounds like CV were recording things just to see what they sounded like when they played the tape back.

Definitively odd though they may have been, this is left field even for Cabaret Voltaire. Eerie, prolonged soundscapes, tripped-out musique concrète, and demented proto-rock experiments comprise this collection, many similar in sonic texture, characterised by tape machine graininess and strange noise; Sometimes these sounds are quite disturbing, as on the surreal, unsettling "Venusian Animals" and the Beatles deconstruction "She Loved You".

Other times the music simply broods, or goes utterly mad, a great example being the Throbbing Gristle-esque spoken word "A Sunday Afternoon in Biot", which predates "Very Friendly" by a year. Occasionally, the music is light-hearted, even goofy, such as "Oorseal" with its backwards-sounding catchphrase, or the brilliantly gratuitous dance parody "Do the Snake", with all three members joining in on the vocal fun.

Also notable is the opener, "The Dada Man", a found-sound jumble which sounds surprisingly hi-fi, although it may well be the oldest piece here.

Now this is creepy. You would really need a darkened room to appreciate this, all tape loops and primitive synths.
This sounds like the sort of stuff that the BBC put on Doctor Who as background music in the 60's and 70's (but ten times longer). There is some speech on A night in Biot, Do the snake and She Loved You. The rest are instrumental and range from Radiophonic style squeals to the outer limits ambient style noise tones.

A real eerie gem. 4/5