Born of the literal industrial decrepitude of Sheffield in 1973, and initially composed of Stephen Mallinder, Richard H. Kirk, and Chris Watson, Cabaret Voltaire named their influences and objectives in their appropriation of the name of the Zürich nightclub that was ground zero and home to the Dada movement of the early 20th century. Cabaret Voltaire's initial work, much in the way of the concurrent theatrical-music explorations of Throbbing Gristle and COUM Transmissions, generated new hybrid forms consisting of experimentation with self-constructed crude electronics and tape recorders in settings and theatrical situations inspired by Dada and performance art. Alongside a growing body of contemporaries, released on British labels like Some Bizarre, Mute, Rough Trade and Throbbing Gristle's own Industrial Records these sounds intersected at the epicenter the UK's cross-pollination of performance, sound, visual art, theater and cultural-political action. Generated by the contextual cultural moment of Thatcher's England, alongside protests from the labor class and the rise of underground Queer politics, the music of this scene produced a corpus of varied interpretations of the industrial aesthetic and ethos that could be heard in the music of Test Dept., Coil, Psychic TV, Whitehouse and Nurse With Wound. As an overarching document, no better representation of this decade's cultural continuum of outsider industrial music in the United Kingdom exists than David Keenan's "England's Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground".
Biba Kopf, for decades the foremost contributor to The Wire on the deep underground, industrial, experimental, neopagan, gothic folk, dub, dancehall, punk, post-glam and wave scenes and man on the ground chronicler of the post-punk underground in the UK, wrote for the Grey Area of Mute catalog on Cabaret Voltaire's central, and essential, position within this cultural moment. "'We will not allow any dancing...' In the brief respite after punk's first rush wore off and before Saturday Night Disco Fever properly set in, a number of groups, among them Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, The Pop Group, and 23 Skidoo, emerged from the shadows to occupy the middle ground. Though their tenure was mostly kept deliberately short, their impact was profound. In Cabaret Voltaire's case, their early training as media guerillas vested them with the mobility to slip in and out of the mainstream earshot almost at will. Filtering influences as diverse as Stockhausen, Can, early Roxy Music, Velvet Underground and James Brown through various tape and electronic devices, they have in turn infiltrated all manner of heresies and subversions into the often conservative territory of dance music. On first exposure their bombardments were relentless and unending. But anyone left standing came to realize their dissonances were more than just dirt in the ear. Aside from the immense, invigorating pleasures of their transgressive noises, Cabaret Voltaire bravely forced new ways of listening." This month, in a rare stateside appearance at Seattle's The Moore Theatre, Cabaret Voltaire invite domestic audiences to experience their array of new ways of listening on their final US tour alongside I Speak Machine.
