Tickets £3
Doors open 12pm, session starts 12 12:30pm
This show is for a seated audience.
The bar will be open throughout.

The session will be curated by Neil Turnbull.
The album playback will be followed by a Q&A session.

After a short break, we’ll follow the album with our usual ‘Dead Wax’ session.

Bring along a vinyl disc of your choice and hear a track from it played through the Arts Centre PA. This can be anything you like, for any reason – the more ‘out there’ the better.

“This is Fun!!!!”

So declares Stephen Mallinder in his sinister monotone over the intense rhythms of `This Is Entertainment’. “Fun” this album certainly is not. `The Voice Of America’ is dark, unsettling, challenging music that showcases Cabaret Voltaire’s industrial roots.

In July 1980 Cabaret Voltaire, initially composed of Stephen Mallinder, Richard H. Kirk, and Chris Watson, released their second studio album ‘The Voice Of America’ following their 1979 ‘Mix-Up’ LP. Influenced by the Dada movement, which is where they got their name, Cabaret Voltaire once again display their craftsmanship of magnetic tape manipulations and how noisy, abrasive, and unpleasant an album can be.

The album is sometimes seen as a companion piece to ‘Mix-Up’, and it’s true that this is still very much old-school Industrial music: relentless drum-machine rhythms, extensive sampling, squally chopped-up guitar and keyboard lines, out-of-nowhere distorted vocals, everything fed through manipulated tape loops to twist it out of all recognition. But ‘The Voice Of America’ is more focussed than ‘Mix-Up’, with tighter and more propulsive rhythms and slightly more conventional song structures. And while it is just as ambitious as ‘Mix Up’ musically, the experiments here are more consistently successful and interesting, with nearly every track being distinctive and memorable.

There’s not much here to suggest that Cabaret Voltaire would become dance pioneers in the mid 80’s. But because it is a leaner, tighter album than ‘Mix-Up’, it is a bit more accessible, so for casual fan curious as to what the Cabs did in the early days, this might be a good place to start. And of course if you already love old-school experimental sounds and Industrial music in general, this one is essential.