Cloth Ear - 一 (yī) (2026)

 

I assume this to be the work of Peter Hope, it having been hustled forth by Wrong Revolution, but I'm otherwise mostly in the dark given the lack of information on either cover or Bandcamp page. It could be the first album from his milkman for all I know, but let's assume it's the man himself, being consistent with Hope's sonic aesthetic which allows for noise, distortion, and things occasionally sounding like they were captured on a mono-portable tape recorder in 1974 - allows for without it being the entire point such as you tend to find with young bearded men who curate things involving 'vinyls' in coffee bars. Instruments feature, or at least there's a guitar providing scraping noises, meandering bass notes on some kind of primitive synth, percussive sounds which are probably cardboard boxes and bits of wood, and everything dominated by a delay, possibly a WEM Copycat by the sound of it. It chugs, whines, hisses, screams, drifts from place to place, and what we lack in anything you'd call a tune or even a groove is compensated by the slow repeat and decay through a dirty echo box; so it becomes hypnotic and absorbing fairly soon. I don't detect any significant element of nostalgia, but the mains hum, technology, and general mood hark back to those brief seven or eight months before anyone described anything as industrial, and all we had were rehearsal tapes of Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Deviation Social and hardly anyone else; and we didn't really know what the hell it was except that we liked it. The repetition of the delay is what makes sense of this material as something powerfully musical and after a few plays you begin to anticipate certain sounds and noises just as you'd anticipate the chorus of something more obviously structured.

It wasn't that I didn't have expectations of this album but I didn't have any idea what it was, relying on the House of Hope to come through with the goods as usual; as indeed it has, and this may even be my favourite Wrong Revolution release, or at least it's up there with the best.

Mysterious Kitchens (1980)

 

More recently reissued on CD by Klang Galerie, Mysterious Kitchens was a Terse Tapes compilation cassette from way back in the depths of the Precambrian. Terse Tapes, as you will doubtless recall, was the Australian organ from which the mighty Severed Heads didst squirt forth. Featured artists include Pissy Relay Switches, the Nobodies, Wet Taxis, Mr + Mrs No Smoking Sign, Lamington Lady, Holiday Funn, and Mindless Delta Children amongst others. As you may have guessed from the fameproofing of the names in combination with this being a cassette from 1980, what we have are weird noises recorded on cheap equipment by a subs bench of about ten persons working in various combinations under different names. Mr + Mrs No Smoking Sign may be vaguely familiar as an early incarnation of the Severed Heads, which it is, although Tom Ellard and Garry Bradbury are each involved with half of the other named artists on Mysterious Kitchens so it's six of one, half dozen of the other, and Pissy Relay Switches actually sound closer to Clean or Ear Bitten. Standouts include the Nobodies, seemingly the only act failing to share its membership with anyone else from what I can tell, who fall marginally closer in sound to early Cabaret Voltaire or Devo, for want of a better comparison; also Garry Bradbury's Wet Taxis who notably managed something of a career beyond this compilation. Primitive rhythm boxes, cheap keyboards, tape loops, hiss, and one effects pedal between the lot of them accounts for the sound, generally speaking, although there's plenty of variation, with Tom Ellard's involvement betrayed by his luxurious Pre-Raphaelite melodies which sound gorgeous even when recorded on what may as well be one of those little plastic records you used to find in the back of your talking Action Man.

One for the kids there.

Mysterious Kitchens is rough as fuck but has a joyous peculiarity that elevates it way above the standard photocopied industrial collections of its day - closer in spirit to the Residents and their like than any of the Gristle bunch; and honestly it's a lot more fun and interesting than many of its more technologically adept successors.

Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction (1997)

 

I've generally given anything involving Al Jourgensen a medium to wide berth, my knee-jerk impression having been formed by his seemingly recording and releasing everything he does without any sort of filter whatsoever under a million different effortfully contentious personas, too many collaborations with famous friends, generally trying too hard to be a metal goblin and pulling scary faces at the camera while challenging us with philosophical conundrums on the level of going to church is shit RRRAAAARRRRGH!!! Life is too short for that much pantomime badassery.

Yet I have to admit that what he does well, he does very well - those Revolting Cocks singles, Acid Horse with Cabaret Voltaire, and of course Lard. I've heard a couple of Ministry albums, even owned one of them for about three days. All I recall is grunting and growling, everything jammed on eleven, and samples of evangelical types asking for money. It sounded like a parody, plus it's now 2026 and I'm bored thoroughly shitless with persons younger than myself* who really need to know whether or not this record is properly industrial so they can add it to their stupid fucking list. Well, Lard is 25% punk due to the involvement of Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys who were a punk band, and 75% industrial because of Al and the gang, so that's interesting isn't it, you fucking suckers.

I could listen to Biafra all day long. He cuts straight to the bone of the bullshit which makes our lives that much worse, and he's very, very funny, and that weird warble isn't like anything else in the pantheon; and so his involvement fills the bandwidth which, were it anything other than Lard, Al would probably have stuffed full of something annoying, or at least annoying to me. This allows me a greater opportunity to enjoy what Al and his pals actually do well. It's metal of some description, tight as fuck and paradoxically no fat, chopped into sharp edged steel blocks with swarf and grease all over the place, coming off the belt at twice any speed recommended by health and safety standards. The effect is akin to being stood on a traffic island with the constant vehicular roar forming an ocean of automotive noise for an hour, while Jello bounces around like the Mr. Rogers of hard, uncomfortable truths yodelling clues as to what you might like to think about should you ever get off the island alive.

I'm sure Al is one of the good guys but I really wish I liked a few of the others as much as I like this one.

*: Which is now admittedly nearly everyone.

British Murder Boys - Active Agents and House Boys (2024)

I still don't know a whole lot about this pair. They turned up in Wesley Doyle's book about the Some Bizarre label with some frequency yet without actually having been on the label so far as I could tell, and that seemed like a recommendation. They're from Birmingham and what physical records they release tend to sell out before you're even aware of them - so I've been lucky on this occasion.

It's old school acid or possibly techno in so much as that you could slip any one of these tracks onto a compilation in between Maurice Joshua and Lidell Townsell and I doubt anyone would notice; which is because, aside from the obvious Rolandisms, this music, like that of the acid pioneers, resists the formula which eventually took over, instead building a similar intense mood - not one which immediately suggests smiley tees and glo-sticks, it has to be said. The clue is probably in the name.

British Murder Boys, at least on the strength of this one, are distinguished by pounding overdriven tom and the tempo wacked up just a few notches beyond what is probably healthy, creating a sort of euphoric coronary effect. It's just a bit too fast, just a little too dark and claustrophobic, and that's why it's great. Sequences buzz away behind the pounding, with half-heard howls echoing into an endless decay which seems to fulfil the promise that Cabaret Voltaire failed to deliver when they turned smooth house around the time of Hypnotised. Very tasty.

Portion Control - Step Forward (1984)

I can't help but feel that Portion Control have been unfairly sidelined over the years. Certainly they've had their successes, exposure, toured with big names and so on, but still the impression seems to persist of Portion Control as one of those other Wild Planet bands who never quite got where they were going. You may have heard something by them on a compilation, but nobody knows who bought the records.

Apparently it was me.

The legend of the name deriving from all three of them working in the canteen at the Houses of Parliament seems to have been a myth, but never mind. If I Staggered Mentally - as sterling a debut album as you could wish to hear - owed something to Cabaret Voltaire, Step Forward seems to have consolidated their sound into something unique, or which was at least unique for as long as it took for all those other bands to rip it off. I'm not sure there was really anything quite like Step Forward at the time, or at least I don't recall it being so. Front 242 had a more glacial edge, Depeche Mode were still in their Teletubbies phase, and Portion Control sounded like no-one else - hooligans with sequencers, and drum machines which recreated the feeling of having one's head kicked in; and the magnificent Dean Piavanni, a man who sounded like he'd just been in a fight every time he stepped up to the microphone—occasionally like he was still having one. Of course, their hard rhythmic electronics became an entire genre in another couple of years, but this seems to be where it started, and thankfully with a band who weren't scared of the occasional tune.

With hindsight, Step Forward sounds almost squeaky clean compared to the subsequently dreadlocked aggrotech cyberwarriors selling this back to us as a Mad Max soundtrack; but there's more to mood than just speed and distortion, and I'm pretty sure this lot were all reading 2000AD comic like good lads, so some of the populism rubbed off with them along with the imagery, and certainly the wit. But for the occasional invocation of cyborgs kicking the shit out of each other in some mutant wasteland, Portion Control were essentially a punk band which is why they rock. Play it loud is almost always a compensatory serving suggestion offered by those who couldn't quite get there and hope you'll mistake volume for power, whereas Portion Control were always loud, regardless of the decibels. Also, they seem to be the only band whose orchestral stabs somehow still sound startling and upsetting three decades later.

Stephen Mallinder - Tick Tick Tick (2022)

I'm almost not sure what to say about this one. He's been at it for nearly five decades, yet continues to put out first class albums which build on what has gone before without sounding like a retread - always breaking new ground; and Tick Tick Tick substantially develops even on Um Dada from 2019. We're back with smooth electric disco, for want of a better term, but where previous efforts with Wrangler and Cabaret Voltaire have been, if not quite dark, certainly tinged with paranoia, Tick Tick Tick sounds kind of happy. Of course, the equipment used brings with it trace elements of acid, techno, handbag house, hardbag, or whatever the fuck they were calling it that year, but more than anything it puts me in mind of some of the weirder extended disco workouts from the likes of the Gap Band and others. Should it even need stating, it seems fair to say that the James Brown influence really wasn't just something with which to freak out all those conservative punk rockers and industrial music trainspotters. Hush seems to be the standout track with its haunting sample of what sounds like a wonky old tape of something orchestral, but it's very much a close run race. If all music was this good we'd be fucked because you'd never know what to listen to next; and talking of matters next, if whatever follows improves on this, I really won't know what to say and may have to resort to expressive dance.

What a time to be alive!

Second Layer - World of Rubber (1981)

Here's another reminder for my kicking myself at having somehow missed the Sound during that year when they were at their peak and probably would have displaced Joy Division and the usual bunch as soundtrack to my entire existence, had I actually been aware of them. Second Layer were either forerunners to the Sound or a side project, depending on which bit of internet you're looking at. I had some misgivings about this reissue of a partially unknown quantity, not least the titles hinting at the sort of thing I'd rather not discover about what my potential heroes got up to in their own time, because unless you're Soft Cell, culturally Belgian, or the version of Adam & the Ants which hadn't yet got around to recording Dirk Wears White Sox, you're probably going to sound like a twat. Thankfully, whatever that World of Rubber may have been, it doesn't seem to involve Adrian Borland breathing heavily, so far as I can tell - and lyrically he was always very direct and not prone to anything ghastly smuggled across the sexual border as a metaphor.

Second Layer were more or less the Sound stripped right down to just bass, angular guitar, and primitive drum machine fed through a bunch of pedals - something inhabiting the same sonic ballpark as Métal Urbain and the first couple of Cabaret Voltaire albums but with Borland's characteristically anthemic touch - which you might not think likely to work in such a setting, but it really does and as such sits well alongside the first couple of albums by the Sound as a slightly moodier cousin. This CD reissue ends with Skylon, a track previously unreleased from a related project of breezier disposition providing powerful contrast to the thoroughly bleak Black Flowers, the original closing number. The more Borland I hear, the more I wonder why the Sound's reputation never came anywhere close to matching the quality of their music, because surely it can't all come down to Korova Records spunking away their entire budget on Echo and the sodding Bunnymen, can it? Given Borland's tragic passing in 1999, it may be a bit late to even ask the question, but should anyone be inclined to do so, this reissue serves as further testimony to the power of his distinctive and yet overlooked voice.

Beautiful Pea Green Boat - Get Religion (1988)

If Third Mind Records have endured to any extent in the collective musical memory, I've an unfortunate feeling it's probably as - ugh - old school industrial pioneers, as young people who know more than the rest of us are wont to put it, thanks to the undeniably seminal Rising from the Red Sand and status as a footnote in the saga of Front Line Assembly - apparently. Having actually been there at the time - and even painted a couple of the record covers for that matter - I can confidently state that this is complete bollocks, and nothing underscores the back catalogue's resistance to silly labels quite like Beautiful Pea Green Boat.

At the time, Third Mind seemed cut from approximately similar cloth to Some Bizarre (who weren't fucking industrial either), not least because they seemed to have booked all the Wild Planet people which Some Bizarre should have bagged - Nurse With Wound, Konstruktivists, Attrition and so on; but right from the off it was obvious that Gary Levermore simply intended to release great music regardless of how industrial or otherwise it might be deemed, and there was a point at which his main focus very much seemed to be Beautiful Pea Green Boat. He sent me a stack of records for services rendered or something, amongst which was an early Front Line Assembly release that I liked, but thought it sounded like a Cabaret Voltaire knock off - mostly grunting and sequencers. Get Religion, on the other hand, was clearly the prize of the litter. With hindsight it probably sounds very eighties, but at the time it seemed like the newest thing we'd ever heard. I'd already encountered sampled orchestral stabs and the synth pulse of New York high energy disco but never quite like this, and never with the same depth of feeling as the most heart wrenching sixties soul. The key to their power seemed to be in the contrast of Ian Williams' state of the art technical overload - at least as of 1988 - with Heather Wright's sweet, almost folksy voice. I'd say imagine a combination of the Pet Shop Boys and the Cocteau Twins, but as comparisons it captures nothing of the tumult or drama of their music which, in spirit, is almost Byronic.

Third Mind was a pretty great label while it lasted with more than its fair share of classics, of which Get Religion was possibly the finest. They really should have been fucking massive.

Campbell / Mallinder / Benge - Clinker (2021)

I've been listening to a lot of Cabaret Voltaire since the death of Richard H. Kirk, and because I'm a pedant who becomes physically aroused at the mere thought of things arranged in alphabetical or chronological sequence, I started with 1974-76, working my way through, one album at a time and incorporating the singles so as to get some sort of overview of their progression. Interestingly enough - at least to me - there were a few surprises, not least being that The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord isn't anything like so great as I remember; and there were even a few revelations - patterns I wouldn't have noticed from listening to an individual record. Most blatant was how little they ever truly owed to rock music, which I state having once regarded Mix-Up as essentially a much weirder take on the Velvet Underground; and conversely how much they owed to black music, James Brown, soul and so on. The influence was never hidden, and was expressed most vividly in Cabaret Voltaire's propensity for extended beat driven jams - grooves rather than songs; but it's easy to get lost in all of the weirdy effects and treated percussion and to lose sight of this element, and of how fundamental it always was to their sound.

Clinker isn't Cabaret Voltaire, but it continues the journey through the presence of one of their number, reaffirming the vision through collaboration with parallel travellers. As with the Wrangler albums, the sound is quite dry, relatively clean compared to Mallinder's previous group, with effects used sparingly, allowing the analogue electronic sound to breath. Julie Campbell's unashamedly funky guitar serves as a perfect complement to the electronics yielding what is essentially a disco record in a reasonably traditional sense but for the absence of backing singers - and by disco I mean that warm sound with the congas and glitterballs, yet remaining awkward and left-field, and without sounding like a retread - imagine Marshall Hain's Dancing in the City stepped up a few beats and with androids as much welcome on the dance floor as anyone else.

It would be unfair to single out Mallinder as uniquely responsible for how great this record is - particularly given the presence of the other two and that the overall sound is much closer to Campbell's Lonelady than to anything of Mal's previous bunch, but for a man with a back catalogue extending into three figures, this may be one of the best things with which he's ever been involved.

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Stimmung (1968)

I'm not entirely sure how I'd heard of Stockhausen back in May 1982, but I assume his name may have come up in something written about Throbbing Gristle. I had a couple of their albums but had only just begun to dip toes in such waters and was still to hear what Cabaret Voltaire sounded like - for example. Anyway, I found this at my local record library and vaguely recall being disappointed that it didn't sound anything like as electronic as I'd hoped although there was nevertheless something fascinating about it. Then a couple of years later, having left school and signed up for beer studies at Maidstone College of Art, I was lucky enough to see Stimmung performed at the Barbican as part of their Stockhausen week. That was January, 1985.

Meanwhile, back in the present day, I've discovered another used record store in San Antonio, one called Crazy Rhythm which I'd passed many times, but never as it was open. When a random break in my usual routine deposited me outside Crazy Rhythm during its opening hours, I went in and immediately noticed that one of the racks was marked avant-garde classical, and I noticed this because I always look for that section in whichever used record store I happen to enter but never find it. I always look for that section because it's not quite familiar territory for me and is therefore likely to yield surprises; and accordingly the first record I encountered as I began to browse was Stimmung - same Deutsche Grammophon edition, even the same cover as the one I'd borrowed from the library in Stratford-upon-Avon nearly forty years ago. It was ten dollars and is in wonderful condition, so I also picked up Stockhausen's Gruppen and Carré while I was there. It was all I could do to keep from giving the cashier a big old Frenchie. Stimmung isn't quite where it all started for me, but it's pretty close.

It's a lengthy piece, over seventy minutes and sounding clear as a bell on this single album - somewhat calling into question recent boutique vinyl reissues expanding supposed classics to six fucking sides of a triple album in ten minute helpings. It's also entirely choral, having been scored for six vocalists, hence my being disappointed that it didn't sound more like Second Annual Report back in 1982; and at least one of those vocalists - specifically Wolfgang Fromme - is one of the people I saw on stage back in '85. Stimmung is mostly vocalisation with words, phrases and names - mostly of mythological figures - here and there for the sake of punctuation. It's scored but with some leeway for the performers to react and improvise within the whole. Perhaps what takes the most getting used to, is how much Stimmung relies on vocalisations amounting to the sort of weird noises we probably all made as children when left to our own devices, weewah and oyoyoy and that sort of thing, which aren't the sort of sounds one expects to hear on a record, being mostly too peculiar to work as anything cool or emotive in the conventional sense; so I suppose one might term it sound poetry, or at least acknowledge that Stimmung is a relative of the same. However, the harmony of Stimmung is strong, generating a semi-hypnotic drone within which the more unorthodox vocalisations become texture, weaving together so well as to distract from this even being a vocal performance; and over seventy minutes, the cumulative effect is emotionally very powerful.

Most surprising of all is how well Stimmung has lasted. If it has a strong sense of the sort of post-Dada theatrical experimentation one associates with the sixties, it nevertheless sounds fresh, like something new and unfamiliar experienced for the first time.

Stockhausen remains an approximately controversial figure. Referring to the events of September the eleventh, 2001 as the biggest work of art there has ever been probably wasn't the greatest career move, and Cornelius Cardew famously denounced him as a tool of capitalism - which might have carried more weight had the same not taken to wearing a flat cap and affecting a Lancashire accent so as to be down with the mans dem - but fuck it, on the strength of his work, Karlheinz really was a visionary and probably a genius, if that term actually means anything.

Cabaret Voltaire - Chance Versus Causality (1979)

The unfortunate passing of Richard H. Kirk has, somewhat predictably, resulted in my listening to quite a lot of Cabaret Voltaire of late; and this one has stood out partially because it didn't make much of an impression at first, sounding as it does somewhat basic in contrast to The Voice of America to which it was approximately contemporary, but also because it doesn't really sound like anything else from their back catalogue - although I should probably add that I haven't heard that boxed set comprising a million CDs worth of out-takes and the like.

As you possibly know, Chance Versus Causality is the soundtrack to an experimental film by Babeth Mondini, improvised live by the lads without actually seeing the film. It's very much the opposite of multilayered, often with just a single weird atonal noise occupying the stereo field for some time and very little that's conspicuously musical - snatches of heavily treated guitar being employed for effect rather than in pursuit of anything melodic which therefore may as well be a hoover or something. Edits are often abrupt and incongruous, as is the dry insertion of taped dialogue played both forwards and backwards, amounting to something which suggests the early days of experimental film without the benefit of a visual dimension - unless you're sat looking at the cover. It works through application of the unexpected, through contrast, and through what may well have been a concerted effort to avoid the conventionally musical, arguably placing it more in the realm of Pierre Schaeffer and, I suppose, maybe Stan Brakhage, than even Gristle's After Cease to Exist soundtrack which sounds positively Ennio Morricone by comparison. It's crude, effective, and still sounds surprising after all this time and the more technically sophisticated efforts we've heard since; and, despite the minimalism, it's immediately identifiable as the work of Cabaret Voltaire.

I've seen them written off as overrated in recent years, and I disagree. As a group who worked with semi-improvised grooves rather than anything more obviously structured it's inevitable that some albums were more convincing than others, and the live albums tend to fall under the category of things which probably sounded better if you were there; but even their most chugging pieces never sounded like anyone else, retaining so strong an identity as to render most tribute acts sounding so derivative as to be pointless - although both Portion Control and Bourbonese Qualk admittedly found their own respective voices by the time it came to sticking a record out; and when they got it right, which was a lot of the time, they were genuinely astonishing, and I'd argue moreso than, in particular, even Gristle, through a reluctance to rely on shock effect for its own sake. I'm still not convinced that Chance Versus Causality is the lost classic described by most of the reviews I've seen, but it's a good indication of what made them so special and why we're still listening to this stuff four decades later.

Wrangler - A Situation (2020)

It's unfortunately difficult to discuss Wrangler without at least thinking about Cabaret Voltaire, which seems potentially insulting to the two of them who aren't Stephen Mallinder; although for what it's worth, Mallinder's vocals and what he does with them are pretty distinctive, pretty difficult to mistake for those of anyone else, which is impressive given that his lyrics are more like serving suggestions, loaded images delivered in the same couple of bluesy notes which have seen him so well through these past four or five decades. He doesn't do a whole lot in terms of vocal acrobatics, but he's never needed to.

Musically, Wrangler feel like an outgrowth of Cabaret Voltaire, specifically from the shock of the clean sound where sequencers and electric pings replaced fuzzed guitar and flanged clarinet; and, of course, it's also a factor that what we have here are extended grooves rather than songs in the traditional sense.

Nevertheless, three albums in and Wrangler is beginning to feel very much its own entity regardless of historical detail. I'm told they use only analogue equipment, or at least analogue synths. I don't know whether this is true, or to what extent, and there are at least a couple of vocal burps which sounded somewhat sampled to me, but it feels organic, a jazzy groove which just happens to come out in bleeps, bloops and acid squelch. In fact, A Situation is funky in terms which Cabaret Voltaire never quite managed, despite the house phase, like an Asimov rewrite of the Gap Band and the like. The odd thing, at least at first, is how this one seems so much less immediate than the previous two, which is down, I suppose, to its ten tracks taking the form of tight rhythmic jams more than anything too reliant on hooks or a chorus; but three or four plays and it's tugging at your sleeve, pulling you out onto the dance floor, and no-one is going home just yet. I know it's not all Mallinder, but nevertheless it's hard not to marvel at the man and his career, that he should be involved in something of such magnificence some forty years since Voice of America and Mix-Up. I'm beginning to think we should consider an annual National Stephen Mallinder Day.

Severed Heads - Clean (1981)

I'd heard of the Severed Heads, but they were mostly just an amusing name until I chanced upon a copy of Rotund for Success for mere quids at Greenwich Market. I took it home, played it, and by the end of the week had tracked down every last Severed Heads record I was able to find, then spent the next year playing them all to death. I'm not sure there was ever another band for which I fell quite so hard, so suddenly, and those records don't seem to have lost any of their power. Listening to Come Visit the Big Bigot now, thirty years later, still gives me a bit of a funny turn. Yet weirdly, I was somehow unaware of their having released anything much before Since the Accident and had always assumed Blubberknife to be the only thing of note. In fact, up until a couple of weeks ago I hadn't realised that Since the Accident wasn't even their first album; and it turns out that neither was Clean, it being the second. Thank fuck for reissues.

I had reservations, believing the earlier Heads to be mostly the stuff with the tape loops, as heard on Clifford Darling, Please Don't Live in the Past and the aforementioned Blubberknife; and the looped material is certainly interesting, even powerful, but for me, it was always the tunes. Clean has therefore been a bit of a revelation given that I expected noise, or at least something of a racket. Actually it is something of a racket, but a racket with drum machines, rhythm, mood, and those twinkly sequenced melodies which no-one ever did quite like Tom Ellard. Another revelation, one which came to me just this morning, has been that everything I ever liked about the music of the Severed Heads is shared by, of all things, John Barry's Persuaders theme; so if you somehow never heard them, even though we're now two decades into the next century along, the Severed Heads are the Persuaders theme in the mind of an eighties computer, or possibly a watercolour impression of the same, images blurring as the rain begins to fall and a lovely lady artist in a floppy hat enjoys her Cadbury's Flake which, I rather think you'll find, tastes like no chocolate ever tasted before.

That last sentence exists because it's otherwise difficult to describe the full emotional impact of Tom Ellard's greatest work - and actually most of it is great.

Clean - which is now expanded to a double with a shitload of bonus material, because that's how it tends to work these days - is a formative, rudimentary, slightly raw sounding version of that greatness dating from before our man built up the confidence to vocalise, and before these things began to sound like songs or lullabies or anthems. At this point, Severed Heads were approximately the antipodean Cabaret Voltaire, spreading their invocations of the sublime across extended grooves formed from elements which hadn't always started life as music. It's a little like Since the Accident on a reduced budget, except without my implication of it necessarily lacking anything which it needed to work. It wasn't the full ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which was to come, but we were very much heading in that direction.

Peter Hope & David Harrow - Sufferhead 85/13 (2020)

Here's a couple of EPs originally released by Hope and Harrow in 1985 and 2013, now reissued as a single album; which works surprisingly well despite the three decade gap between the original sessions, with five tracks per side adding up to a nice and tidy album length. The 1985 material sounds very much of its time and geography - which isn't a criticism - very much birthed from the same milieu as Hula and digital-era Cabaret Voltaire with hard gated beatbox rhythms pulled out of shape by horns, tapes, even some metal bashing, then formed into something fierce and bluesy by Hope's powerful voice, yielding, I suppose, sound pieces as much as songs, like short, moody films lacking only their visual component. It's quite harsh, almost not quite musical, and yet there's a kind of funky tension keeping everything tight, keeping it all from springing out of shape. Think Tackhead pushed further, twitchy and sleep deprived.

I tend to listen to a lot of music first thing in the morning while doing things around the house, washing dishes, wrestling cats, cleaning up shite and so on; which has begun to feel a little awkward since my wife's company decided, in their finite wisdom, that they could make a great saving by having her work from home while hiring out the office space to someone else. She isn't too happy about the arrangement, which means I'm additionally a little self-conscious about my morning soundtrack, given her arguably more traditional musical tastes. As she has made clear, I'm quite welcome to listen to what she refers to as that pipe banging music, but I nevertheless feel a bit uncomfortable about blasting her with DDAA or Headyello first thing.

Getting back around to the point, I sensed funny looks coming in my direction when I played the aforementioned 1985 material, although Mrs. Bricklaying seemed to acclimate to it after the first couple of days. More surprising, at least to me, was how much she seemed to enjoy the second side of the record, the material from 2013, even asking who was responsible and what the tracks were called. Side two maintains the mood but otherwise slows everything to the pace of a comedown with intricately woven sequencers dominating, and less of a temper. We're still on the short, moody films, but now they feel like film noir, mysteries half seen from a rain soaked doorway.

Internet research reveals David Harrow as having worked with Jah Wobble, Adrian Sherwood, and others already resident on my shelves, which makes a lot of sense given the sonic territory he inhabits; and his soundtracks provide a perfect complement to Hope's image-heavy narrative. I realise I seem to have gotten into the knee-jerk habit of unquestioningly buying everything issued by these two on the strength of name alone - limited run vinyl, CDRs, lathe cut things and what have you - but they deliver every time so it seems justified, and I'm already looking forward to the Revbjelde album.

Mrs. Dink - Diabolique (2019)

Having dedicated myself to the arguably pointless task of writing about music and the attendant construction of statements such as sounds like Pink Floyd in short trousers if Gordon Ramsey had been in the original line up, Mrs. Dink's Diabolique presented me with a dilemma, namely that I initially had no idea what to say about it beyond yeah, this is really amazing, which would seem a bit bland as reviews go. Then, just this morning, it came to me by virtue of my listening to this album immediately after giving Cabaret Voltaire's Seconds Too Late a spin; and it came to me because I can now hear what sets Diabolique apart from others of its kind. I could tell it was something special, but couldn't quite put a finger on what was different.

It's techno and an absolute banger, as the internet's Gary Goblins points out on Bandcamp; so we're talking sequencers, squelches, samples, filters, four to the floor beats, and bass that gets you right in the colon, but otherwise it feels unusually organic with sounds and melodies which come and go like absent-minded thoughts. Much like Seconds Too Late, it doesn't feel programmed and somehow gives the impression that much of what it's doing is in the bits you can't quite hear, like techno at a right angle to the sort of thing with which we're maybe more familiar; plus there's a sort of eastern feel without it necessarily being anything you can put your finger on, nothing obvious. I suppose - to follow this train of thought - it's like the point at which the machines start talking to themselves, except it turns out that they're saying something quite unlike whatever we tried to predict.

To translate the above into English, yeah, this is really amazing, you can move your arse to it, and Classy as Shit - as vocalised by the ever wonderful Peter Hope is an instant classic, although not the only one here by a long shot. The law of diminishing returns suggests that by this point of its evolution, techno probably should have devolved into a squelching noise heard on the soundtrack of trailers for televised sporting events, but instead has flowered into something which almost eludes description and which apparently lives on Jupiter. Additionally, this one is a benefit for the Lambert House, a charitable establishment providing resources for LGBTQ yoots in this age of witch hunts and angry shitheads; so Diabolique speaks well for the future of the human race in more than just one respect. We need more like Mrs. Dink.

Purchase ye this minstrelry yonder.

Depeche Mode - Spirits in the Forest (2019)

'If there was a movie about them,' observed my friend Nick, 'they'd be running round the corner to escape the police in Basildon, and then be in a massive stadium with heroin addictions in the next frame.'

Surprisingly, there is a movie about them, and although Nick was off the mark where the plot is concerned, I nevertheless feel his comment expresses some deeper truth fairly well.

I recall Depeche Mode from way back, at least since they first started turning up in the pages of Sounds.

Ollie who worked in Discovery Records in Stratford referred to them as Depeche Toad, which was amusing; and Photographic on the Some Bizarre Album seemed like a fairly decent impersonation of Cabaret Voltaire, albeit without any of the funny noises which made Cabaret Voltaire interesting; and yet somehow there was a pervasive wholesome quality about them, something guileless, something a bit youth club with synths set up on the ping-pong table. This quality, whatever it was, lingered, rendering subsequent transgressions inherently comical, deeds effortfully undertaken as part of a futile effort to shake off the image, like kids with their first ciggies, lighting the wrong end and taking theatrical drags as though cameras might be running; and then there was the time they found those special sex clothes in that box at the back of dad's wardrobe, and then with the tatts and the arm candy...

I'm sure it was all real, but nevertheless, that's how it looked to me, and how it still looks despite everything. Even a few legitimately great songs - Two Minute Warning, Never Let Me Down Again, Enjoy the Silence, and probably a couple of others - can't quite shift the stench of pop, crisps, and jumpers knitted by your nan, which I propose even whilst holding that Dave Gahan is blessed with a genuinely powerful voice. I'm not even sure what it is - the ballsachingly appalling lyrics, Martin Gore's hair - which doubtless ensured that his dinner money never once saw the inside of the school canteen cash register, the plinky-plonky quality of certain songs, or something else, some emergent property resulting from a combination of indelibly wholesome factors.

Still, it was a free ticket for a film showing for one night only, so I wasn't going to say no, despite my reservations. I anticipated a documentary accounting for their transformation from Herman's Hermits into SPK and then ultimately into U2, but thankfully it was better than that. Spirits in the Forest has six Depeche Mode fans from across the globe tell their stories, interspersed with footage of a predictably massive concert in Berlin. It works because the fans, or at least these fans, are more interesting than the band, so they may as well be Lieutenant Pigeon obsessives for all the difference it makes; and I particularly enjoyed the story of DMK, a tribute act featuring a father and his two kids playing Depeche Mode covers on toy instruments. Actually, I think I liked them more than I liked the main feature.

The live footage, which punctuates the progress of our six fans as we follow them to the gig, fails to shed any light on the mystery of Depeche Mode, at least for me. What subtle qualities their less comical songs may have is lost once blasted out on a scale more suited to some Laibach parody, and Martin Gore standing around like a lemon with a guitar fails to make much difference to anything, and then we come to Dave Gahan, now a troubling hybrid of David Niven and John Waters whose face is too big for his head. His arms and legs are similarly too long for his body, which his weird Jagger impersonations only accentuate meaning that he now vaguely resembles one of those things from Ice Age. I don't understand why you would go to see this band, or why you would go to see them in a stadium the size of the Grand Canyon; but then I found it nevertheless watchable with a couple of decent tunes, despite it being Depeche Mode, so if that's your bag, I've no doubt that Spirits in the Forest must seem amazing.

Stephen Mallinder - Um Dada (2019)

I wasn't really expecting a whole lot of this one, having been somewhat inundated with newly unearthed Cabaret Voltaire material of late; but bloody hell - it may even be the best thing he's ever had a hand in. His previous solo album was Pow Wow, a couple of decades back which, although it sounds so different in terms of instrumentation as to have been recorded by someone else, somehow feels similar. Actually that's probably a redundant observation given that Um Dada similarly shares common ground with the very best Cabaret Voltaire material in being extended grooves rather than songs; and while there's always been a funky element, this time it verges on nu disco. Benge is involved in some capacity, which may - I suppose - be significant in how this relates to the last couple of Wrangler releases with that same popping analogue bop underpinning the beats like nothing so much as a distant descendant of Jack the Groove - which isn't a comparison I make lightly.

Um Dada is seven tracks of electric disco-house perfection and stands as contender for album of the year, possibly the century, and possibly also Mallinder's entire back catalogue. I'm told Cabaret Voltaire still exist as Richard H. Kirk's solo thing due to his having taken a bit of a funny turn in recent times; so I don't know what he's been up to in Mallinder's absence, but it would have to be pretty fucking skippy to come close to this one.

I'm not sure I've heard a stack of bleeping, blooping machines ever sound quite so human or organic as what we have here.

Cabaret Voltaire - 1974-76 (2019)

I realise this one has been around for yonks but I've only just heard it. I missed out on the Industrial Records version by a couple of months, and was never tempted by any of the CD reissues because they all seem to have been reissued at the same time as five million other things, representing a tidal wave of rarities, and I didn't feel like taking a second job just for the sake of keeping up with all that Grey Area stuff. Now, however, it's been issued on vinyl as is only right and proper, so here we are.

Pleasingly, this material is somewhat less rudimentary than I imagined it would be, based on Is That Me (Finding Someone at the Door Again?), the b-side of Nag Nag Nag dating from the same era. Nevertheless, the music is fairly rudimentary, recorded on a domestic reel to reel - it says here - therefore possibly not even a four track; electronic rhythm is provided by one of those lounge boxes with five or six settings, samba, bossanova and so on; instrumentation is sparse, everything on the cheap, with a few rudimentary effects filling in. In other words, they did as much as they could with whatever was available, so it's somewhat noodly, like very early Gristle without the arts council funding - swooping sine waves, clangs, bleeps, and farts - but it's very atmospheric, and pretty impressive for something recorded around the same time as Diamond Dogs. Most peculiar of all is that 1974-76 seems more like a forerunner to the moods and loops of The Voice of America than to the velvet distortion of Mix-Up, their first album proper.

Oddities of particular interest include Do the Snake and She Loves You. Snake is what you used to get when suburban whitey rendered his low-fi interpretation of disco music safe in the knowledge that no-one outside the band would ever hear the thing, stilted and self-conscious exhortations to get on down and so on - we've all been there, I'm sure; and if you listen closely you will notice that She Loves You is actually a cover of the Beatles song, with all of its moptopped screamarama pared down to something weird and paranoid which sounds as though it was recorded inside a cupboard, which may well have been the case. Elsewhere on these two discs, you will find nothing obvious or overstated - as has generally been true of Cabaret Voltaire's work - and neither is there any padding, anything which could have been shed for the sake of brevity. As always, the strength of this band are elements which emerge and which remain difficult to pin down, never anything flung directly in your face; and even if it's a little basic in places, this collection holds its own in relation to the likes of Voice of America, Red Mecca, Microphonies or any of the others.

Stex - Spiritual Dance (1992)

There was a point about halfway through the eighties at which it seemed like Some Bizarre were the only label of substance and I'd never need to bother with anyone else's records ever again. It seemed as though pop music had stopped being a wanker, or was at least doing something kind of interesting; and then the Smiths came along to restore order, to calm the fears of those who foresaw the extinction of proper music made by white blokes with guitars and a love of the jangly sixties, like we knew before all those - well, you know, can't say no names or nuffink but name me one good reggae song, yeah?

Then Cabaret Voltaire were suddenly on Parlophone, The The were similarly elsewhere, Psychic TV failed to be anything like as interesting as promised, and Stevo's thing had seemingly vanished off the map. Excepting a vaguely recalled clip of something trading as Blowzabella on some youth TV show, it had all gone quiet. I suppose it may be significant that this apparent disappearance probably coincided with my giving up on music papers, but I don't know, and the subsequent history of Some Bizarre is a strange and obscure tale populated by artists you've never heard of - Monkey Farm Frankenstein and others.

That said, I'm not sure I'd actually heard of Stex, but Johnny Marr of the aforementioned Smiths plays on this record so I assume it will have been paid at least some attention, even if I was looking in the wrong direction at the time; and I assume from the scarcity of posthumous information on the internet (a realm wherein one may learn even the birth dates and respective shoe sizes of all three members of Naffi Sandwich if you look hard enough) that they're probably still owed at least fourteen of their allotted fifteen minutes.

I say they're but, so far as I can tell, Stex was he, and specifically a he of Lewisham - which is actually where I was living in 1992, but never mind. Stex seems to have been something to do with the developing garage scene, and I gather that, aside from Johnny Marr twanging away on a couple of numbers, we also have the involvement of an Altered Images dude, with Dave Ball possibly twiddling something or other. Spiritual Dance is uptempo bluesy soul of a kind which was admittedly fairly common in 1992, but done with the sort of feeling which connects it firmly to its roots, and which therefore distinguishes it from the formless, generic pish gratuitously emoted by all of those Alexander O'Neal types. Guitars chop and chunk like Nile Rodgers, and the computer bass squelches with a warmth I hadn't even realised I'd missed, and the mood is uplifting without getting stupid, whilst smouldering like Imagination's New Dimension, or the broody opening bars of Diana Ross's Love Hangover; and really it's just a fucking tremendous soul album, a lost gem in every sense. Stex may have seemed an odd labelmate for Einstürzende Neubauten, but if you listen close it becomes difficult to miss the kinship with The The and even Cabaret Voltaire's funkier material.

What the hell happened, Stex? You should have been fucking massive.

Električni Orgazam (1981)

Back in the early eighties, my school friend Eggy went on holiday with his family to what was then Yugoslavia. Passing through the airport on the way home, it occurred to him that he should bring back presents for his pals, Grez and myself, and thus accordingly he picked a couple of random music cassettes from the nearest stall. I had first dibs so I took this one, based on the cover looking sort of interesting, meaning Grez ended up with a tape of some bunch named Kamelioni - not very good, apparently, which I'd kind of guessed might be the case.

Amazingly, Električni Orgazam turned out to be a great pick, regardless of my having no fucking clue what any of it was about. I played the tape a lot. When I bought a CD burner, it was one of the first things I took the trouble to digitise, and now, having discovered the joy of hunting stuff down on the internet, I actually have the fucker on vinyl, kindly sold to me by a very helpful Croatian gentleman - nice big sleeve like a proper record as issued by Jugoton, the Yugoslavian state record label! This thing turning up in the mail felt like a message from space or discovering that Lord of the Rings really happened. I slapped it on the turntable, vaguely worrying this was going to be one of those exercises in nostalgia which doesn't quite pan out, faded photos of some distant holiday romance which has everyone scratching their heads, but no - this record still sounds incredible. It wasn't just my imagination.

To get into specifics, I chose Električni Orgazam over Kameleoni because the name sounded edgy and the cover reminded me of both Dadaism and Cabaret Voltaire's Voice of America album; and the first thing I was reminded of when I first played the tape was Cabaret Voltaire dabbling with sixties-inspired organ noodles on Red Mecca and others. Beyond this comparison, I suppose Električni Orgazam were maybe the angular Serbian Wire or Devo or something of the sort, but populist with a faint swirl of the fairground or cabaret about them - weird and spikey, but never quite bleak enough to have been remembered as cold wave. It seems they went a bit chicken in a basket after this first album, also losing Marina Vulić - their female bassist who, it turns out, was actually very, very easy on the eye - although the early warning signs can probably be discerned in both the obligatory Beatles cover and Fleke, the token white reggae number apparently translating as Stain. Then again, whilst the Yugoslavian state may well have obliged artists to a standardised quota of cod reggae and Beatle coverage, I don't really care because both tracks are wonderful. In fact, I prefer Fleke to quite a lot of proper reggae, so nyer.

Aside from Douglas P recording benefit albums for an end to this terrible genocidal war with proceeds seemingly going to those actually doing the genocide, my knowledge of the former Yugoslavia and its music is limited to Laibach, this album, and Mi Nismo Andjeli. Mi Nismo Andjeli is a film of which the title translates to We Are Not Angels and which was sent to me on DVD by some other Discogs bloke apparently because he had a copy laying around and he wanted to say thanks for buying stuff from me. It was made in 1992 and is definitely one of the weirder and more entertaining random presents I've ever received from a stranger. Furthermore, it seems to suggest a comedic sophistication we of the West have historically denied those Eastern block countries because we're too busy chuckling at Borat with his big moustache. In fact, Mi Nismo Andjeli suggests the former Yugoslavia developed strains of sarcasm we still don't understand even now, and which would make sense of both Laibach, and how Električni Orgazam had an unusually jolly quality to all those starkly spiky riffs.

Of all the best kept secrets over which I've ever evangelised,  Električni Orgazam is a genuine work of genius. I only wish they hadn't turned into the Serbian REO Speedwagon after this one.