At last, Chance Vs Causality, the long-lost Cabaret Voltaire soundtrack to a 16mm film by Babette Mondini, sees the light of day. Up until now, only a fragment had surfaced on a b-side to their “Silent Command” 7-inch back in 1979.
Would loved to have seen the film, and if the sleeve art is anything to go by it was an artsy collage to be behold. A battlefield of scribbled kernels, hacked up celluloid which syncs with the music surprisingly well, seeing how this was essentially a blind commission. Neither Richard H Kirk, Stephen Mallinder nor Chris Watson saw the film in question, composed and sent the recording overseas without even seeing any of its footage. The cut-up, found sound approach they opted for gels well with the abstracts of the cover for sure, an electronic rawness that evils the hemispheres, robotically slurs with erosive chasms of guitar.
The looped dialogue holding the invention, spurring it on as the repeats unravel, syllables overrunning, unlocking weird rythemic interchanges, the tangled sci-fi tingling in slippery reverse. I love the dirtiness of early Cabs as much as I love their Micro-Phonies and Crackdowns, there’s a serenity there, the salty taste of decline, the sonic scar of a crooked industrial skyline. A sense of desolation that Throbbing Gristle also hooked into so magnificently, etched here in the clambering metronomics, the spiralling feedback eating into numb sine scramble with a swampy and synaptic joie de vivre splurging corrosively over.
1974-76 captures a certain hands-on intimacy – a garbled poetry floundering on slurry-shot drones, the spin of the tape machine capstans lubricated by fevered imaginations. The Shadowring-esque whisk of washy keyboards on “A Sunday Night In Biot” full of discordant flutes and ear-grating starkness, the unnerving gasps of vocal tearing around that infernal drip.
It’s an uneasy listen and the elasticated yelps of synth on “In Quest Of The Unusual” don’t help either as the distorted backdrop spears you with its instability, leads you to the early electro-pop adventure that is “Do The Snake”, a disturbed sibilance on Bossanova eggshells.
The absolute love I have for the way “The Outer Limits”’s “let me out” whispering mutates into a slipsteam spine to somewhere else, an artistry way ahead of its time. Yeah, you could say, as historical documents the tracks don’t have the sparkle you get from today’s machines. but the radiophonic rasp of inventiveness here sure seduces, musique concrète full of slip-disc rhythmics and spatter-caked skree, not to mention the odd whorl of space-invader bombardment. If you’re serious in sampling where all that lush programming of the 1980s originated, this is definitely for you.-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
