Review Summary: Proto-Industrial III
By the measure that words like ‘genius’ and ‘visionary’ are made by breaking borders and ushering in new points that much later become trite from overuse, Sheffield trio Cabaret Voltaire always fitted the bill with ease. Even a cursory look at the core components of
Three Mantras is enough proof. A motorik groove, programmed drums, Eastern trance, field recordings of a market in Jerusalem, tape loops of inverted vocals, Dada-esque tweaking of titles and placement, randomized blips of Arabic instruments and noise samples; all of these are by now stock fare in making collaged music, ready and available, and deployed with sickening over-saturation by everyone and anyone able to grasp basic software. Yet in 1979, when CV were laying Mantras to tape, that thick dizzying stew of sounds sounded novel and alien and a little terrifying.
On
Three Mantras, Cabaret Voltaire captured art as sound, recording two long-form compositions, one of which materialized as near-perfect industrial dance punk, and the other as one of the most punishing stretches of anti-music this side of
Metal Machine Music.
Side A, or Western Mantra, or Eastern Mantra - since the packaging of the single reversed both the artwork and the names of the sides, creating a forever-recurring
Who’s on First? argument about it - is a dance track borne of momentum. For the duration of its twenty-minute run, it coasts and crashes on a whorl of skittering guitars, Middle-Eastern atmosphere and punky speak-singing vocalisations. Still CV manage odd modulations, even as the track refuses to lose tempo. Instruments fade in and out, the vox intensify and trample out. Around the halfway mark of Side A, the noise eases back, leaving behind only an inchoate whirl over arthouse drums, morphing for a full minute into a pure techno track. Electronica, breakbeat, dance punk and a hundred other sub-genres would be mining this blueprint for decades to come, slowly but surely turning this beautiful cacophony into banality.
Side B offers as a palette-cleanser, a singularly taxing twenty-minute composite. Slow and grinding, the track lets the Eastern instruments and samples take shape more clearly, un-covered from the curtain of feedback of Side A. Peppered in are vocals that sound almost gospel-like, until closer listening reveals it to be an inverted chant of the word ‘The Human League,’ a tip of the hat, cheeky or earnest to a fellow Sheffield band. The band’s early obsessions with Dadaist deconstruction blooms in full on Side B’s wonderful and frightening slog. Its ‘echo in an empty hallway’ brand of sound mixing would also go on to figure in many future bands’ work, heard most effectively, perhaps in the hollowed-out squall of noise punk albums like
Locust Abortion Technician.
Cabaret Voltaire would predictably grow in scope and execution. Their later albums would see them mine post-punk, prog and other genres, fitting them all neatly into their own frame. “Three Mantras” stands as one of their first and pure pushes into punk music that was as vast and epic, as it remained primal.
