Once an Industrial music icon during his time performing in Cabaret Voltaire (pre-disco), Chris Watson now records natural sounds with such skill that he makes something that goes well beyond ‘ambient’ music. As a tribute to his work, Touch Records commissioned several artists, including recently reposed ones like Philip Jeck and Mika Vainio, and supplemented by Fennesz, Biosphere and Watson himself.
With the death of Richard H. Kirk last year, my hopes are dashed for new material from Cabaret Voltaire. However, Stephen Mallinder is carrying the torch of mid-period Cabs by combining a dark soundscape with rough electro-funk. From his Bandcamp website: “Cabaret Voltaire co-founder Stephen Mallinder’s second solo outing for Dais further distills his signature fusion of minimal synth, oblique wordplay, and “wonky disco” into a riveting rhythm suite ripe for our age of escalation: tick tick tick. Channeling the temporal malaise of lockdown through a lusher palette of modular electronics and stereo strings, the songs embrace ambiguity and plasticity,…