Cabaret Voltaire - Shadow of Funk

Cabaret Voltaire came out of Sheffield in 1973, three men with tape loops, a beaten-up rhythm box, and no interest in anything resembling a normal band. They pioneered industrial music before it had a name, and their influence runs through techno, house, hip-hop production, and every act that ever built a song from noise.

Shadow of Funk arrived in 2021 as a companion piece to Shadow of Fear, four tracks of Richard H. Kirk working the loop-heavy, bass-forward end of the Cabaret Voltaire sound. Where the album was all dread, this leans into rhythm, letting the grooves run long and the noise sit in the cracks.

It was one of the last things Kirk released before his death that year, and it is a reminder of how effortlessly he could make machine music feel physical.

A short, heavy dose of late-period Cabaret Voltaire on vinyl.