Cabaret Voltaire – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 846

Design by Randoll Coate for the Labirinto Borges, a hedge maze at the Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice, which was renovated earlier this year.

• “Code was probably our most overtly political record, which is interesting, touring and playing it in these very different but scary political times.” Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire talking about the experience of touring America again.

• At The Daily Heller: A look at the work of designer/illustrator George Hardie whose five-decade career is to be celebrated in a retrospective exhibition in London. There’s more George Hardie here.

• “Almost as soon as weird began circulating outside of Macbeth, its meaning broadened too, from ‘eerie’ and ‘uncanny’ to ‘odd’ or ‘unusual’.” Colin Gorrie on the weird history of the word “weird”.

• At The Quietus: Toby Manning on 40 years of Gone To Earth by David Sylvian. A minor nitpick: the album’s art and design was by Russell Mills, not Vaughan Oliver.

• New music: Burning Song by Kali Malone; Obsessive Surrealism by Parallel Worlds.

• At Door Of Perception: The radical architectural designs of Eugene Tssui.

• DJ Food’s latest accumulation of psychedelic graphics from the desktop.

• Old music: When The Music’s Over (Live, 1970) by The Doors.

• Arthur Brown‘s favourite songs.

• Weird Dream (1976) by Harmonia | It’s So Weird (1983) by Bush Tetras | Ballad Of The Weird Sisters (2013) by Blood Ceremony

Weekend links 840

The Toad of Maldoror (1932) by Valentine Hugo.

• Old music: Thank You America (John Robie Dub Mix) by Cabaret Voltaire. Code, the group’s 1987 debut for the Parlophone label, receives an overdue reissue later this year with a substantial collection of remixes.

• At Lesser-Known Writers: Douglas A. Anderson examines the career of Hal Garrott, a writer whose novels for children feature fine illustrations by Dugald Stewart Walker and Mary-Ponton Gardner.

• The August catalogue of lots for the After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn, etc.

• Mixes of the week: The Invisible Collage Vol. 1, and Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe’s Invisible Jukebox Mix at The Wire.

• New music: Modulisme Session 144. Lightning Field 01. Constraint by Philippe Petit, and Signal Loss by Paul Beaudoin.

• At Colossal: Los Angeles Public Library unveils the world’s largest pop-Up book.

• At the BFI: Craig Ian Mann selects 10 great East German films.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Ed Emshwiller’s Day.

• Signaux Codes Non Identifiés (1978) by Michel Magne | Code Rays (Codex Dub) (1995) by Main | Codes (Encryption And Decryption) (2025) by Andrew Heath

Weekend links 833

Tony Hyde’s original artwork for the front cover of Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music by Hawkwind. The painting is being auctioned later this month.

• At the Daily Heller: Steven Heller reprints his 2012 Atlantic review of The Graphic Canon, a three-volume collection of visual adaptations of works of literature. The collection was edited by the late Russ Kick, and includes my own condensation of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Bill Hsu presents…21st Century Nightmares: Dark Animations by Cristóbal León/Joaquín Cociña, Hugo Covarrubias, Christiane Cegavske, John Frame, Saori Shiroki, Joe Hsieh, Phil Tippett, Robert Morgan, Shengwei Zhou.

• At Colossal: In Los Angeles, 70 artists transform a vacant hospital into a sprawling art experience.

What we were doing was rooted in that specific moment, but looking back, it also seems to resonate strongly with the present—particularly in terms of how we understand media, perception, and reality itself. This is something I’ve been thinking about again recently, especially with the renewed activity around Cabaret Voltaire. It brings into focus the extent to which earlier work now reads almost as a form of prefiguration. At the time, though, much of it was intuitive. We didn’t necessarily have a fully formed theoretical framework for what we were doing—we were artists, and we were working instinctively. It’s really only in retrospect that some of those ideas begin to take on a clearer shape and meaning.

Stephen Mallinder talking to Nicolas Ballet about Cabaret Voltaire, the group’s history and working methods

• New music: The Endless Dance by Hannah Peel; Helt by Fjall; Air Signs by Anthéne.

• Adam Rowe is writing a new book about science fiction art.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Brutal Types.

• Mix of the week: Isolatedmix 135 by Aspetuck.

• Brute Reason (1983) by Bernard Szajner | Let’s Get Brutal (1986) by Nitro Deluxe | Brutal But Clean (1994) by Cabaret Voltaire

Weekend links 827

Dante in his Study with Episodes from the Inferno (1978) by Tom Phillips.

• “This set, featuring two of the surviving members of Cabaret Voltaire, is as clear and powerful as any of the live albums the group released while Richard H. Kirk was alive.” Derek Walmsley, reviewing what we’ve been told will be the last ever Cabaret Voltaire album. I can also vouch for its excellence but then I’m not what you might call an impartial listener. My copy arrived in the post only a couple of hours before Boards Of Canada made the announcement they’d been teasing for the past two weeks—the new BOC album, Inferno, will be released at the end of May—a coincidence that felt vaguely significant. “How random is random?” as William Burroughs used to say. It’s tempting to describe the moment as the passing of a creative torch but I doubt either of the groups would agree. Boards Of Canada’s approach to electronic music has always been very different to that of Cabaret Voltaire: less aggressive, more melodic, more pastoral, more concerned with memories and the past than with the present or the near future. But the promotional videos for Inferno are reminiscent of the scratch videos that Cabaret Voltaire were creating in the 1980s: degraded VHS assemblages collaged from TV broadcasts and home-movie footage, visual equivalents of a tuning dial running through the shortwave radio spectrum. Then there’s the latest BOC album art which, when taken with details from the teaser video, foregrounds the same fascination with American bastardisations of Christianity that the Cabs were referring to in Sluggin’ Fer Jesus and The Covenant, The Sword And The Arm Of The Lord. I’ll leave it to others to play with the interpretations that can be brought to an album title like Inferno. We’ll no doubt be seeing a great deal of journalistic musing around this and related issues before and after the end of May.

• Jiří Barta’s Expressionist animated adaptation of the Pied Piper story, Krysař (1985), has turned up in high definition at YouTube. Ignore the credit for Wilfred Jackson, an American animation director who had nothing to do with Barta’s film.

• At Public Domain Review: Magic by return of post: Allan Johnson explores the history of those mail-order occult outfits whose ads fill out the pages of the early American pulps.

• Visual Music: a lecture by Simon Reynolds describing the use of electronic music as a soundtrack for abstract cinema.

• At the BFI: Anton Bitel selects 10 great Brazilian horror films.

• There’s more intermediate eyeball fodder at Unquiet Things.

• Your Name in Landsat

• FruitierThanThou

• Disco Inferno (1976) by The Trammps | Inferno (Main Title Theme) (1980) by Keith Emerson | Om Riff From The Cosmic Inferno (2005) by IAO Chant From The Cosmic Inferno

Weekend links 826

Hexa (1971) by Victor Vasarely.

• New music of the week is Tape 05, three minutes from Boards Of Canada following their thirteen-year silence, which was released on Thursday after several days of the group and their record label teasing a comeback with mysterious VHS cassettes and cryptic posters. I’ve been listening to the Sandison brothers’ discography for most of the week while trying to get a major illustration commission finished; this revelation has been the icing on a deteriorated, over-processed cake. I’m now looking forward to whatever emerges next.

• The Long London Uncovered: Alan Moore (again) and Iain Sinclair (again) in conversation. Alan’s second novel in the Long London cycle, I Hear A New World, will be published next month.

• RIP Chris Mullen. Not a name that most will recognise but Mullen’s sprawling website, The Visual Telling of Stories, has been linked here on many occasions. A remarkable resource.

• More new music: Boots On The Ground by Massive Attack, Tom Waits; Angel Lost by Luca Formentini; Phaser For The Ocean, Chorus For The Moon by Hatchback.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Sensual Laboratories, Light Shows, Experimental, Film and Psychedelic Art by Sophia Satchell-Baeza.

• At Public Domain Review: “A beautiful purplish hue”: Frank Dudley Beane’s experience with ergot and Cannabis Indica (1884).

• Mixes of the week: An Invisible Jukebox mix for Irmin Schmidt at The Wire; and DreamScenes – April 2026 at Ambientblog.

• At The Quietus: Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley of Sunn O))) discuss their love of hiking.

• At Film Quarterly: Elinor Dolliver on the surprising folklore of analogue horror.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Gilway Paradox.

• The Strange World of…Spacemen 3.

• Tape Kebab (1974) by Can | The Attic Tapes (1975/6) by Cabaret Voltaire | The Black Mill Video Tape (2012) by Pye Corner Audio