Richard Kirk has been lurking on the outer edges of British electronic music for over twenty years now. From his punker-than-punk scrap technology noises in the early Cabaret Voltaire, through the later Cabaret Voltaire years which saw Stephen Mallinder and Kirk explore everything from electrofunk to straight house music, to his current multiple solo personalities charting the waters of electronic dub, tribal trance and the very fashionable electronic eclectica.

Cabaret Voltaire still exists, at least in name, having released a classic ambient techno double album, The Conversation, on the prestigious Belgian R&S offshoot label, Apollo last year; but it has been his three solo albums also released last year that have drawn the shambling music press back to him. Now he has just released another solo effort, The Number Of Magic on Warp, closely followed by The Idea Of Justice on Beyond and he muses over his recent return to the 'alternative' limelight.

Mellow, slow, with heavy and obvious dub influences, The Number Of Magic rolls out of the speakers alongside the best of what has been called 'ambient dub'. Kirk explains; "I've always been into dub - dub has underpinned all my work even all the way back in the Seventies. My personal take on it all is that it fits in now because it offers an escape from the pounding beats of the dancefloor". Dub seems to be undergoing a revival with many new dub crews springing up, in Britain under the consistently watchful eye of the highly influential but little recognised, Jah Shaka amongst others. Of course there are lots of imitators intent on making the most of this heightened interest, exploiting it, sampling old records and releasing them under a new name with no reference to the source. Trendy postmodern pastiche? Maybe, but the people who are being ripped off tend to be Black and conveniently ignored in the 'official' histories of popular music; and not surprisingly the majority of the people doing the ripping off are middle-class Whites with considerable access to expensive technology.

Consequently, "a lot of people have sampled from old dub records, you've only got to go into record shops to see that a lot of it has been re-released on CD, and provided that the people who should be getting the royalties are getting the royalties then I think its positive. The same as like, a lot of people sample from James Brown, and his back catalogue took off in a big way because the sampling turned a lot of people onto that music. Unless you start stealing huge chunks of someone else's music, I don't think its such a bad thing - I mean I don't mind if someone nicks a bit of my record". But its a slightly different matter when it comes to traditional Third World folk musics - for a start there is no 'original composer' to pay royalties to, and often the music and its ritual use holds cultural and spiritual significance for those involved.

"I don't feel bad about [sampling ethnic music] because I really like the sounds especially in Latin American music and I will sample little bits and pieces. The reasons I'm doing it are artistic, and I'm not in the charts. My music is pretty obscure and my reasons are far from commercial. Taking from Third World musics I do feel a bit of a moral dilemma but in the end you just have to rely on artistic licence". And maybe this is the difference between Kirk and mass commercial plunderers like Deep Forest. Since colonialism, Western culture has been and continues to be highly parasitic in terms of both material resources and culture - one need only look at the French elite's attitudes to Polynesia, or BHP's Ok Tedi mines, or our own to East Timor, the list could go on forever. Economics is conveniently scripted as morally neutral, yet with regards to Kirk's recent work, the age-old question remains, can there be 'art' outside of the pull of commerce?

The Number Of Magic appears on Sheffield label Warp. A small company that exploded onto the "post-techno" landscape with releases from Autechre, the Aphex Twin, Nightmares On Wax and the like, Warp has attempted to remain outside the pull of the market. Kirk explains his involvement with them; "I'd worked with Warp early on as Sweet Exorcist, and we're both in Sheffield so it meant, amongst other things, I don't have to go down to London so much anymore . . . a lot of people who will be buying this record don't even know anything about Cabaret Voltaire, and I quite like that. Its really nice that people will just hear The Number Of Magic, and then maybe go back and go through the old stuff". For Kirk and many others it is not about money, nor is it about personal fame or egos, and for many in high places this seems to be disturbing.

The "free market" does not rule these exchanges, and there is something strangely political in the lyric-less world of beats and bleeps. Kirk agrees; "you can put out pieces of music that are highly political and it doesn't need to have someone chanting slogans over the top of it like The Clash. But if you're clever enough you can do it without forcing it down someone's throat. There's almost a politics in 'mindless dance music' especially when you're getting laws passed like the Criminal Justice Bill prohibiting music with 'repetitive beats'". Currently more subtly disturbing than punk, it may be this constant suspicion of market forces that has kept the techno revolution alive, and allowed it to be seen as posing such a threat to the 'order of civilised society'. Whether it continues to do so will require more people like Richard Kirk who constantly shift ground, and change identity, like a cultural nomad.

Yellow Peril

Goto Snarl Texts Index Pages