Hi everyone, I'm a Sheffield-based designer running a charity project raising funds for Help Musicians, who offer health and welfare services and a mental health helpline for anyone working in the music industry.
It's a series of 40 holographic Waveform artworks visualising soundwaves generated by some of my favourite British dance, rave, synth, and electronic music albums.
https://preview.redd.it/f3ke65gzttr71.jpg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6270b23eba16043e63d5109c649ddc951c2553ed
Includes albums by:
Aphex Twin, Altern-8, Bicep, Boards of Canada, Burial, Chemical Brothers, Four Tet, Goldie, LFO, Massive Attack, New Order, Nightmares On Wax, Orbital, Prodigy β and lots more. Backers can select from 40 albums silkscreen printed onto their choice of six metallic and holographic papers.
The fallout from COVID-19 has been tough on a lot of people working in the music industry, and charities like Help Musicians are doing loads to help those in need. If you could share this project with anyone you think might be interested it'd be a big help.
https://preview.redd.it/u9tdi5b0utr71.jpg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9a7cb2fddcc01905033f7b58d58c241d587e71d0
Sad to read of the passing of #RichardKirk, one of the founders of #CabaretVoltaire. A huge influence over the decades they were making music + video. Rest In Power! -> Richard H Kirk was prolific, hungry, angry and funky to the end https://buff.ly/3tYV8Pb
https://www.amazon.com/BN9Drone-Limited-White-Cabaret-Voltaire/dp/B08TZBTMF7/
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Today, Iβm taking a look at Cabaret Voltaire, one of the most important acts in the development of βindustrial musicβ in the late 70s and early 80s. They came up right alongside groups like Throbbing Gristle and Clock DVA, and their earlier work is strident and subversive, full of harsh, hissing textures, and dense compositions that almost dare you to make sense of them. This era of their career came to a head with 1981βs Red Mecca, an album inspired by political turmoil in Western Asia, and often considered their great masterpiece.
While this earlier work was extremely influential, sowing the seeds of all manner of noise and industrial music to come, Cabaret Voltaire didnβt stick with this sound forever. Thatβs where their 1983 album The Crackdown comes into the picture. After founding member Chris Watson left the group to pursue a career in sound engineering for television, Cabaret Voltaire were reduced to a duo of Richard H. Kirk and Stephen Mallinder, and on this album, the two of them would push their sound into significantly poppier territory.
Listening to the surprisingly bright synth effects on βAnimation,β you can start to see why Cabaret Voltaire are sometimes remembered as more of a New Wave act, in spite of those rough beginnings. Much more focused on digestible hooks and melodies, The Crackdown saw significantly more mainstream success and appeal than anything they had done before. Still, itβs selling this album a bit short to position it as a straight-up pop record. Itβs really kind of a transition point between their more avant-garde work and their more dancefloor-oriented output later in the 1980s. βAnimationβ is definitely a bit of an outlier, sonically speaking, and itβs also a bit buried in the tracklisting, only appearing at the end of the first side.
By contrast, the album opens with β24-24.β It and other tracks on The Crackdown really lay out what Iβd consider the βclassicβ Cabaret Voltaire compositional structure: they center around these repetitive grooves, which are quite funky, and catchy in a dark way, but also somewhat unsatisfying to lis
... keep reading on reddit β‘)