Stephen Mallinder, co-founder & frontman of Cabaret Voltaire has announced a new solo LP—his first in over 35 years!
The new album is called Um Dada, and opens with the surreal analog synth machine funk abstraction “Working (You Are)”—a genre-defying dancefloor groove that is almost a meta meditation on the evolution of technology grinding the human spirit in the cogs of capitalism.
Listen to “Working (You Are)” below:
Since the release of Pow Wow in 1982, Mallinder continued his pioneering work with Cabaret Voltaire, as well as recording and touring with his electro projects Wrangler, Creep Show, Hey Rube, Kula, and Cobby & Mallinder. In addition to his non-stop schedule in electronic music, his professional life as a journalist, broadcaster, producer and now a professor of Digital Music & Sound Art at the University of Brighton, has lead Mallinder to a unique point in his career. Most in his position would be caught up in rosy retrospection, but Mallinder himself says:
“There’s too much digital finger-licking right now; every thought and desire at the turn of a dial… well a click of the mouse. And there’s a giddy, false nostalgia about the analogue past. Sorry to burst your bubble but the truth of history is more mundane: practical, pragmatic…Um Dada is about ‘play’ – cut and paste, lost words, twisted presets, voice collage, simple sounds – things that have been lost to technology’s current determinism. Let the machines talk to each other, let them dance .. they lead, we follow.”
Um Dada is out October 11th on Dais Records
Track list:
- Working (You Are)
- Prefix Repeat Rewind
- It’s Not Me
- Um Dada
- Satellite
- Colour
- Flashback
- Robber*
- Hollow*
*CD + Digital bonus tracks
