[Awards] The electronic rumors Awards: HALL OF FAME – electronic rumors’ Hall Of Fame inductee 2013

Long-time readers will be very aware that we make no secret of our love of electronic music pioneers Cabaret Voltaire. It was only a matter of time before they joined Kraftwerk, The Human League and Daft Punk in the electronic rumors Hall Of Fame. Cabaret Voltaire seem to have been with me my whole life, whatever music we have been into at any given time, all roads lead back to the Cabs.

Hailing from that electronic music mecca, Sheffield, Cabaret Voltaire were always on the cutting edge of production. From their inception in 1973 as a Dada-influenced art group to their early 90s experiments with House and Techno, Richard H. Kirk and Stephen Mallinder always had a place in musical royalty. Their early, experimental electronic material, for example, is massively influential on everything from Industrial to SynthPop to Electroclash. Their journeys through the world of Dub spawned untold Techno and Ambient outfits and they rode the club wave on the cutting edge of the UK House scene. Not just genre chameleons though, the Cabs were technical innovators too, using synths and electronics in ground-breaking ways that would become commonplace years later. But, on top of it all, though all the noise and acclaim and abrasion, Kirk and Mallinder always seems to know how to write a really good song. It’s hard to be catchy when everything sounds like a distorted machine gun, or when everything is hypnotic synth loops, but these guys managed to do it. It feels odd trying to write about the Cabs, they have been academically studied to death and we can’t do any better, suffice to say that without them there would be no electronic rumors.