Search - Cabaret Voltaire :: Mix-Up

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Robert Kennedy | Astoria, NY United States | 08/04/2003

(4 out of 5 stars)

"If you're even looking at the Cabaret Voltaire offerings [on the site], for whatever reason (Fischerspooner got compared to them, you were researching the dada movement, customers who bought Nine Inch Nails also bought this CD, et alia), you need this CD in your collection. These boys were the genesis of the sound that legions of followers would mutate into a myriad of directions that you know and love -- techno, industrial, breakbeat, goth -- and this album will take you to amazing places. Play it in the dark, or set your television between channels and watch the static with "Mix-Up" in the background. Have kinky jaded ... and put this on repeat on your CD player. Paint your windows and appliances matte black or sickly green and blare this as your soundtrack.Given 4 stars only because this band would surpass this effort with "Red Mecca". You should have that one too, but one step at a time if you're not among the industrial Illuminati."

Great industrial music

Israel Casanovas | PPCC | 07/31/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Mix Up is one of my favourite Cabaret Voltaire releases, and there is no doubt that it is an industrial record in the vein of Throbbing Gristle. However, unlike Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire did not focus as much in unrecognisable noise and strange tapeloops as they did on playing their own weird breed of industrial: distorted guitar lines on the background, constant basslines, early rythm boxes gone insane and scary vocals. The atmosphere they bring up is really cool, and dark, on this album. An early industrial classic - recommended."

'Expect Nothing'

Paul Ess. | Holywell, N.Wales,UK. | 04/17/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"There are very few things I know about Voltaire: a philosopher, great liberal social reformer, and a big buddy of Montesquieu.

That's about it.

Quite where that leaves us as far as 'Mix-Up' is concerned, I'm really not sure.



Industrial Sheffield, part of the grim North of England (indisputable no 1 - Cabaret Voltaire cannot come from London); much rain, unemployment, grim humour, Sean Bean and despair. A fabulously fertile breeding site for a music (irrefutable no 2 - Cabaret Voltaire are not a pop music entity) such as 'Mix-Up'.

Smog seeps from the cd case when you open it. Some-one speaks, steel, knives...



The first I heard from Cabaret Voltaire was 'Baader-Meinhoff' around the reign of Queen Victoria (disputable no 3 - Q V never went to Sheffield) and it had an effect along the same lines as 'Transmission' or 'Porno-Base'.

A loosening of brain cells to an accordance; a way of thinking which is easy to calmly analyse now - but when you're a boy...

You leave the lights on.



Yet again all experimental roads lead to 23 Skidoo and the monolithic 'Seven Songs' (hopeful no 4 - 'Seven Songs': I will cease to be obsessed by it), and although 'Mix-Up' is less of a party, they share kinship in the most observable way. Art school pseudo-punk white noise, discordantly sieved through Can and Suicide, and the results seized on by self-satisfied, university educated, middle-class music journalists, and projected.



'Kirlian Photograph' opens 'Mix-Up' and leads the way for the accompanying 'Eyeless Sight,' 'Photograph' and 'Capsules' as the album's central spine (grateful no 5 - that the titles give so much of the album away and saves the reviewer words).



This is one of a number of Cabaret Voltaire albums (indispensable no 6 -'Voice of America') which any great sensible will buy immediately and quizzically imbibe to oblivion.



Voltaire probably enjoyed the classics, but I don't know what he'd make of damp Sheffield and a group of 'musicians' who distrust the very fundamental concepts of melody and cohesion."