Richard H Kirk 1956-2021

I've only become aware of Kirk's death in the last week as I'm no longer following media or going online on a regular basis to protect my brain from nonsense. You can thank the morons on both sides of the political spectrum for that. That in turn means both media teams who toe their narrow radicalised party lines. Name calling is what politics has become and you don't even realise you're doing it. Funnily enough this is the sort of subject matter Richard H Kirk, who died mysteriously on the 21st of September, was interested in from the early days of Cabaret Voltaire up until his final recordings. Cabaret Voltaire's paranoid vision was straight out of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four, Ballard, Boroughs and other futuristic and dystopian novels, movies and current affairs. He had a deep distrust of government, and if I recall correctly he thought all politics was corrupt. So his concerns were more relevant than ever in 2021 with the rising tide of authoritarianism in democratic countries, twitter's thought crime, mass psychosis, the surreptitiousness of big tech, The Great Reset etc. Kirk's visions of dystopia are almost fully realised in Western Civilisation today.

I've written about my love of Cabs before so I'm just gonna post some of his music that I've been listening to recently. He had something like 40 solo aliases such as Sandoz, Dark Magus & Al Jabr plus a bunch of collaborative projects like Acid Horse & Sweet Exorcist. He was part of at least three distinct music movements: Industrial (Experimental electronic post-punk), 80s conform to deform alternative dance music and Bleep & Bass (A distinctly British Variant of Techno). His music appeared on labels such as Industrial Records, Rough Trade, Factory, Virgin, Some Bizarre, Wax Trax, Blast First, Warp, Mute, Touch etc. Plus he had his own label Intone.

Sweet Exorcist is Richard H Kirk's groundbreaking project in collaboration with Richard Barrett aka DJ Parrot. They became the first act to release an album on WARP Records.