Richard Kirk

Kirk was perhaps the true genius of the Cabaret Voltaire and demonstrated this with the eclectic solo works of his maturity.

In the 1980s he had already authored several prescient works. While Disposable Half-Truths (Industrial, 1978) had added little to the contemporary projects of Cabaret Voltaire, the double album Time High Fiction (Doublevision, 1983) unsettled the industrial music of the time with the sprawling suite Dead Relatives, the most experimental work of his career.

After the banal Black Jesus Voice (Rough Trade, 1986) and the confused Ugly Spirit (Rough Trade, 1986), Hoodoo Talk (Wax Trax, 1987) brought him closer to the ranks of the new danceable music, but without particularly original ideas.

The 1990s, however, revitalized the old Kirk. Under the alias Sweet Exorcist, he released a couple of ethno-funk essays: C.C.C.D. (Warp, 1990) and Spirit Guide To Low Tech (Touch, 1994).

As Sandoz he proposed a softer, ambient, dub, and hallucinatory sound on the albums Digital Lifeforms (Touch, 1993) and Intensely Radioactive (Touch, 1994), his main experimental laboratories. The somewhat cryptic Sandoz saga continued with Every Man Got Dreaming (Touch, 1995), a much easier and funkier album, and Dark Continent (Touch, 1996), a reissue of the eponymous 1993 EP with four unreleased tracks.
The six suites of God Bless The Conspiracy (Alphaphone, 1997) are emblematic of his exploration of ambient techno (Lights In The Sky), wild house (Levels), cosmic funk (Blow This Mother Up), and drum'n'bass (Moon Rises).
Chant To Jah (Touch, 1998) is a sort of dub mass, a spiritual (and electronic) take on dub.

Agents With False Memories (Ash, 1996) is instead devoted to Kirk the avant-garde musician.

As Electronic Eye he released the monumental and austere Closed Circuit (Beyond, 1994), issued on four LPs or two CDs, another summation of his confused and ambitious art. This was followed by The Idea Of Justice (Beyond, 1995), still balancing disco rhythms with cosmic poems (Black Star, X Scan), increasingly clever in blending jazz, funk, dub, and new wave elements.

Drawing on these side experiments, Kirk succeeded in creating a dialect of atmospheric techno first on Virtual State (Warp, 1994), particularly in accessible yet intelligent tracks like Soul Catcher, and then on the monumental Number Of Magic (Warp, 1995), a labyrinth of classy gestures, from the jazzy Monochrome Dream to the tribal Atomic, the oriental Indole Ring, and the programmatic Lost Souls On Funk.

Kirk is also active under about ten other pseudonyms. As Nitrogen he released Intoxica (Alphaphone, 1997), as Dark Magus he released Night Watchmen (Alphaphone, 1997), and as Trafficante he released Is This Now (Alphaphone, 1998).

Al Jabr is yet another impersonation, although the music on One Million And Three (Alphaphone, 1999) is the "ambient ethno funk" that Kirk has been serving for years.

Loopstatic (Touch, 2000) and Darkness at Noon (Touch, 2000), the new albums released under his own name, do not improve Kirk's recent standard. These are avantgarde collages of samples that mostly prove the musician's love of machinery but rarely become art.

Electronic Eye returned with Neurometrik (Alphaphone, 2000), one of his most mesmerizing attempts at fusing African rhythm and techno hypnosis.

Sandoz's Afrocentris (Intone, 2001) incorporated African music, percussions, radio samples and warped beats (Dissolved, Phaseur).

Orchestra Terrestrial (Die Stadt, 2000) was yet another project, continued on Here and Elsewhere (Die Stadt, 2001), while the volumes of The War Against Terrorism (Intone, 2003) was released under Kirk's own name.

Life In The Earth: Sandoz In Dub Chapter Two (Soul Jazz, 2006) was Sandoz at its most derivative, a sort of electronic version of King Tubby. Nonetheless, Thousand Year Dread is one of his best achievements in this genre.

Kirk died in 2021 at the age of 65.