Spread the Virus : Affective prophecy in industrial music

Abstract

The ‘industrial’ music of British post-punk band, Cabaret Voltaire, exemplified an experimental ‘street’ attitude to sound and music which reflexively appropriated elements of both popular and avant-garde techniques and styles in imagining, and rendering audible, a new, post-industrial world and society of control. It was a kind of clairaudience constituted by a contagious encounter, the capture and mapping of affective flows of the late twentieth-century mediascape. A noise music such as industrial is neither plagiaristic nor precursive, but rather a space in medias res, immanent, sandwiched between actual identities, a space in which the ‘outside’ is prophetically folded into the world. In Cabaret Voltaire’s music a map of the future was sounded which was attuned to incipient metamorphosis, a mutation of capitalism and other vital stirrings in the world.