Dasein CD

Cabaret Voltaire co-founder Richard H. Kirk, once one of electronic music's most prolific artists, has been surprisingly quiet of late. In fact, Daesin is his first album of new material since 2011. As you might expect, it's particularly obtuse, with the forthright experimentalist producing the kind of set worthy of the Cabs in their early '80s pomp. While there are moments of fleeting positivity - see the intergalactic industrial funk of "Do it Right Now", the shoegaze-goes-Italo throb of "Radioactive Water" and EBM onslaught "20 Block Lockdown" - for the most part the album is as formidably fuzzy, moody and foreboding. That means raw, heavy, effects-laden guitar textures, trippy electronics, steel-clad drum machine beats and, for the first time in a decade, Kirk's gnarled vocals.