“…silence to say goodbye” – William S Burroughs, Naked Lunch

I

There is no Access All Areas when it comes to the past. Media technology ensures that you never get a free pass – you can only go where you’re allowed to go. Platforms become obsolete, data systems are corrupted, files are no longer readable. The true enemy of memory isn’t time but storage, which has its own form of mortality. Sometimes there’s nothing left – not even the recordings. The transition from reel-to-reel and audiocassette to CD and DAT, and then on to minidisc and WAV took a little over 60 years to reach our ears, which corresponds roughly to the amount of time Richard H Kirk spent on this planet. If it’s the larger disasters that shape our lives, usually without our being fully aware of it, then Kirk’s was formed by the impermanence of recorded sound – or rather by the apparent illusion of its permanence. Time and the nature of technological change was a subject that interested him greatly, and we talked about it often together. “It’s this notion of going back to go forwards,” he said to me the first time we met. “Take a step back and look at where you came from in the first place, then reapply that to now and see what happens.” That was on a grey rainswept afternoon in early January 2000 – right at the start of the new millennium. The Wire had sent me up to Sheffield to interview Kirk about his prolific output since leaving Cabaret Voltaire. I still have the tapes of that conversation on a shelf somewhere, although the Sony cassette machine upon which they were recorded has long since ceased to function.

Kirk was not, in any case, the most articulate of interview subjects. He couldn’t seem to get through an answer without using the word stuff a lot; but he read deeply and was extremely well informed. There was a lot of research and insight behind his music. The reality was that Kirk thought in rhythms and expressed himself rhythmically, even in his longer explorations of static, distortion and noise. Rhythm was where the signal lay. It didn’t matter, least of all to him, whether you liked everything he put out or not. Sooner or later Kirk would find the beat that synchronised perfectly with you; and once you were tuned in to it, you got the message. My most vivid memory of that grey afternoon was Kirk taking me to visit his favourite record shop. He told me that this was where he had been going to buy krautrock, experimental music and free jazz records since he was a teenager. We chatted a little about Sun Ra with the guy behind the counter, who went into the backroom and brought back an old El Saturn pressing signed by Sun Ra when he toured the UK back in 1982. Next to his neat signature, Sonny had written “Greetings from the Twenty-First Century!” He had always been ahead of us, Kirk and I both agreed, but somehow, we’d managed to catch up.

II

Kirk and I would talk on the phone for hours at a time, which seems such an old-fashioned concept now. Sometimes I’d record what we were saying on my old Sony cassette machine if it happened to be for an article, or some sleevenotes I was working on. Mostly we talked about music and politics. I remember him telling me with amused detachment of his visit to the set of Michael Winterbotton’s 24 Hour Party People. They had replicated the Haçienda’s legendary interior in a Manchester warehouse for the film, and Kirk was there to watch two actors performing onstage as Cabaret Voltaire. He said it was strange to see incarnations of himself and Stephen Mallinder up there performing “Sex Money Freaks”, one of the tracks from their 1987 album Code. A tracking shot from the stage out into the audience, where the real Richard H Kirk stands watching his younger cinematic counterpart perform, never made the final cut. That footage must still be around somewhere: slowly disintegrating. Cinema and television were important creative inputs for Cabaret Voltaire, who started their own video label Doublevision, to circulate their cut-ups and collaborations. “Sometimes when I’m working,” Kirk said of his solo projects, “I’ll have the TV running and just randomly drop some of that in, doesn’t matter what it is, just for the hell of it. When you’re working that way, things sometimes get buried in the mix, so you don’t hear them, and sometimes they jump out.”

Film and TV voices are everywhere in Kirk’s recordings, multitudes of them. Dispassionate or angry, they remain nearly always hostile and disruptive – ‘jumping out’, invading the moment. At the same time, he remained deeply suspicious of the networks responsible for distributing them. In all the years I knew him, Kirk never had a website and became deeply paranoid when someone started one in his name. He was worried that they had posted an inaccurate transcript of an interview he had given after playing a DJ set in Sheffield. In retrospect, Kirk’s use of cut-up media voices in his work appears to have been as much a defensive strategy as it was an offensive one.

The next time I saw Kirk in person was in 2004 when he travelled down to London by train to see Throbbing Gristle playing at the Astoria one bright Sunday afternoon in May. This was their first reunion, and the audience were supposed to be locked inside the theatre once the performance began. Like everyone else, Kirk and I stood outside in a line of people stretching all the way back to Tottenham Court Road, waiting to be let in. He told me he had been working on a set for an earlier TG event, which had fallen through. His hair was dyed a bright red, and he was wearing dark glasses against the May sunshine. He joked that this was the disguise Chas adopts in the 1970 Nicolas Roeg film Performance to flee across London without being recognised by either the police or his underworld associates. Movies are our real inner life.

III

It’s very easy to lose track of the number of aliases under which Kirk released his material over the past 20 or 30 years. There were just so many of them. An adopted identity will always be a predatory signifier: an assumed name providing a perfect way to disappear into the foreground. Sometimes it seems as though the entire future of electronic music has been written in aliases. In the end, perhaps the best identity to have is no identity at all. The use of multiple names also aligned Kirk with the nocturnal afterhours world of dance music, which he saw as a major driving force for technological change and innovation in the production of sound. Experimentation and exploration flourish when no one is looking. You have the freedom not to be you.

Taking on another name meant Kirk could evade himself. “If I sent some of these recordings to them under another name,” he said of one major label, “I’d probably get a deal right now. But if they knew it was me, they wouldn’t bother.” Other labels, he complained, were only interested in the archive of recorded material from his Cabaret Voltaire days and before. “I like to do something and then move on,” he had told me in Sheffield back at the start of January 2000. Janus, of course, was a two-faced god who simultaneously looked forwards and backwards.

The last time I met Kirk was in a Sheffield cinema ten years later. We were there for a rare public screening of Johnny Yesno, a short film by Peter Care for which Cabaret Voltaire had supplied the soundtrack, releasing the result in 1983 on their Doublevision label. Care and Kirk had collaborated on a remixed updated Redux version of the project. I had been invited to talk about the film in particular and the application of the cut-up method to audiovisual material in general: the work of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin having had a lasting impact on Kirk’s communication strategies. The organisers of the event had also asked Kirk to take part in a Q&A session with the audience afterwards, but he absolutely refused to do it. That level of public exposure clearly made him uncomfortable. I found him before the show sitting at a table outside the cinema, smoking a Marlboro Lite and drinking a beer. He told me that the prospect of “Cabaret Voltaire stalkers” at events like these bothered him. He wasn’t even sure what he was doing here. This might simply have been pre-show jitters; but as the evening unwound, I got the impression that Kirk felt trapped – that he saw himself caught between the past and the future.

In a sense, he was stuck. He was still using studio equipment he’d first adopted over a decade ago; the same ghostly preachers, militiamen, corrupt politicians and cable news reporters haunted much his work. Kirk probably believed in the end times as much as any televangelist ever did. He had developed an apocalyptic vision of the world that first came into sharp focus at the end of the 20th century – and he had clung to it ever since with a stubbornness that made “moving with the times” seem like the basest of compromises. Maybe he was waiting for the rapture too. Go back and listen to any of Kirk’s releases from the past two decades, and you can see for yourself that what he was describing in sound then is happening in the world right now. And now that he’s gone, we find that we need him more than ever – but perhaps Kirk had anticipated that.