Cabaret Voltaire: Big funk
R. J. Preece: Big Funk —was this partly filmed in Greece?
Stephen Mallinder: Well-spotted (laughs). I have to say even though Richard and I edited Big Funk, some of the footage was shot by Peter Care. We were film buffs as much as music buffs, and so there are film reference as well as sound references.
R.J. Preece: Would you describe Big Funk as pure beat music-oriented? It seems like there is something underneath it.
Stephen Mallinder: I think in everything we did, there’s a sense of tension and a sense of things pulling in a different way. It’s interesting calling it “beat music”. That’s quite true, the rhythm is up to the fore, it’s got a slap bass, and it’s got “funk” in the title. But I think there’s always a level of irony when we did those kind of things. I think underneath it all was a little bit of a Europeanness in it. Even though we were influenced by American culture and music, we like the rest of Europe have been colonized with that in the post-war period. At the same time there’s a sense of dirty earthiness and Europeanness and Britishness in it as well.
R.J. Preece: The way that you are splicing the images and bombarding us with the flashes of the images, you could feel it. Were you kind of parallelling the bombardment of visuals and messages that we receive—and specifically at the time in the 80s—and what’s behind the surface of all these things?
Stephen Mallinder: Yes, one of the tropes of our videos is that they were very rhythmic with clipped edits. And as sonic journalists, we were increasingly becoming bombarded with global images. It was the early idea of the cut-up, the idea of images being juxtapositioned, which we were doing with sound. That was the early days of samples.
We had always used found sound, but we had always used it in an analogue way. And it was the early days of using collage and sound in a digital way. MTV, a couple of years later would be that way. And the cut-and-slash sort of thing would be used 8-9 years later.
It was a technique that worked for us as it reflected the kind of sound we were using.
Stephen Mallinder, intro | In the 70s | Crackdown | Kino | Big Funk | Sensoria | Looking back now
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