Agents with False Memories

For over 45 years, Richard H. Kirk made some of the most distinctive and idiosyncratic music in the so-called "electronic" genre, beginning in his teens with the embryonic Cabaret Voltaire, experimenting with primitive sequencers, processers, synthesizers, drum machines and tape along with guitar, wind instruments, bass and other more traditional instruments.  Over roughly twenty years, CV which originally included Christopher Watson, whose environmental recordings have been featured here, as well as Stephen Mallinder, who continues making great music today, evolved from harsh, uncompromising "industrial" sounds to more accessible recordings (including a brief major label period in the late 80s) to a final phase, in the first half of the Nineties, that was a balance between experimentation and accessibility.

After Mallinder moved to Australia by the mid-1990s, Kirk, who'd launched some great side projects like Sandoz and Sweet Exorcist, entered into an incredibly fertile period, including recordings under his own name and a dizzying array of aliases (Electronic Eye, Nitrogen, Orchestra Terrestrial, Dark Magus, Al-Jabr, Blacworld and a great many others that were generally one-offs for individual songs or on compilations like the fantastic Step, Write, Run double-disc of works under his Alphaphone label).

One of the more interesting of his releases during this era was 1996's Agents with False Memories, issued by Ash International, a label run by Mike Harding, co-owner, with Jon Wozencroft, of Touch, which put out many albums by Kirk and Watson.  The single, 53-minute long track might be considered a close kin to "Project 80," the mind-blowing long-form piece from Cabaret Voltaire's The Conversation (1994) that was the last album until Kirk resurrected the name and released the very strong Shadow of Fear in 2020.  In turn, they might well be descendants of his 1982 solo work, "Dead Relatives."

Agents with False Memories is a compelling wash of electronic programming and percussion accompanying a great many samples of found sounds, including an interview with Orson Welles, a visit to Kirk's hometown of Sheffield, England by an American evangelist calling forth the Holy Spirit, a quote from President George H.W. Bush, a discussion on the technical innovations of the racist 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, expositions by scientists and a great deal else.  On the heels of "Project 80," the piece is a standout in a very long career with a great deal of diversity in it.

While Ash International's description referenced the album as a soundtrack for a film of the same name by Oregon-based Guy van Stratten, this was a little joke by the label and Kirk as van Stratten was the name of a Welles character from the 1955 film, Mr. Arkadin.  Kirk was fascinated by Welles, as found, just with a couple of examples, Cabaret Voltaire's take on the theme from A Touch of Evil and Kirk's "Sons of Harry Lime" as rendered by Orchestra Terrestrial on his Intone label's Unreleased Projects, Volume 3.

Kirk's death in September 2021 at age 65 ended the incredible career of a phenomenally productive creator, who left, for those who enjoy his work, an amazing legacy spanning six decades.  The exhaustive discography concluded, just months before his passing, with the final Cabaret Voltaire albums, BN9Drone and Dekadrone, that were further explorations in long-form music.  For those with adventurous tastes in "electronic music," Kirk's many albums are worth pursuing and hearing, with Agents with False Memories a definite highlight.