Over three CDs and 53 tracks, Methodology unveils Cabaret Voltaire’s earliest experiments with electronics. Through radical manipulations of voices and instruments, Sheffield, England’s Chris Watson, Richard H. Kirk and Stephen Mallinder restlessly developed the phonemes of a sonic vocabulary that would coalesce into the viral language heard on their bleak, industrial-electrofunk classics Red Mecca and 2 X 45. But before those refinements came and before they embraced rhythm and Burroughsian paranoia, Cabaret Voltaire diabolically schemed in the studio like pre-Autobahn Kraftwerk, forging bizarrely bleeping abstractions akin to Gil Melle’s Andromeda Strain soundtrack and elaborating on the timbral mutations pioneered by Tod Dockstader and Morton Subotnick. This boxed set is both a revelatory peak into a crucial electronic group’s embryonic stage, and a key chapter in electronic music’s evolution in the ’70s, a decade that (contrary to conventional wisdom) abounded with innovation-as did Cabaret Voltaire.