Cluster

The three lengthy and nameless tracks on Cluster (Philips, 1971) indulge in velvety drones, distorted reverbs, cyclic repetitions and tonal poetry, thus aiming for a form of contemplation instead of Kluster's abstract painting. The difference in means and ends is evident from the opening 15:43, initially propelled by a weak synthesizer pulsation, then enveloped in slow-building, floating cosmic vibrations (an idea that predates the symphonic suspense of Klaus Schulze's Irrlicht). The piece soon emancipates itself from the cyclic structure and displays a majestic design, letting the drones spread in the universe, while occasionally regaining a glimpse of organic pulsing
The "brief" 7:42 is a study on rhythm, which is overlapped, dilated and streamlined for the purpose of creating a dark, apocalyptic atmosphere. The longest track, 21.32, is a little too self-indulgent in revisiting the same themes, and it lacks an organic structure. Its chaotic nature harks back to their beginnings, once the harsh tones are replaced with smooth tones and soft drones, once the industrial beats are replaced with solemn metronomes and hallucinated reverbs. The last seven minutes are particularly engaging, when the music, distorted and fragmented, seems to journey deep into the horror visions of the subconscious.
The musical continuum of the new Cluster was drawing inspiration from Tangerine Dream's psychedelic/cosmic meditations, but without the emphasis on the "visual", sensational, chromatic, symphonic aspects that Schulze had gone on to develop in his solo career.
Cluster's electronica was subtle and psychological, rather than emphatic and psychedelic. Sound effects were employed to create unnerving feelings, not the trancey ecstasy of the cosmic poems. Their focus was on the background cosmic radiation rather than on the explosion of a supernova. This album lacked the monumental, religious longing of Tangerine Dream and Popol Vuh: it was rather a "pagan" work, exploring not the mysteries of the cosmos but human neurosis within the atrocious drift of Time.

Cluster II (Metronome, 1972) continues the journey from where the previous album had interrupted it: Plas indulges in the same distorted echoes of the human psyches. Georgel pushes it further into the neuroris of the everyman, by amplifying the echoes and expanding the drones. The 12-minute minimalist essay Im Suden composes and decomposes three melodic patterns (in three different timbres) that dance around each around, letting them evolve slowly in the manner of Steve Reich. Live In Der Fabrik is a 15-minute industrial fantasy that relies on a similarly "iterative" method but employs harsher, faster vibrations, thus obtaining a much stronger hypnotic effect. The track is basically a continuous pulsing organism, and the pulsation keeps changing, sometimes predating the frantic pounding of techno music and sometimes predating the machine-like clockwork of industrial music.
They had little or nothing in common with the sci-fi trend of "kosmische musik": Cluster's concept of the future is a distorting mirror in which even silence is dissonant. The cosmic saga of German rock had reached the threshold of nervous depression.

Cluster's third phase begins with the album Zuckerzeit (Brain, 1974 - Revisited, 2007), a collaboration with Michael Rother. The spirit had changed because both the times had changed and their location had changed (Cluster had moved outside Berlino) It is not surprising, therefore, that the prevailing mood is relaxed, harmonious and even childish. Gone are the abrasive tones and the lugubrious atmospheres. The obsessive use of artificial rhythms coined a new musical genre (jointly with Kraftwerk's contemporary Autobahn). It is also the first album on which each song is credited only to one of the two musicians.
Moebius seems to enjoy his newly-found peace of mind. His compositions are the simplest and warmest: the hummable melody of Caramel, the silly merry-go-round of Caramba, the frantic ska of Rotor, and, above all, the humorous novelty of Rote Riki.
Roedelius pens slightly more sophisticated ditties: Hollywood could be one of the driving pop numbers on Brian Eno's contemporary Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy; Rosa interweaves a synthetic music-box line, a minimalistic piano figure and syncopated beats; Fotschi Tong sounds like a tribal dance from Central Asia; Marzipan is a serene, pastoral sonata. Compared with their early albums, this is light divertissement for retired hippies.

Roedelius, Moebius and Rother also formed Harmonia, who recorded only two albums: Musik von Harmonia (Brain, 1974 - Lilith, 2006) and Deluxe (Brain, 1975 - Lilith, 2006). Posthumously, Tracks & Traces (Random, 1997) would deliver recordings from 1976 with Brian Eno. Live 1974 (Water, 2007) documents a live performance dating from the time in between the two albums.

Fame finally came to Cluster with the album recorded with Brian Eno: Cluster Und Eno (Sky, 1977 - Water, 2005), followed by After The Heat (Sky, 1978). Old Land (Relativity, 1986) is an anthology of these two collaborations. In truth, the only salient fact is the spectacular quality of the production. Instead, an excess of discipline and geometry prevents the music from repeating the lyrical spontaneity of the earlier works.

Cluster Und Eno (Sky, 1977), a collection of instrumental vignettes, is disappointing both from the point of view of Eno's previous works and compared with Cluster's Zuckerzeit. The insistent tremor of Schoene Hande, the iterative lament of Steinsame, the austere piano sonata of Wermuet have very little to say: they simply repeat a simple pattern, hoping to leave a "koan" for the listener to solve. Fuer Luise manages at least to evoke a romantic feeling out of this lazy, superficial art.

The second Cluster & Eno album, After The Heat (Sky, 1978), with its emphasis on singing, is not any better. The average song is not particularly original, whether the tedious psychedelic pop of The Belldog or the funky, psychotic tongue-twister Broken Head. The album features only three classy numbers: Base & Apex, that mimicks Eastern classical music, Old Land, a delicate ambient watercolor, and Tzima N'arki, a middle-eastern chant over an obsessive tribal beat reminiscent of Talking Heads.

Cluster converted to Eno's ambient music with Sowiesoso (RCA, 1976 - Water, 2006), a piano-centered work which features the majestic, and almost triumphal, bolero of Sowiesoso, the minimalistic piano dances mutating into tribal orgy of Umleitung, the Eastern suspense of Halwa, the moving piano sonata of Es War Einmal. Zuckerzeit's electro-pop still permeates the sylvan atmosphere of Zum Wohl. They re-invent lounge music in the bluesy, jazzy In Ewigkeit.

Liliental (1976) documents a supergroup formed by Dieter Moebius, Conny Plank, Asmus Tietchens, Otto Bekker, and two members of Kraan (Helmut Hattler and Johannes Pappert).

The best of this phase is found in the cadenced watercolors of Grosses Wasser (Sky, 1979), such as Avanti and Isodea, which seem barely whispered by the synthesizers and glide about with classical grace. The suite Grosses Wasser (18 minutes), one of their most successful sonic “fairy tales,” uses as its elementary sounds the resonances of solitary chimes, juxtaposing piano chords and drops of water, psychedelic hisses and psychoanalytic whirlpools, with an interlude of robotic ballets and fanfares.

Cluster’s last album was the mediocre Curiosum (Sky, 1981).

The double-disc Live In Vienna 1980 (Downtown, 2010) documents a live performance and their only collaboration with Joshi Farnbauer.

In the 1990s the ambient-music revival would bring Moebius and Roedelius back into the spotlight, and they felt the need to resume their dialogue with Apropos Cluster (Curious, 1991), featuring a twenty-minute suite (the title track), and One Hour (BSC, 1995), two works largely improvised in the studio. First Encounter Tour (Purple Pyramid, 1997) and Live Japan (Southern, 1997) document live performances from this new phase.

After the partnership dissolved, Moebius recorded Moonwind (Sky, 1979) and devoted himself mostly to music for German television. With Connie Plank he recorded albums of mad synth-pop: Rastakraut Pasta (Sky, 1980 – Sky, 1994 – Water, 2009), by far the best, steeped in Jamaican and African inspirations, and Material (Sky, 1981). Zero Set (Sky, 1983 – Bureau B, 2009), with Plank and Neumeier, is his second masterpiece, a frenzied jam of electronics and percussion that anticipates 1990s glitch music. The fourth and last of the series, En Route (Curious, 1995), recorded in 1986, was released posthumously many years later (Plank died in 1987), and it foreshadowed 1990s techno and ambient genres. It would take 15 years for Ludwig's Law (Drag City, 1998) to be released—the album of recitations by Mayo Thompson (Red Crayola) with electronic accompaniment by Moebius and Plank. Moebius recorded only one album under his own name, the melodic and gentle Tonspuren (Sky, 1983 – Bureau B, 2009), apart from the soundtrack Blue Moon (Sky, 1986); but he made two (very cacophonous) albums with Gerd Beerbohm, Strange Music (Sky, 1982) and especially Double Cut (Sky, 1983 – Bureau B, 2010), containing the 21-minute suite Doppelschnitt that anticipates minimal techno, and two with Renziehausen, Ersatz (Pinpoint, 1990) and Ersatz II (Nova Era, 1990). Blotch (Scratch, 1999), his second solo album, is a cauldron of sampling, electronica, world-music, techno, and jazz.

Hans-Joachim Roedelius’s first solo album, Durch Die Wüste (Sky, 1978), was the result of two years of rehearsals with Plank, and represents one of the earliest examples of a fusion of classical chamber music and electronic ambient music. Peter Baumann instead helped him conceive and realize Jardin Au Feu (Barclay, 1979), another electroacoustic chamber work. Then Roedelius was truly on his own, author of three musical “self-portraits” that defined once and for all his soft and serene style, centered around the piano and punctuated by staccato rhythms.

In 1979 Roedelius moved to Austria, where some of his most lyrical works were born: Lustwandel (Sky, 1981), mostly for solo piano, Wenn Der Sudwind Weht (Sky, 1981 - Bureau B, 2009) for organ, synthesizers and piano, and above all the most austere work and the masterpiece of this phase, Offene Turen (Sky, 1982), in which Roedelius grew comfortable with the grand piano and the synthesizer. In the following years he specialized in recording “songs without words” in which one or more acoustic instruments are wrapped in delicate electronic layers: Wasser Im Wind (Ariola, 1982), and especially Geschenk Des Augenblicks (EG, 1984), a poignant poem to happiness (which also employs violin and cello). Continuing in that direction, Roedelius arrived with Wie Das Wispern Des Windes at an ethereal sound to the point of seeming unreal, as in Harold Budd’s best works.

At the end of the decade, however, Roedelius, struck by an ideological crisis, suddenly turned to danceable rhythms and saxophone improvisations, which ranged from the airy jazz-rock of Momenti Felici (Venture, 1987) to the aggressive fusion of Bastionen Der Liebe (Venture, 1989), leading a ten-piece ensemble. Even Der Ohren Spiegel (Multimoog, 1991) becomes an exercise in contrasting timbres and rhythms, especially in the twenty-four-minute Reflektorium. Meanwhile, Roedelius also founded the dance theater "Treffpunkt Wien" in the Austrian capital.

Accompanied by saxophone, double bass, and violin, Roedelius may have found in the sonatas of Variety Of Moods (Nova Era, 1990), particularly the ethereal Muy Encantado, the most atmospheric balance of this (slightly confused, yet always highly refined) period, as well as (with Solo-Monotonie) a much more human and decidedly more New Age path to his "pictorial" piano style. The long, transcendent meditation of Hasta Moderato demonstrates how Roedelius straddles Indian raga and Western impressionism, between minimalist repetitions and melodic vignettes.

At times Roedelius shows hints of regression toward a simpler past. Tace (Prudence, 1993) is one of his most relaxed and linear albums, infused with waltzes and marches. Two pieces in the style of Cluster, recorded years earlier with Brian Eno—Captured By Letters and Long Run—saw the light on Theatre Works (Multimood, 1994). Sinfonia Contemporanea n.1 (Prudence, 1994), a sort of ideal continuation of the program of Offene Turen (1982), merges this yearning for grace and innocence with bolder experimentalism (featuring Asmus Tietchens and Lars Strochen).

A separate chapter is formed by the five "Selbstportrait" albums, which gather the experiments attempted in the early 1970s by the artist, who had retreated monastically to a rural cottage with his favorite instruments.

Selbstportrait (Sky, 1980) contains tonal poems for solo piano. The saga continued with Selbstportrait (Sky, 1979), Selbstportrait II (Sky, 1980), and Selbstportrait III (Sky, 1981), and later in five more albums: IV: Flieg Vogel Fliege (Sky, 1982), Piano Piano (MaSo, 1991), VI: Diary Of The Unforgotten (Curious, 1995), Selbstportrait VII (Captain Trip, 1999), VIII: Introspection (Horizon, 2002).

Having also converted to the mass production of the independent-recording era, Roedelius would continue to flood the market with mediocre albums: Wie Das Wispern Des Windes (Cicada, 1986), Fruhling (Prudence, 1992), Romance In The Wilderness (Prudence, 1992), Cuando Adonde (Nova Era, 1992), Pink Blue And Amber (Prudence, 1996), La Nordica (Multimood, 1996), Aquarello (All Saints, 1998), Roedeliusweg (Prudence, 2000), Evermore (Klanggalerie, 2001); plus collaborations with Aqueous, namely Meeting The Magus (Hermetic, 1997), Alquimia, namely Move And Resonate (Prudence, 2000), Tim Story, namely The Persistance Of Memory (Seventh Chance, 2000) and Lunz (Groenland, 2002) and Inlandish (Gronland, 2008), and with Conrad Schnitzler, namely Acon 2000/1 (Captain Trip, 2002).

The triple-disc 1970 - 1971 (Water, 2008) collects the first three Kluster albums.

After Moebius and Roedelius left to form Cluster, Kluster recorded Admira (1971 - Important, 2008) and Vulcano: Live In Wuppertal 1971 (Important, 2008).

Roedelius collaborared with new-age artist Tim Story for Inlandish (Gronland, 2008) and with electronic keyboardist Stefan Schneider for Stunden (Bureau B, 2011).

Qua (Nepenthe, 2009), Cluster's first album in fourteen years, contains 17 vignettes that sounded outdated in the age of glitch music.

Moebius died in 2015.