Kraftwerk – “The Catalogue” (2009)
A review of the new box set of 8 of Kraftwerk’s proto-techno pop classics, all remastered by Ralf Hutter himself. There are some mixed reviews on this reissue series, partly due to the mixes themselves, but also 2 of the albums being renamed and with different covers than on some of the originals.
This is taken from The Quietus, Oct. 13, 2009 and was written by Jude Rogers…
The first time I heard Kraftwerk it was like a scorch of hot metal, a bolt of white light to the mind. I was 16, an indie girl from an industrial town, an unlikely target for machine music made by four men from Düsseldorf. Chris, my best friend and partner-in-crime in small-town escapism, had come round as usual on a damp Friday night, with four cans of Fosters that would go straight to our heads, and some dusty CDs he had bought with his pocket money. Usually we’d listen to Teenage Fanclub, Blur, or some dull, cut-price grunge, but this album looked different. An indigo-blue and luminous yellow cover; a monochrome robot with wild, widening eyes; a title, The Mix, set in Ceefax-style building blocks. I was scared of it, somehow, genuinely puzzled by its strangeness. And then its first track whirred, sputtered, shot into life, filling the corners of my mum’s old front room – a dark hole full of bibles and commemorative plates to old collieries – with something bright, clear, and incredibly modern. It sharpened the room’s old-fashioned edges; it set my synapses alight. And slowly but surely, Kraftwerk became mine.
In the years that followed, my obsession kept building, like a line of charge on a battery. I scoured old second-hand shops for their LPs on cassette – the correct medium of the future for them, I thought geekily – and wrote essays about them in my media studies class. In 1997, I joined a gang of pilled-up halfwits on a coach to Tribal Gathering, keeping myself cleanly awake with strong coffee and egg butties not to miss the band I loved live. I still remember going in their tent with good old Chris at my side two hours early, joined only by a few, anoraked middle-aged Germans. But Christ, it was worth it. That gig remains the greatest thing I have ever seen – a life-changing explosion of neon lights and numbers, colours and sounds, feelings and sensations.
And now it is 2009. This girl from Wales and these men from North Rhine-Westphalia have been together for 15 long years. Listening to The Catalogue, eight remastered versions of the bulk of Kraftwerk’s output – 1975’s Autobahn to 2003’s Tour De France Soundtracks being the band’s pristine parameters – I now understand why we have so much in common. Their music still sounds masterful, sure, if a little too shiny, but it also sounds innocent, wide-eyed and searching, qualities to which I have always related.
This is because Kraftwerk make folk music for the first generation brought up with technology – not as a distant phenomenon, but a tangible and incoming reality in our homes and our lives. It’s all there in their sounds on their records – the whoosh of the car and the train-track, the clang of metal on metal, the bleep and beep of the terminal. It’s all there in their name, too – the German term for power plant, which carries the ghost of old-fashioned manufacture in its two, sweet syllables. For a girl who remembered her father buying a Spectrum ZX81 as a tiny child, and the same man marvelling over the arrival of the pocket calculator, no wonder this combination of homeliness and strangeness in Kraftwerk’s music – the heimlich and the unheimlich – had a lightning effect.
After their early progressive and florid early albums – 1973’s Ralf and Florian being a particular gem – 1974’s Autobahn and 1976’s Radio-Activity redefined Kraftwerk’s identity. Wolfgang Flur and Karl Bartos were now on board, giving the group a four-man format that nodded towards pop and rock and roll mythology, while subverting it gorgeously, and rather robotically.
These albums also flirted with the idea of Germany, some would say rather dangerously. For instance, the Autobahn was embraced in Hitler’s grand plans for his country; the original front cover of Radio-Activity presents a distinctive 1938 transistor radio, which became popularly known as “Goebbels’ snout”; and the decision to call the opening track of Trans Europe Express ‘Europe Endless’ did seem rather questionable. But then we find out that the Autobahn album is based on the very first road that was opened in 1932, a year before Hitler’s succession to the Chancellorship; that this particular transistor radio allowed Germans to hear the world beyond National Socialism for the first time; and that the Trans-Europe Express stood for freedom of movement in an European mainland still frozen by the Cold War, then you get a sense of what Kraftwerk were trying to do. They were creating a new identity for their country by embracing the healthy advances of their past, while placing their hopes in the present, and the gleam of the future. In effect, these men born just after the end of the Second World War were starting again.
That said, Kraftwerk’s music obviously came with warnings, too – real achtungs, baby – although they were similarly conveyed in innocent voices. Heard now, ‘Radio-Activity’ still sounds like a terrifyingly lovely thing, a substance floating around the set of a children’s TV programme – “in the air for you and me” – before we take in the terror of the quickening Geiger Counter, and the lines about “chain reaction and mutation/Contaminated population”. There is black humour in their early work, too, most tellingly in the title of ‘Ohm Sweet Ohm’ and the shop-window rave-up of ‘Showroom Dummies’.
1978’s The Man Machine and 1981’s Computer World move on, and sum up the conflicting sensations that emerge in the interface between human and hi-tech – both the excitement that can bubble and blister in those connections, as well as the numbness it produces that can soothe and dull the cells. Looking back, what’s most striking now is how prescient Kraftwerk were in capturing these awkward emotions, making it hardly surprising that their sound took a while to catch on. But after ‘The Model’ became a no. 1 hit in 1982, four years after it was recorded, the whole fabric of pop was quickly restitched. Synth-pop, hip hop, electro, house and techno were all weaved from this pattern, creating something that glowed with a whole new kind of being.
Sadly, the later Kraftwerk recordings – The Mix aside, of course, mainly for reasons of sentimentality – never quite packed the same punch for me. Perhaps it was because Kraftwerk worked best as chroniclers of the fast-paced present, capturing it on tape before its shimmered into the world on its own. Ralf Hütter’s cycling accident in the early 1980s couldn’t have helped productivity either, and the fact that 1986’s patchy Electric Cafe has been renamed Technopop for this release, suggested all was not well at KlingKlang at the time. Nevertheless, the band still should have credit for the way that their sounds still moved on. ‘Boing Boom Tschak’ from Technopop, for instance, still sounds shockingly, mesmerisingly alien after 23 years; while ‘Dentaku’ from The Mix reveals the band’s fabulous commitment to turning international languages into musical instruments. Even the pitchshifting wondrousness of 2003’s Tour De France Soundtracks – an album that should have sounded as dated as a muddy BMX, given that it was made by men in their late 50s– managed to sound entirely fresh, but still entirely them.
In recent years, however, this wide-eyed woman-machine has grown apart from Kraftwerk in their present-day incarnation. It doesn’t help that my beloved Florian Schneider has gone, that the band’s line-up changes are starting to rival those of the Sugababes, nor that their 2003 and 2009 British gigs were simple re-runs of the show I adored back in 1997. There’s also been a cleaning-up of the sound on these albums that diminishes their potency a little – I miss my cassette hiss, obviously, and the background ping of the beer-can ring-pulls. But these are minor fusses. When I take this catalogue in its entirety, Kraftwerk’s magic still astonishes . After all, they did something phenomenal: reconfiguring the promises and horrors of the 20th century through the prism of the innocent, imperial future. They also took us somewhere sublime by using the language of our everyday lives. Full of reminders and markers of our immovable modernity, Kraftwerk gave us our folk music.
Jude Rogers
“Holger Czukay’s Short History of Can” (1997)
Holger Czukay of Can wrote this article for Perfect Sound Forever in May 1997…
CAN’s first recording ever was made in June 1968 during our first concert for a modern art exhibition at Schloss Nvrvenich near Cologne. It is called PREHISTORIC FUTURE and was released 1984 on the Tago Mago label in Paris as a limited number of mono-cassettes (2000 pressings). For the first time we recorded samples of the students’ rebellion of 1968 in Paris and these became an important part of the concert. From there on we were lucky in obtaining the permission for building up our own studio in Schloss Nvrvenich. This studio consisted of 2 stereo tape-deck machines and about 4 microphones. A musician’s amplifier was used as our ‘recording mixer’. We immediately started recording film music for a young German film director and through this experience we decided to become a rhythmically orientated ‘heavy weight’ group in combination with ethnological influences- sometimes at least. And as we were trying to imitate ‘primitive sounds’ CAN ended up with its Ethnological Forgery Serie and did not even stop at imitating a Japanese No spectacle. Of course we regarded these attempts more from the humorous than from a perfect performance side.
The first regular CAN album was MONSTER MOVIE and the first piece we recorded was ‘Father Cannot Yell.’ We thought more of a collapsing building in slow motion pictures than becoming heroes on our instruments. Everything was spontaneously recorded by ‘instant composition’. ‘Yoo Doo Right’ was an unusual long piece of music at that time with a rhythm which did not belong to the world of Rock ‘n Roll. It seemed more to be played by an electric tribe band with adequate instruments of that time.
The album SOUNDTRACKS became more an in-between project,because it took CAN much more time in finishing the double album TAGO MAGO than we thought. Of course we could not live by our income from live gigs or record sales and so CAN was lucky in doing several film musics. The title tracks of the pictures were released as soundtracks on the SOUNDTRACK album. ‘Don’t Turn the Light on, Leave Me Alone’ was Damo’s first recording with CAN ever. This piece expresses Damo’s mood at that time I think, after I found him singing or ‘praying’ loud in the streets of Munich. Jaki and me were sitting outside in a cafe when Damo came near. I said to Jaki: ‘This will be our new singer.’ Jaki: ‘how can you say that, you don’t even know him.’ I got up from my seat, went to Damo and asked him if he is free for the evening. We were an experimental rock group and we were going to play a concert the night- sold out. Damo said he had nothing special to do, so why shouldn’t he sing. The venue was packed that evening and Damo started murmuring like a meditating monk. All of a sudden he turned into a fighting samurai, the audience was shocked and almost everybody left the hall. About 30 Americans were left and got totally excited about what they heard. Among them was Hollywood actor David Niven who probably thought he was attending to some sort of nightmare happening.
TAGO MAGO was CAN’s official second album and was an attempt in achieving a mystery musical world from light to darkness and return. The album consisted not only out of regularly recorded music, but for the first time we combined ‘in-between-recordings’, that means the musicians were secretly recorded in the pauses when a new microphone and recording set up was being established. In that time the rest of the group just played in order to make the time pass by instead of waiting till the technical problems were solved. And there was always one microphone and one recorder on standby position for such cases. Altogether certainly a psychedelic experience, and the studio itself even turned into something new e.g. by changing dramatically the whole illumination.
At the end of 1971 CAN moved into another village with their studio equipment where we rented an old cinema which wasn’t any longer used as such.The walls were covered by new walls out of 1500 military matresses and the studio looked like an elephant from inside. We could achieve an excellent dry and ambient sound in there and the interior submitted a cozy landscape feeling with all possibilities of spontaneous recordings. EGE BAMYASI was the first album made in this new environment and reflects the group being in a lighter mood than it was in Schloss Nvrvenich. ‘Vitamin C’ became the title track of the Hollywood movie ‘Dead Pigeon’ by Samuel Fuller and ‘Spoon’ was another title track of a TV-gangster series. Everytime about 30 million people switched their TV on, they heard this and so it didn’t surprise when ‘Spoon’ became a top ten hit in Germany. And ‘Spoon’ was one of the first pieces banded on tape in combination of an electric drum machine and a drummer who was himself an i n h u m a n machine.
As ‘Spoon’ was so successful CAN could afford having some summer holidays for the first time in its short history. And when everyone returned back to the Inner Space Studio, the music had this summer feeling too. A lot of editings and cuttings were involved during the production and for the first time I could concentrate myself only on bass playing and didn’t function as CAN’s recording engeneer at the same time. This became the job for our roadies now. Especially ‘Bel Air’ showed CAN in a state of being an electric symphony group performing a peaceful though sometimes dramatic landscape painting.
And it was the calm weather before the storm too. Damo got married to a German girl from the Jehovas’ Witness religion and left CAN. For the rest of the group it was the feeling of a powerful fist strike into one’s stomach. We tried out many other singers,but nobody suited to us anymore. So guitarist Michael Karoli and space organist Irmin Schmidt and sometimes me filled the gap. SOON OVER BABALUMA was the last album which was recorded straight onto stereo without a multi-tracking machine. An era came to an end. But it was also the birth of something new. ‘Quantum Physics’ became one of the first ambient music pieces with a sort of techno character thanks to Jaki’s fabulous machine drumming and Irmin’s prehistoric synthesizer ‘alpha 77′.
In all these years from 1968 to 1974 a lot of unofficial in between recordings came to existence. This was somehow the other face of CAN. These recordings were first released as a LIMITED EDITION album and later got expanded to UNLIMITED EDITION. This double album witnesses the extraordinary mood of the Inner Space Studio and only in such a place these recordings had been possible. We have tested out other professional studios but none could equal our private home studio which put the musicians in such a special state of creativity.
In 1975, CAN obtained their first 16 track recorder and that gave a lot of change to the groups musical output. LANDED became the first CAN album which got a real mix- a professional mix so to speak. The ambient aspect had its successor in ‘Unfinished’ and for the first time a guest musician appeared on an CAN album: Olaf Kubler from Amon Duul played saxophone on ‘Red Hot Indians’.
FLOW MOTION showed how CAN got influenced by reggae music, though no song of this album is actually reggae music. But I remember attending for the first time Bob Marley in concert and I was really impressed by the drums and bass and the reggae-designed guitar work. The very sinister ‘Smoke’ reminded me of CAN getting back into the sixties again and ‘I Want More’ took CAN into the U.K. charts, giving an impression of CAN’s danceable power. One of my favourite pieces became ‘Flow Motion’ itself and this time it didn’t matter that nobody was singing. It was the nucleus of the group performing this music as it had been from the very beginning since its existence.
The times were changing. During a TV-recording in England we met the musicians of TRAFFIC and two of them soon visited us at Inner Space. Rebop and Rosko Gee liked the way we were approaching music and so they got involved as the new temporary CAN members leading especially the rhythms into a fluent bombardment. It was the time when I invented a new instrumental scenario for myself which switched CAN to different medias like radio tuning, prepared samples of other ethno worlds, electronic treatments and a different instrumental line up as such. ‘Animal Waves’ of SAW DELIGHT became a journey into other countries and their musical cultures. All of this was synchronized by an activated morse key. Without our new members from TRAFFIC, this intensive musical flow would have never been established.
And as everything comes once to an end, the CAN album showed a last time the glance of a vanishing star. ‘All Gates Open’ is synonymous for it. And we could take that title straight. All gates really came open for each member of the band going their own musical way which everyone had dreamed of – until 1987, when our first singer Malcolm Mooney wrote us a letter from the United States asking if we couldn’t come together again. Since his departure from the group he got named as an artist without having made an attempt as a singer again. He wanted to know how it feels again standing with the band behind a microphone, which had made him so sick when he had left. We all came together in the beautiful landscape of South France and a new spirit came up with the first recordings. In the meantime the group became slowly matured still remaining the original CAN of the old days with an uptodate musical output. RITE TIME was born and especially ‘In the Distance lies the Future’ became one of my favourite CAN pieces of all time.
With such an amount of musical material recorded in around 10 years it became obvious that new combinations and shorted versions were finding its way into CANIBALISM I to III. The listener who gets in contact with CAN’s music for the first time will get a concentrated impression on certain essential aspects. ‘Animal Waves’ on CANIBALISM II was never cutted so effectively to the point as it is on this album. And this is only one example.
One thing shouldn’t been forgotten: when our first album entitled PREPARED TO MEET THY PNOOM was finished no record company wanted to get hold of that kind of music. So we decided to go on recording and try it again. This was leading to MONSTER MOVIE and we made a private pressing out of it, before a record company wanted to sign us. These very first recordings were later released as DELAY 1968. When I did the mastering in the beginning of the eighties the enigmatic German producer Conny Planck listened to it and got excited saying: ‘As long as CAN playes ‘Soul’ they are unbeatable.’ ‘Little Star of Bethlehem’ is one of the first recordings with inserted overdub parts of the whole group.
1997 becomes the year where other musicians show the timeless aspect of CAN’s music in the new remix album SACRILEGE. And this is the Sound of CAN in the nineties.
Holger Czukay
Neu! – “Neu! 2″ (1973)
An undated review of Neu!’s 2nd album from the PopMatters website (circa early 2000s), written by Nicholas Taylor. This was one strange but fascinating album…
Neu! 2 is one of those rare albums that challenges the very notion of music itself. It scrutinizes the concept of the album, the relationship between the artist and the listener, the producer and the consumer, as well as making the very notion of originality extremely dubious.
In Krautrock/art-rock circles, the story of Neu! 2 is pretty well known. Neu! was formed in 1973 in Düsseldorf, Germany. Multi-instrumentalists Michael Rother (bass, guitar, keyboards) and Klaus Dinger (guitar, drums, keyboards, vocals) left an early formation of what was to become the most famous Krautrock band, Kraftwerk, dissatisfied with the band’s movement toward an entirely electronic sound (for the best example, listen to their classic “Autobahn”). Rother and Dinger wanted to pursue a more minimalist guitar experiment. Hence, Neu! was born.
Neu! recorded their eponymous 1972 debut in four days, and despite the album’s simplicity in terms of both melodies and rhythms, it sold extremely well in West Germany. When they went into the studio in 1973 to record Neu! 2, however, Rother and Dinger ran out of money after recording only a few tracks. Ergo, the bizarreness of Neu! 2. Desperate to get a full-length LP into the stores, Neu! remixed the existing songs at different speeds, resulting, for example, with three versions of both “Super”: along with the normal speed version, we are treated to alternate versions of the same track, simply sped up to 78 rpms (“Super 78″) and slowed down to 16 rpms (“Super 16″). The effect is startling and unsettling-much like the films of Ed Wood, the famed ‘worst director of all time’, these cheap, hastily thrown together tracks leave you wondering if these guys are really serious.
The tracks originally recorded for Neu! 2, however, are wonderful. The meat of the album is the 11-minute driving instrumental, “Für Immer [Forever].” A straight, dry drumbeat consistently chugs along as two clean guitars intertwine with a lightly droning keyboard. As the track progresses, new keyboards glide gently in and out and minimalist lead guitars rise and fade. The effect is something like the Velvet Underground under a warm blanket of synthesizers. “Neuschnee” also stands out, opening with plucked strings ringing out starkly, giving way to another driving instrumental, driven less by thumping guitars than a sublimely beautiful lead guitar ran through so many processors and effects pedals as to sound like a distorted synthesizer.
“Super,” the album’s closer, is nothing short of a time warp: instead of it being 1973, you could swear it was 1977. “Super” is a driving proto-punk guitar swirl, showing us what the Sex Pistols and the Ramones would sound like at their most daring and weird moments. In Dinger’s warped and effected snarls and screams, you hear a prototype for the “Oy! Oy!” of the Ramones later in the decade. And while we’re in the time machine, Dinger’s wailing and desperate gasps and indecipherable yelps on “Lila Engel [Lilac Angel]” are pure Thom Yorke-lilting, delicate, and amazingly affecting.
For all of the sparse greatness of these tracks, however, the fact remains that Neu! 2 is a joke. Not only is the band’s name (which means “New” in German) laughable in it’s tongue-in-cheek over-enthusiasm (an exclamation point?!?), but the cover of Neu! 2 barely qualifies as a cover at all. Over a stark white background, the word “Neu!” is written diagonally in gray in front of a crudely spray-painted bright fluorescent pink ‘2′. Not only did they not have the money to put together enough songs for an album, it also seems they did not have enough money to even attempt making a presentable album cover. And while you can rationalize the “remixes” till you’re blue in the face, they are not “remixes” at all-they are jokes. To play a record at 78 rpms and call it a remix is to throw the whole idea of remixing out the window.
So why do we remember Neu! today? Why are they valorized by such diverse artists as David Bowie, Brian Eno, Sonic Youth, Pere Ubu, Stereolab, and Radiohead? Precisely because of their practical joking. To dismantle the structures of rock and start fresh, you need jokers like Neu! to create music so unabashedly ridiculous and bizarre as to make the notion of “serious” rock a joke. To get some place new, you have to make the values of the past seem ridiculous. Isn’t all really great rock, after all, just a joke? What about “Louie, Louie,” Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, the Beatles’ “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number),” or the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray?” As great as they are, all of these are jokes.
What all of these artists did in their levity and glee was to push the limits of what “serious” fans would consider art. When an album like Neu! 2 can be re-released by Astralwerks and be heralded as a trailblazing visionary work that never got its proper due, the responsibility lays not on Neu! but on us. They were just bored musicians in a studio making funny sounds – we actually consume those sounds. So when Neu! simply fills in an album with the most ridiculous Ed Wood tactics and get away with it, what does that say about music listeners? When does minimalism give way to pure laziness (or, in this case, poverty)? Are we so enlightened that we can find beauty and meaning in Neu!’s silliness? Or are we simply pretentious fops, heralding anything bizarre as genius, losing all critical insight and some degree of objective evaluation? Neu! 2 is not a great album, but it is amazingly provocative and challenging. It pushes rock to its breaking point.
Is this an album? Is this music? Is this art? I certainly don’t know. But then again, I don’t think Neu! knows either, which is what is so thrilling.
Nicholas Taylor
Richard Gehr – “Krautrock Revisited: Life After Can and Ash Ra Tempel” (1998)
Spin magazine article from July 20, 1998…
Even before Kraftwerk’s great mid-’70s cars, trains, and airwaves trilogy, Krautrock was largely about getting away – especially from Germany itself. The band Can in particular fused cut-and-paste wanderlust with a transgeneric rhythmic paganism guaranteed to transport musicians and listeners alike out of their skulls back into their dancing butts. More ethereal, Ash Ra Tempel sought utopia through psychedelic guitarist Manuel Göttsching’s long and winding solos.
Can conceptualist Holger Czukay pioneered what I call “short-wave rock”, a subgenre in which the exotic sound of the other disrupts implacable beats. Czukay had studied with avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose seminal 1966 work Telemusik combines electronic music and international short-wave radio transmissions into the eeriest Martian mix tape you’ll ever hear. Shortly after joining Can, Czukay attempted to emulate Stockhausen with Canaxis, a dry sandwich of choral loops and Asian samples.
A decade later, however, Czukay announced his departure from Can with Movies, a gloriously giddy traipse through ethnodelic soundscapes, and a much more successful fourth-world montage than Canaxis. Two years in the making, Movies develops the slicker, funkier side of the multi-flavoured Can. If film is the locus of imaginary worlds, as Czukay believed, Movies is a virtual Imax experience. It kicks off with a refreshing blast of hot summer funk (‘Cool in the Pool’) before venturing into woozy sampled Arabia (‘Persian Love’) and extended cinematic reveries (‘Hollywood Symphony’), all intercut with bits and pieces of found dialogue and sound effects. Czukay cutting-room flair for unlikely juxtapositions is almost as evident on his 1981 follow-up, On the Way to the Peak of Normal, whose slippy, opiated grooves float on Pink Floyd carrier waves and a Zappa-esque sense of the cosmic absurd. The key tracks here are ‘Ode to Perfume’ and ‘Fragrance’, which Baudelaire fans will recognize as the poet’s royal road to ecstatic elsewhereness.
After Can, keyboardist Irmin Schmidt – another former Stockhausen student – drifted toward (relatively) traditional song structures. On 1987’s Musk at Dusk and 1991’s Impossible Holidays (a double bill reissued on a single Spoon/Mute disc), Schmidt leads a musical tour through swoony vacation scenarios exuding the dreamlike allure and romantic artifice of movie sets. Schmidt is literally all over the place on these records. The rhythm section lays down fat, funky Carribean beats underneath Paris accordions, breathy chanson lyrics brimful of mock (“The women have no pity / The men are sometimes shitty”) melodrama, and more ennui than Roxy Music.
Drummer Jackie Liebezeit and guitarist Michael Karoli were Can’s real groove shamans. Deluge – Karoli’s newly unabridged 1984 solo album – is a sweetly flowing tube ride of a record buoyed along by Polly Eltes’s repetitive sing-song chants. It’s a reggae album, really, a dubbed-up tribal trip through hippie truisms (“sooner or later something will come along”). Sadly, only the first three tracks feature Liebezeit’s amazing man-machine drumming – as though Eltes’s patchouli-scented meditations had forced him to bail out prematurely and thus miss the cleansing rainstorm – ‘Deluge (The River)’ – that washes everything away
If Krautrock is defined largely by droning, rhythmic minimalism, Ash Ra Tempel could be the rule-proving exception. Manuel Göttsching finds his bliss in seemingly endless jams edited down to album-side portions. The ecstatically spacey ‘Freak ‘n’ Roll’, which kicks off the Purple Pyramid reissue of 1973’s Join Inn, contains nearly twenty minutes of top-shelf improvisation. Sounding uncannily similar to Anthem of the Sun-era Jerry Garcia, Göttsching is kicked further into the stratosphere by prog/psych-keyboardist (and former Ash Ra member) Klaus Schulze’s squealing oscillations. The following year’s Starring Rosi (on the same disc) highlights vocalist Rosi Mueller, whose gypsy-queen-in-rainbow-land lyrics can unfortunately drag even Göttsching’s otherworldly flights back down to German soil. And who wants to go there?
Richard Gehr
Cluster – “Cluster 71″ (1971)
This review comes from the Dusted website and was written by Doug Mosurock (June 1, 2006)…
This article – and this record, Cluster 71 – is about being first. It’s about the perils of innovation, about being the first guest to arrive at the party and having to make idle chit-chat with the host until someone else arrives. In Cluster’s case, they were about three or four years early to the party. Some would say that even in 2006 they should still have waited a bit longer before showing up.
The story is as such: Cluster with a C precipitated out of Kluster with a K, following the departure of Conrad Schnitzler from the original trio rounded out by Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius. Hitching up with engineer Conny Plank, who’d worked closely with some of Cluster’s peer group (Neu!) and would work with even more as the years went on, Cluster 71 was delivered to the Philips label, who at the time was busy snatching up any and all German rock music, no matter the variety. Labelmate status with Lucifer’s Friend, Silberbart, Weed, Eloy, and Kraftwerk had no bearing on Cluster, or the three pieces that comprised their debut album … an album with no vocals, no percussion, no single, no melodies, no static themes (though there was plenty of static), not even any titles (the tracks are listed by length: “15:33,” “7:38,” and “21:17”). Philips, therefore, had no clue what to do with the group, and with no way to market the release, there would of course be no follow-up granted, at least through their channels.
So what is Cluster 71? How about a clearinghouse of ideas, for starters. To make this music, Moebius and Roedelius built up traditional instrumentation (namely strings and organs) through a Danger Room full of sonic obstacles: effects pedals, then oscillators, tone generators, ring modulators, mechanical equipment, found objects, household tools, and testing gear. The duo would use the instruments to generate a signal, then trap it inside the effects and manipulate the sounds from there. It should be mentioned that in spite of the hellacious buzzing and astral detritus that fills these tracks, no synthesizers were used in the making of Cluster 71. Few existed at the time, and those that did were certainly outside of the group’s budget or schedule to become proficient in their use. Curiously, their approach here would have certainly been far more difficult and risky to pull off; it’s uncertain that any of their outboard “gear” was stable, to say the least, but notions of time coding didn’t bear out until the advent of MIDI in the mid-’80s, so what they did here was such completely uncharted territory that the notion of a chart in the first place seems totally ridiculous.
What else is Cluster 71? How about a sonic minefield. I listened to this for the first time about a month ago, having been familiarized earlier in their life with their “peers” of the Krautrock ilk, realizing into the first track that I’d heard nothing like it at all. I put the record away, perplexed, and decided to focus on work instead of devoting thought processes in untangling it. Coming back to write this piece, I’m still flummoxed by the sounds here, particularly in the third track and its radar-like wah-wah ping over what sounds like a nest of electronic wasps swarming in a wind tunnel. That being said, those who listen closely would be hard-pressed to not be awed by the humanity here. At no point does it sound like the machines have taken over. Nothing is quantized, nothing is even, nothing is repeated precisely. These are musical arguments, sometimes tense, sometimes slack. These are audio letters written in a language two men are only trying to learn. Hearing one performer turn the knob on another’s steady rhythm and throw the whole thing on a different course is something to get used to, but then again, this whole album is something to get used to.
Anything else? How about the first, and perhaps only, record of its kind. Cluster 71 informs the following three decades and change of outsider music, and it sojourns inwards; sprinkling its kosmische dust on techno, experimental music and composition, leftfield hip-hop production, Krautrock, New Age, even latter-day dub, doing so not only from an adventurous and refreshingly non-academic vantage point, but also from a sonically clean, open space, a far cry from the noise recordings of today, where more often than not the medium and studio textures become an accomplice to the sounds themselves. Other musicians, not the least of which Cluster themselves, would carry these ideas on to their future work and refine them into what we know to exist today.
But being first always has that curse. Most of the time someone will yell atop the mountain (or find a publicist to do so) about supposed musical innovations that are likened to installing a clock into an existing invention. When you’re truly well ahead of the curve, you don’t know how to tell people about it, because you don’t have the time – you’re innovating and refining all the while. Such was the case with Cluster 71, out of print for decades, with even its represses commanding high sums, at least up until now. Water’s reissue captures both the original Philips artwork and the Sky reissue’s, and adds well-written liner notes and a remastering job. Curiously, there are no bonus tracks, no scraps from the session. This is fine, however, because Cluster 71 stands wholly apart from the group’s discography and any other records like it. If you’re looking for a proven, digestible good time, there are plenty of other things out there for you. If you are jonesing for non-distilled, groundbreaking experimentation and primordial influence, this is your jam.
Doug Mosurock
Russ Curry – “A Curious History of Cluster” (1996)
This article is from the D>Elektro website (link below) and was written in May of 1996…
I clearly remember hearing Cluster’s Sowiesoso album for the first time. It sounded like some heavenly music except that the primary instrument appeared to be a coffee percolator. It was electronic music that, amidst the squeaks and whistles of the machinery, conveyed a human warmth and humor. Folk music for the future: bizarre, yet friendly.
It has been over 25 years and a whopping 80 albums since Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius first joined forces to create some of the most compelling and strikingly original work in electronic music.
Due in part to the challenging and almost unclassifiable nature of its music, Cluster has been little recognized when compared with some of their contemporaries such as Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream and Can. Nevertheless, the duo has influenced a generation of contemporary musicians.
The origin of the group can be traced back to the activities of Conrad Schnitzler, one of the first students of German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys at the Duesseldorf Fine Arts Academy. Schnitzler, affectionately known as the Madman of Berlin, was a key figure in the Berlin undergraound art scene of the late 60s.
In 1968, Schnitzler formed the Zodiak Free Arts Lab in Berlin with, among others, Roedelius, who had previously worked with Schnitzler in the avant-garde groups Plus/Minus and Noises. The Lab was known for its emphasis on experimentation and blending of different disciplines to create new forms of artistic expression. While the Lab quickly became a focal point for the Berlin underground, it was only one of many related activities.
In 1969, Schnitzler happened upon Moebius, a student of Akademie Grafik in Berlin, who was cooking in a restaurant. Upon this unlikely first meeting, Schnitzler immediately enlisted Moebius to join him and Roedelius as the third member of Ensemble Kluster.
Kluster’s approach to music owed much to the Zodiak’s free-wheeling attitude. Such “instruments” as alarm clocks and kitchen utensils were used in lengthy improvisational performances. The trio performed widely throughout Germany.
The group’s first two albums, Klopfzeichen and Zwei Osterie, came about when Schnitzler noticed a newspaper item about a church organist interested in new music. The recording sessions were sponsored and arranged by agreement with the church.
This agreement was reflected in the religious content of the text on the first track of each album. Recorded in late 1970, these releases capture Kluster in its loosest, darkest and most improvisational mood and are regarded today as important early works of industrial music.
During the recording of these albums, Kluster met producer/engineer Conny Plank, who had begun his career as a soundman for Marlene Dietrich. The relationship with Plank would quickly grow into a strong personal and creative bond that would last until his death in December 1987.
After a third similarly dark album, Kluster und Eruption (1971), Schnitzler, described by one associate as “born to go solo,” left to pursue a solo career. Moebius and Roedelius continued, with a slight name modification, as Cluster.
Their first two releases as a duo, Cluster (1971) and Cluster II (1972), continued the commitment to improvisation but developed a focus on sound structure as introduced by Plank, who produced and composed the tracks with Cluster. Cluster also continued to tour extensively throughout Europe and North Africa. One memorable performance included non-stop overnight festival set “opening” for Jimi Hendrix.
In 1973, the pair left the industrial environs of Berlin and Hamburg to live in the rural German village of Forst and establish a private studio. They were joined by guitarist Michael Rother of the German avant-pop group NEU!. Cluster’s next release, Zuckerzeit (1974), (recorded with instruments “borrowed” from Rother while he was away) clearly reflected the change of locale.
The short, tuneful tracks are outright toe-tappers in comparison to the foreboding sounds of their previous albums. With persistent rythmn-machine grooves at the front of the mix on almost every track, Zuckerzeit reflected and perhaps anticipated the electronic pop sound that would soon be popularized by Kraftwerk on their album Autobahn.
Moebius and Roedelius also collaborated with Rother as Harmonia on two albums, Muzik von Harmonia (1974) and Harmonia Deluxe (1975) blending Cluster’s avant-garde tendencies with NEU!’s pop sound. Both Zuckerzeit and especially Muzik von Harmonia, made a great impression on recent Roxy Music departee Brian Eno who contacted the group and played a live date with them at the legendary Fabrik in Hamburg.
In 1976 Eno and Harmonia recorded a studio album [Harmonia '76] that clearly presages such future relases as Eno’s Another Green World and Cluster’s 1976 album, Sowiesoso.
Sowiesoso marked the beginning of a nearly exclusive relationship with Hamburg’s Sky Records that would last eight years. Though it was recorded in just two days, the album introduced a fully realized marriage of electronic sounds with a pastoral warmth.
It was during this period that Roedelius began to record solo material. Though the first solo album to be released was 1978’s Durch die Wuste, he actually began experimenting with solo material in 1973. Segments of these early works spanning 1973-78 were eventually released beginning in 1980 with his Selbstportrait series, of which six installments have been issued to date.
He also released the subdued Lustwandel recorded with former Tangerine Dream member (and future Private Music founder) Peter Baumann.
As a duo, Cluster reunited with Eno for two albums, Cluster and Eno (1977) and After the Heat (1979) that briefly brought them international attention. Eno apparently enjoyed the sessions so much that he lost track of time as he had to be summoned from Forst by David Bowie to begin work on the Low sessions.
Cluster also worked with Baumann on their austere 1979 album Grosses Wasser. The truly curious Curiosum (1981) marked the beginning of a nine-year hiatus in their partnership.
In 1990 Cluster surprised everyone (including themselves) by reuniting for the appropriately titled Apropos Cluster. This work documented not so much a “comeback” as a continuation of their musical dialogue. Curiously enough, this release was their first to be issued in the States.
Moebius continued a string of truly brilliant collaborations during the 1980s most notably with Conny Plank. He experimented with aggressive proto-techno electronics on hist first solo album, Tonspuren (1983), and raw electro-noise on two albums with Gerd Beerbohm, Strange Music (1982) and Double Cut (1983).
In collaboration with Plank, Moebius’ harsher tendencies were whittled, twisted and mutated into sheer strangeness producing three truly odd masterpieces of sound experimentation, Rastakrautpasta (1979), Material (1981), and Zero Set (1984).
Their last work before Plank’s death was En Route (1986) which anticipated the techno/ambient movement by almost a full decade. Moebius briefly paired up with Karl Renzeihausen for two early 90s albums as Ersatz.
Moebius, who has also worked in German television, has recently begun work on his first solo album in twelve years.
Roedelius, the more prolific of the two, has released numerous solo albums and works in a variety of collaborative formats, most recently as a member of the group Aquarello. Has has also composed extensively for theater and dance. Notable among his recent solo albums are Theatreworks (1994), Sinfonia Contempora (1995) and Selbstportrait VI (1995).
The current wave of interest focusing on electronic music along with Cluster’s reinvigorated output sees 1996 as perhaps the duo’s highest profile period a full twenty-seven years after Schnitzler first saw Moebius baking a Strudel.
This year an ambitious reissue campaign by Gyroscope brings 13 releases from the group’s “golden years’ on Sky Records to a North American audience for the first time ever. Cleopatra records recently issued the first two Kluster albums (with bonus tracks) marking not only their first U.S. releases but the first-ever CD release for these stunning 25-year-old recordings. The most recent efition of Cluster music has been the epic One Hour (1995).
And finally, the Erste Begegnung (First Encounter) Tour brings Moebius and Roedelius to the U.S. for the first time ever despite having been a touring entity for over a quarter of a century. In addition to the tour, 1996/97 will see the continued release of new and old, live and studio work (including some surprises) related to Cluster and a continued higher profile.
At a time when many of their peers have either left the music business or are producing pale imitations of their previous work, Cluster’s music remains as odd and as interestiing, as bizarre and as friendly as ever.
Roedelius recently described their continued ability to produce interesting work, “we are like two old chaps who communicate better through sounds than words. We did what we did and we do what we do. It was never a problem for us because the name, the category, didn’t interest us.”
Russ Curry
Die Rattles – “The Witch” (1970)
This psychedelic offering from Germany’s Die Rattles (The Rattles) was originally recorded in 1968 and was a hit in their homeland. This re-recording from 1970 surprisingly made it to the charts in America. They were in fact, the first German band to make the American charts. The song itself sold over a million copies worldwide.
They also had a number of other hits in Germany during the mid-60s.
This pre-Kosmische band was actually where Achim Reichel (who eventually formed A.R. & Machines) started out.
A.R. & Machines – “Truth and Probability (A Lexicon for Self-Knowledge)” (1971)
Germany’s demented genius Achim Reichel made some of THE strangest music in the history of mankind back in the early 70s. If this isn’t the most demented piece of music ever released, I don’t know what is. This guy had to have done too much acid. If not, then he is obviously insane. Either way, he probably should have never been allowed near a recording studio. Thank God he was though.
This “song” is from his 1971 album Die Grüne Reise (“The Green Journey”).
Tangerine Dream – “Alpha Centauri” (1971)
Written by someone named stereomachine, this was written for the Head Heritage/Unsung website (to which I have contributed pieces over the years), Feb. 5, 2005. Link to this site is in the blogroll section…
The first Tangerine Dream album, called Electronic Meditation did not contain any synthesizer, which makes it an anomaly in the band’s catalog, who’s made reputation by using all the cutting edge synth technology in past three or four decades. Rather, it was a jam session made by a psychedelic rock band interested in improvisation and unusual unconventional sound experimentation, which was marred by being a bit too unfocused. The line-up consisted of, besides guitarist Edgar Froese, multi-instrumentalist Conrad Schnitzler and drummer Klaus Schulze, both of whom became solo artists using mainly electronics, just as would Tangerine Dream subsequently. After Electronic Meditation, changes would come: exit Shnitzler and Schulze, enter Christopher Franke and Steve Schroyder, the latter being an organist who was however kicked out of the band after recording the second album, the former being a multi-talented young 17-year old drummer also having interest in the works of Stockhausen and Ligeti, and who had acquired a VCS-3 synthesizer. Not only did the line-up change drastically, but the music was about to change as well. Exit (most of the) rock influences, enter synthesizer experimentation and space themes.
Recorded in January 1971, this album consists of three pieces. Original Side 1 had two shorter songs, which were one foot stuck in the original Pink Floyd-ish psychedelic space rock influences, and other foot stepping to the furthest reaches of unworldly cosmos in its avant-garde electronics, whereas side 2 would embrace the latter paradigm fully. “Sunrise in the Third System” opens up with delicate plucking of a harp-like instrument which gives way for church like organ playing a meandering pseudo-classical chord progression in the minor A key, which resembles the final part of Pink Floyd’s “A Saucerful Of Secrets” with Edgar Froese’s eerie ghost-like moaning glissando guitar taking the centre-stage in the composition. This 4-minute track also sets the whole mood for the album; dark, desolate, “abandon-all-hope” type of gloom and sense of tragedy mixed with far out trippy spaciousness.
Coming next is 13-minute “Fly and Collision of Comas Sola”, which appears to be the most structured composition on the album, opening with trippy violent pulsating VCS3 signals, then followed by fading in of another chord progression in minor A, played on guitar this time around, which forms as a backdrop for more medieval organ melodies and also melancholic flute improvisations, played by guest Udo Dennebourg. Space signals from VCS3 synths (there are two VCS3’s played on the album, one by Chris Franke and the second by another guest, Roland Paulyck) return at the middle of the track and they start burying out all the music played by natural instruments, and just when you think it’s all going to hell, Chris Franke comes in at the 8:30 mark to save the situation and finally provides us the much-needed drum work. Needless to say, it appears that Franke’s drumming abilities proved to be quite underused and under-rated, and he also gave up his drum set by mid-70s, but on here, Franke starts with quiet tom-driven improvisational patterns that suggest typical psychedelic rock motifs, but as his drumming goes louder (and meanwhile, flute returns to the scene as one of the dominant instruments again), it develops into a crashing jazz-inspired drum-solo that would put most generic drum solo muso-ism to shame; a violent energetic free-form fluency that sounds the craziest drum bashing this side of Robert Wyatt, and is truly an equivalent of planets and meteorites crashing into one another and truly a part of the over-all cosmic sound, rather than plain wanky show-off theatre, as most drum solos tend to be.
Finally, the title track of Alpha Centauri, 22-minute improvisational proto-ambient epic to take up the whole original Side 2, and also one of the first side-long cuts, which paves way for everything from their next album Zeit to all their famous lengthy epics like the title track on Phaedra. With rock drums dispensed, and the famous Moog sequencers also still waiting for their exploitation in the later TD era, “AC” has no conventional rhythm to speak of, it’s a large abstract sound sculpture, mixing natural instruments like the opening clanging cymbal washes, improvised flutes and occasional experimental guitar sounds with reverberated droning organs, pulsating synthesizer freak-outs and sine wave generators, and even coffee-machines (as Froese is credited with playing one, but you couldn’t tell). Whole tune builds rather slowly, instruments moan, drone, instead of fast rhythms, the listener is treated to alternation between meditative relaxing sound washes and unsettling eerie shrieks. Beautiful, fragile flute solos that represent the worldlier and more ‘normal’ aspects of the sounds are standing out against the cosmic unworldly forces embodied by dark organs and synthesizers and occasional experimental gliss guitar drones. It is hard to write this kind of music off as boring self-indulgent ambient, this composition has a rather dark and scary, even tragedy-like sense of doom to it, which might come across as a soundtrack to the Judgement Day, and the said otherworldly apocalyptic implications are further helped by the final four minutes when the tune finally settles for another cluster of eerie organ chords, with guest Udo Dennebourg reciting a spoken-word text in German that perfectly seems to fit the over-all concept of God in mono-theistic religions, and the wordless choir-like moaning vocals might suggest either lamenting angels or souls being tormented in Hell, you decide. Except that the ironic thing is, it all sounds so chaotic and improvised that it comes across as stoned-out meandering psychedelic lunacy. But the tone, which closes the 22 minute title track and the whole album, is dark, haunting and dirge-like all the same and the improvisation deprives nothing from the sense of tragedy so present on the entire album.
Alpha Centauri is considered as the “first electronic space album,” and it’s hard-pressed to find any other preceding album that in such grandiouse manner would suggest a lengthy and dramatic exploration of other-wordliness that also implies how most of us are mere mortals who are sometimes, while listening to more upbeat music, too ignorant of the terrifying, but huge forces of the universe which are completely independent of our whims. Tangerine Dream would go on to attempt topping such achievement on their next album Zeit, which, while indeed darker and even more desolate than its predecessor, is ultimately marred by its reduntant ambitiousness and even less focus than found on the title track of Alpha Centauri; and then make their electronic space-rock style more palatable for the whole world with masterpieces like Phaedra, but Alpha Centauri is still one of the most unique works in their lengthy catalog.
stereomachine
