Slow Goes The Goose: Cluster & Farnbauer - Live In Vienna (2017 remaster, orig. rel. 1980)

Friday, 13 March 2020

Cluster & Farnbauer - Live In Vienna (2017 remaster, orig. rel. 1980)

Cluster's first live album was recorded at the Wiener Festwochen Alternativ on 12 June 1980, where they teamed up with an Austrian percussionist/sound artist named Joshi Farnbauer. The first release of the recording was as a 90-minute cassette on the British YHR label, and its digital debut (after a couple of clips were included on Kluster CD reissues) came via Important Records who released a double CD in 2010.

Bureau B put out this single CD seven years later, their version tightening up the recording by making small edits to most tracks and a cut of several minutes to Drums. I don't have the uncut recording to do a comparison, but I reckon this 80-minute version does the job just fine.

The gargantuan improvisations Service and Metalle are the most striking highlights here, sounding closer to the first two Cluster albums (or even the Kluster albums) than anything Moebius & Roedelius had done later in the 70s. Metalle in particular develops into a stunning droning, pulsing soundscape, and features two further percussionists, from the German/Austrian New Wave. Giving the concert variety, there's also two typically gorgeous Roedelius piano features, in the closing track and in Piano, which includes elements of Manchmal from the then-current Cluster album Grosses Wasser.