Brian Eno - Before And After Science (1977)

For his last in a run of art-rock-based albums in the 1970s, Eno assembled the cream of the musicians he'd worked with thus far (including members of Roxy Music, Brand X and Cluster - I ran out of space in the tags to list every name), and recorded over a hundred possible tracks over two years.  This was whittled down to ten that were a summation of the quirky avant-pop/rock sound he'd established, and also looked forward to his increasingly ambient interests.

Overlapping in part with the time Eno spent with Bowie in Berlin, Before And After Science plays well against Low & Heroes, not least on King's Lead Hat (also anagrammatic of future collaborators), and has several krautrock touch points too.  The lyrics on opener No One Receiving look forwards to The Belldog on After The Heat, and Moebius & Roedelius themselves appear on By This River, giving definitive Cluster & Eno overlap.  Another krautrock guest appearance comes in the form of Jaki Liebezeit's drumming on Backwater.

Energy Fools The Magician aside, the original LP's two sides divide neatly into an uptempo, jagged art-rock side and a sublime pastoral side.  As good as the former is, the latter takes the crown for me in Eno's 70s output: the lovely Here He Comes; the bucolic-melancholic Julie With; the aforementioned Cluster co-write; an ambient instrumental aptly dedicated to Harold Budd, and the gorgeous closer Spider & I (thought by some to be about Bowie).  Outside of his purely ambient work, Eno really doesn't get better than this.

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Previously posted at SGTG:
Another Green World
Cluster & Eno 

After The Heat
Ambient 2: The Plateaux Of Mirror (with Harold Budd)

Ambient 4: On Land
Apollo - Atmospheres & Soundtracks (with Daniel Lanois & Roger Eno)
The Pearl (with Harold Budd & Daniel Lanois)

Eno, Moebius, Roedelius - After The Heat (1978)

The second Cluster & Eno album (link to first one below), this time credited to their three individual names - perhaps with the more pervasive Eno influence, this one was felt to be a truer three-way collaboration.  

 

After The Heat is well named: there's a fair amount of cold and dark among the drifting ambient atmospheres on this album, and in the more rhythmic tracks like Foreign Affairs and The Belldog, the latter with a suitably unsettling Eno vocal.  Eno sings on two more tracks, Broken Head and the reversed vocal of Tzima N'Arki, which is also anchored by a Holger Czukay guest spot.  And of course, there's the requisite amount of Roedelius piano gorgeousness on Luftschloss and The Shade.

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Previously posted at SGTG: Cluster & Eno

Cluster - Sowiesoso (1976)

'Evening all.  How's your year going so far?

A few old favourites this week I reckon, starting with the Moebius & Roedelius partnership at its most majestic.  Well established in rural Forst by 1976, with the sunnier, melodic edge of Harmonia increasingly feeding back in to their main project, the results on Sowiesoso were sublime.  The opening track pulses on a single chord, gradually building until it dances around your ears.  Next are a pair of beautifully mellow tracks cut from the same cloth as the more sedate material on Harmonia Deluxe, setting the pace for the rest of the album other than the oddball Umleitung (which I remember being likened somewhere or other to "the sound of drunk shepherds").

If their reunion in the late 80s ended up being called Apropos Cluster, the three tracks that make up Side Two of Sowiesoso are nothing less than Apotheosis Cluster.  The aching melody of Zum Wohl stretches across seven minutes, gradually building like the title track as the green acres of Forst turn brilliant red at sunset, with bird and animals at play.  Es War Einmal comes closest to representing the album cover, gazing out at a gently lapping lake as the evening wears on.  Finally, In Ewigkeit takes us to twlight and beyond, and the forest life turns nocturnal.

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Previously posted at SGTG:

Cluster & Eno 

Live In Vienna

Curiosum

Apropos Cluster

Qua

Roedelius - Piano Piano (1991)

Whether you read that album title as an indication of musical dynamics ('soft, soft'), or just that Hans-Joachim Roedelius' touch on the titular instrument was so good he named it twice, this is a sublime album.  Released in 1991 on the Italian label Materiali Sonori, these nine tracks of solo piano bear all the hallmarks of the master of melancholy melody.  A couple of the longer ones meander a bit, but always in the nicest way possible, along the paths and across the fields of rural Europe that Roedelius' more reflective music conjure up.

On the CD version, Materiali Sonori added three bonus tracks: one of them 15 minutes long, and the other two back down to a compact three minutes.  In contrast to the album proper, there are subtle synth shadings added to these extra pieces.  In the lengthy In der Dämmerung, actually, they're not all that subtle at all to begin with, sounding like a particularly odd counterpoint or out-of-sync overdub at first, but it all starts to make sense after a few minutes.

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Roedelius at SGTG:
Kluster 1970-1971
Cluster & Eno
Jardin Au Fou
Live In Vienna
Curiosum
Lustwandel
Wenn Der Südwind Weht
Offene Türen
Apropos Cluster
Inlandish
Qua
Rufen
Fragen
Tasten

Imagori

Mueller_Roedelius - Imagori (2015)

Glitchy, clicky, and of course beautifully melodic precision electronics from Roedelius and the latest in a long line of collaborators, Christoph H. Mueller from Gotan Project.  Their first album together starts as it means to go on, with classic Roedelius piano over a bed of modern electronics, and covers ground both calm and unsettling over the course of 50 minutes.

In a sense, Imagori could be described as a bit like a Qluster album (see last three links below) with the rougher edges shorn off, but for all its refined exactness it's never dull.  Roedelius' Qluster collaborator Onnen Bock is actually featured here in an occasional supporting capacity, as is the deftly sampled voice of Brian Eno talking about tape recording on one track.  There would be a sequel three years later, Imagori II, which I've still to pick up.

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Roedelius at SGTG:
Kluster 1970-1971
Cluster & Eno
Jardin Au Fou
Live In Vienna
Curiosum
Lustwandel
Wenn Der Südwind Weht
Offene Türen
Apropos Cluster
Inlandish
Qua
Rufen
Fragen
Tasten

Hans-Joachim Roedelius & Tim Story - Inlandish (2008)

Stately, melancholy ambience from two masters.  The story (no pun intended) goes that the younger, American musician first met one of his biggest German heroes in 1983, and ended up staying with him in Austria for a week.  Story & Roedelius wouldn't collaborate until over a decade later, but when they did they made a handful of albums together, of which Inlandish was the third.

It's a gorgeous album that bears all the Roedelius hallmarks you'd expect: sparse, affecting melodies on piano cocooned in gentle ambient waftings and burblings.  In this case, the pair worked from Roedelius' piano sketches, with Story filling out the backgrounds.  Occasional beat-driven tracks like Downrivers and Riddled keep a bit of energy going, but mostly this is mellow meditativeness par excellence.

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P.S. - Florian Schneider-Esleben, 1947-2020
R.I.P to one of the founders of electronic music's Big Bang, who has died of cancer at the age of 73. To celebrate Kraftwerk at the outset of their classic era, head over to Electronic Orgy, where they recently re-upped one of the most astonishing concert bootlegs ever taped.  Or hang out here and enjoy Electric Cafe from 80s Kraftwerk, when their contemporaries had began to catch up on them but they still had plenty to offer; or a recent celebration of early Kraftwerk performed by Zeitkratzer.

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.

Original cassette J-card, 1980 - cover credited to Moebius

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Cluster at SGTG:
Cluster & Eno
Curiosum
Apropos Cluster
Qua

Moebius + Roedelius - Apropos Cluster (1990)

The first Cluster reunion album emerged almost a decade on from Curiosum, and although the group name was referenced in the title, it wouldn't be until the 2010s reissues on Bureau B that this album would be credited to Cluster.  Instead, for this release on a US indie label, Moebius & Roedelius just used their names.

The technology had been updated, as was to be expected from these two electronic pioneers, and one of the criticisms levelled at Apropos Cluster is the sound of the bright digital synths, replacing the analogue warmth of old Cluster.  But it's what they do with this palette that makes Apropos unmistakably a Cluster album.  Right from the opening track (perhaps titled Grenzgänger in reference to the newly opened border in Germany?),  the sounds are tweaked and mixed in pleasingly odd ways, the rhythm constantly tripping over itself.

Emmental, which would become a live favourite, follows with a characteristically aching Roedelius piano melody framed by synth bass and little ambient whispers, then the shimmering surface of Gespiegelt proves to be another beautiful (almost bluesy!) piece that could only have come from this duo.  The album briefly waltzes its way to the end of its first half, then the whole second half is taken up by the title track.  Drifting freely through ambient and rhythmic passages, it ends with a quote from Soweisoso's Es War Einmal, tying together Cluster past and present.  Next week: Moebius catches up with another old friend/collaborator.

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Cluster & Eno - s/t (1977)

The first fruits of Brian Eno's collaboration with Moebius & Roedelius to be released (Harmonia sessions from 1976 would stay in the can for two decades), Cluster & Eno took the loveliness of Cluster's maturing sound on Sowiesoso and made it even lovelier.  The album opens, like Sowiesoso, with a simple monochordal pulse, but made much more delicate and less overtly electronic, with Roedelius on piano.  Holger Czukay, who'd have been on the brink of leaving Can at the time, drops by for a relaxing busman's holiday.

The second track, Schöne Hände, is barely there at all - just a gentle breeze of synth that whispers across an open field, causing small stirrings in the flora & fauna.  Even more than on the previous Cluster album, the move to rural Forst was working wonders on Moebius & Roedelius' sonic outlook, as was the addition of Eno's unique lightness of touch. 

The album continues in this meditative mode until it picks up a little in the second half with the more rhythmic Selange and Die Bunge, before taking a turn into the more Eastern-sounding One, featuring guest appearances from Moebius' Liliental bandmates Asmus Tietchens and Okko Bekker.  The most gorgeous track is saved for last, the shimmering sunset magnificence of Für Luise.  I've often though of Cluster & Eno as a winter album, but been trying to mix things up a bit of late, and it works just the same magic at any time of year.

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Qluster - Rufen (2011)

Onnen Bock and the 84-year-old Hans Joachim Roedelius are still going strong as Qluster; Rufen was one of their first two releases.  A collection of live recordings from 2010, Rufen (along with Fragen - see below) set out their stall as fresh, forward-looking keepers of the Cluster flame for the 2010s, although still sampling their own past work here and there.  All the gear on Rufen is analogue, and in these four hands sounds spectacular.

Rufen's opening track is a 15-minute recording from the Roedelius-curated More Ohr Less festival in Linz, August 2010.  A vast, gaseous Vangelis-like open soundscape offers both melodic, meditative music in the Roedelius tradition and some darker moments.  Tantalizingly, it fades out just as a rhythm track gets going - wonder if the full concert will ever see the light of day. 

The remainder of the album is a three-part recording made in Schönberg in December 2010.  The first part opens in sampling mode with cut-up whispered voices, moving through piano melodies quickly submerged in whizzing electronics to water sounds and more.  The second establishes a more weightless ambience, like an update of the very earliest Cluster recordings, and the third burbles around nicely over a gentle rhythm.

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Previously posted at SGTG: Fragen / Tasten

Qluster - Tasten (2015)

For their fifth album as Qluster, Roedelius and Onnen Bock - by now expanded to a trio with Armin Metz - decided to forego the electronics of previous albums for this sublime album of music for three pianos.  Sound familiar?  What you get here, though, is first of all nearly twice as long, and as distinctly European as the Budd-Garcia-Lentz minature masterpiece was distinctly American/Latin American.  Tasten is also more sparingly produced, largely allowing that timeless Steinway resonance to speak for itself in triplicate.

As might be expected, the result of this setup - and one of course that involves Hans-Joachim Roedelius - is absolutely gorgeous both melodically and harmonically.  Picking standouts is difficult on such a strong programme of material, but I'll plump for Brandung, the longest track, with the perfectly evocative Spuren im Schnee a close second.

Here and there, little interesting touches flesh out the nine pieces on Tasten, such as the string plucking on Über den Dächern, and more subtly so on the following Il Campanile.  That track actually brought to mind for me Zeitkratzer's treatment of Kraftwerk's Wellenlange (see last week) in the way it takes the minimal material somewhere sublime.

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Previously posted: Fragen

Roedelius - Lustwandel (rec. 1979, rel. 1981)

 

Hans-Joachim Roedelius' third studio album was very much cut from the same cloth as his second, Jardin Au Fou, and in fact they were both recorded in 1979 at Peter Baumann's Paragon Studio.  With its heavy focus on piano-led minatures, Lustwandel is even more lushly romantic than Jardin, and electronics take a back seat to provide only occasional colouring.  There's fascinating use of odd bits of percussion too, in tracks like the slight mood-breaker Wilkommen - but even the marching rhythm of that piece sounds more like it's heralding a medieval banquet rather than a march to battle.

Other than that, and longest track Langer Atem, Lustwandel, perhaps even more so than Jardin, is the pick of Roedelius' early records when it comes to pure mellow gorgeousness.  I'm writing all this on a Sunday morning with a cool spring breeze coming in the window, and it fits perfectly.

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Qluster - Fragen (2011)

A year after Qua, Roedelius and Moebius announced that Cluster had come to an end; that same year, Qluster was announced as the next Roedelius project, described as "the extraordinary shedding of skin of one of the most important German electronic groups".  This album, the first of six and counting, was the first under the new name.

Joining Roedelius was sound artist, producer and musician Onnen Bock, who had barely been born back when Cluster made Zuckerzeit, and first met the living legend in 1991.  Fragen wasn't their first recording together, but as the first Qluster release it was the ideal introduction to this great project.  On this initial evidence at least (I've only heard half of the Qluster catalogue so far and it's quite diverse - they later become a trio), Bock brought out the more free-form, kosmiche ambient side of Roedelius that stretched all the way back to the Cluster II album and beyond, whilst updating the sonic palate perfectly.

Only one of the seven tracks on Fragen stretches out quite as much as Cluster of old, though - the 13-minute Wurzelwelt even brings to mind latter-day Coil in its extended dark ambience.  The rest average about four minutes, and pulse away in gentle, exploratory space, occasionally bursting into a more melodic light (the end of Auf der Alm), and more often stark and austere with a subtle rhythmic pulse when needed.  All in all a fantastic album that bode well for this latest chapter in the Roedelius story.

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Roedelius - Offene Türen (rec. 1980, rel. 1982)

Roedelius' eighth album under his name, recorded in 1980 and released two years later.  Among that early 80s prolific purple patch, Offene Türen stands out by being far and away the most minimal and wholly electronic; it compares more easily to Cluster's Curiosum - most notably on Spiegelung, which also features an uncharacteristic vocal hum - than the lush romanticism of Jardin Au Fou.  This is still unmistakably Roedelius though, especially on the two midpoint tracks Auf der Höhe and Allemande; that melodic lightness of touch couldn't be anyone else.

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Hans-Joachim Roedelius - Jardin Au Fou (1979)

Like Conrad Schnitzler's Con, Roedelius' sophomore solo effort was produced by Peter Baumann in his Paragon Studio, but that's where the similarities end.  If Schnitzler took us on a gritty, urban train ride through industrial Germany, here Roedelius takes us on a gentle autumnal stroll through Paris or Vienna.  Almost all in waltz-time, Jardin Au Fou is possibly Roedelius' most unabashedly romantic record, full of simple, sun-dappled melodies and perfect arrangements - loads of piano, becoming more fully electronic when necessary, and adding in well-placed cello shadings at key points in its second half.

The bouncy, multi-layered Fou Fou is about as uptempo as Roedelius gets here, other than the odd little trip to the fairground that is Rue Fortune.  Otherwise, this album is a wonderfully mellow Sunday afternoon in the park watching (and smelling) the falling leaves, none more perfectly expressed than the birdsong-like ambience in Le Jardin - although Cafe Central is my absolute favourite here.

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Kluster - 1970-1971 (this comp. rel. 2008)

Before there was Cluster, the legendary home-base of Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius, there was Kluster - a trio completed by the great Conrad Schnitzler.  Formed in 1969 around the Zodiak Free Arts Lab in Berlin, everything Kluster released in their short lifespan is in this one handy package, and remains some of the most heady, extreme material in the entire krautrock canon.

Unlike the genre's other Year Zero masterworks like Phallus Dei and Monster Movie, or even the Schnitlzer-infused Electronic Meditation, the Kluster sound owed nothing at all to rock music.  Instead, their legacy is these six supermassive black-holes of the freest free improvisation, bearing closer similarities to what AMM were doing on the other side of the English Channel, and also an utterly uncanny prefiguring of the early industrial music of the mid 70s.

In the studio (or rather, in the church where they found themselves recording), Kluster were faced with a bizarre, but very much of the time, compromise: that they allowed the usually religiously-inclined record label to overdub recitations of a couple of lengthy religious texts.  Schnitzler once said that you'll get more enjoyment from both of the vocal pieces if you can't understand the preposterous texts, in which case the stentorian female voice (on the first album Klopfzeichen) and male voice (on the second, Zwei Osterei) are intersting enough soundwise, if a little intrusive at times.

The voice-free second sides are more interesting overall, with plenty of screeching flute, scraping cello shards of guitar/piano to the fore.  The effects-laden sound can also be more clearly heard pointing the way to the first Cluster album sans Schnitzler.  Before he set off on his own however, there was the final Kluster recording.  Taped live, Eruption is an echo/delay masterpiece, stretching out for longer and unencumbered by previous compromises.  The sound is more lo-fi, but if anything this pushes it even closer to the live sound of Throbbing Gristle circa 1976.

Disc 1
Disc 2
Disc 3

Cluster - Curiosum (1981)

We've had the endpoint of Cluster's discography on these pages; now here's the midpoint.  Ten years in to their working partnership, Moebius & Roedelius would take a break for most of the 80s,  but not before recording this, the most minimal album of their career and one of the most singular and fascinating.

The polar opposite of the lush romanticism of Sowiesoso, where Roedelius appeared to be in the driving seat, Curiosum is very much Moebius' album in the Cluster canon.  Possibly the most accessible track, Oh Odessa is up first, with a catchy zigzag melody repeating over a backing that only changes slightly as it progresses.  From here in, there's the chugging, steam-powered electronic rhythms that first made an appearance on Cluster's breakthrough album, Zuckerzeit, given an ultra-minimal, airless update.  Tristan In Der Bar is particularly reminiscent of that earlier record to my ears, if you can imagine both musicians upgrading to portable, battery-powered synths only to discover when they hit record in the studio that they've only got a couple of minutes' battery life left.

Roedelius the master of wistful melody isn't entirely supressed on Curiosum: Helle Melange has it in spades, albeit still sounding - like much of the album - like it's been recorded either on an echo-absorbent squash court, or at the bottom of a swimming pool.  On Charlic we get a classic Roedelius waltz, if it was being distantly heard over a cement mixer.  What I'm basically trying to say is that even for such a unique duo, this album remains an aptly-named oddity in their canon.  Don't miss it!

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Cluster - Qua (2009)

Man, I was gutted by the death of Dieter Moebius last summer - maybe even more than Bowie's passing in January of this year.  Having loved Cluster, Harmonia and everything in between for so many years, I'd been wondering if there would ever be another Cluster album after Qua in 2009.  Sadly, this album now stands as the final bookend to Moebius' forty-year on-off collaboration with Hans-Joachim Roedelius - but it's a good one; a more than acceptable signoff for a truly unique duo.

The most surprising thing about Qua when it came out was the wealth of material it looked like we were getting - 17 tracks, from a band who'd previously averaged something like six or seven per album.  Largely composed of minatures that hang loosely together like a sketchbook - "a multicoloured picture book" in Asmus Tietchens' sleevenote - the beauty of Qua is in the small details.  The missing beat in the rhythm track of No Ernel, resulting in an odd-legged time signature (can't remember enough of my music theory exams to know what it is), or the recording of a squeaky door in the perfectly named Putoil.

The longest track here is the six-minute Gissander, built around melancholic bell chimes, but my absolute favourite is Ymstrob - just a minute and a half of plaintive synth burble and fragments of brass.  And yes, there's mild amusement value in the fact that the full tracklisting of Qua reads like an Autechre album - but we're miles away from any forbidding metallic glitchscapes here, just little drops of sheer gorgeousness.

Alternate cover

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Hans-Joachim Roedelius - Wenn Der Südwind Weht (1981)

Wenn der Südwind weht „Musik zum leise Hören“ (When the south wind blows - music for quiet hours), to give it its full title, was Hans-Joachim Roedelius' seventh solo album, and one of three that he released in 1981.  Far from spreading himself too thin, however, Roedelius was in his prime at this point, releasing album after album of gorgeous synth and organ-based understated gorgeousness, saturated in melody and hazy, spring-day ambience.

Fans of Sowiesoso-era Cluster looking for a natural successor to that album should head straight here.  Whether drifting along languidly like the title track, or taking a more sprightly jaunt like my personal favourite Mein Freunde Farouk, this is absolutely quintessential Roedelius.  Highest possible recommendation.

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