ES7123 seven-inch features edited versions of two brilliant pieces from Cluster’s 1971 self-titled album
‘15:43 (Bureau B Edit)’
‘21:32 (Bureau B Edit)’
The two tracks on this month’s Electronic Sound seven-inch are taken from Cluster’s hugely influential debut album. ‘Cluster’ was recorded and released in 1971, soon after Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius emerged from the ashes of Kluster, the discordant incarnation of the group they had formed with Conrad Schnitzler.
Eschewing Kluster’s proto-industrial clank for warm, drifting, kosmische hues, ‘Cluster’ is a blueprint for the evolution of electronic music. Unlike Tangerine Dream, who were leaning towards sequencer-driven soundscapes, or Kraftwerk, who would soon refine electronics into pop, Roedelius and Moebius created raw and exquisite atmospherics rooted in experimentation. Stripped of conventional structure, harmony or rhythm, their textural and otherworldly music was forged from oscillators, filters and tape machines.
“When Schnitzler left, Moebius and I felt free to do something different,” explains Roedelius. “Our plan on entering the studio was just improvising with whatever gear we could get our hands on – organ, cello, audio generator, Hawaiian guitar, effects, electronic treatments and more. We just did it!”
‘Cluster’, which was renamed ‘Cluster 71’ a few years later, was helmed by the legendary German producer Conny Plank and owes much of its sonic identity to his ingenuity.
“Conny was the third member of the band on this album,” says Roedelius. “He helped us to become so important that people would say, ‘Cluster set the world on fire’. He offered for us to stay and live in his house in Hamburg for some months, because we were really poor and we had no real homes. Conny spent a lot of time with us. He was a co-musician and our midwife, as well as our dearest friend. The mixing table was his instrument and he used it with great talent and creativity.”
The three tracks on the album are titled by their original lengths and the A-side of our seven-inch is an edit of ‘15:43’, its slow-motion vortex of shifting drones and layers folding in on themselves like tectonic plates grinding in the dark. Faint distortion fizzes at the edges while strange pulses flicker like dying satellites. There’s a sense of perpetual motion, yet no clear destination – just an expanse of sound stretching infinitely outward, immersive and ominous, prefiguring the unsettling currents of illbient that lay decades ahead.
Delving further into deep space, the B-side is an edit of ‘21:32’. Cavernous and laden with echo, distant rumbles evoke unknown landscapes, like freaky machines breathing in the void. Lashings of reverb and synthetic interference generate a sense of vast, ghostly emptiness and an intangible yet gripping tension, as if the cosmos itself is slowly coming to life.
Both ‘15:43’ and ‘21:32’ are early sketches of what ambient music would become, years before Brian Eno stumbled on the idea and collaborated with Roedelius and Moebius on 1977’s ‘Cluster & Eno’. Without ‘Cluster’, there would probably be no ‘Autobahn’, no ‘Low’, and no Aphex Twin or Boards Of Canada either, at least not in the forms that we know today.
More than five decades later, ‘Cluster’ still feels radical and visionary – a time capsule from the future that somehow landed in 1971.
“We were very pleased by the reception for ‘Cluster’,” says Roedelius. “Most people welcomed it enormously. It was a sort of initiation of the whole krautrock movement that followed.”
