CLUSTER

The first album from the newly abbreviated Cluster (after parting ways with Conrad Schnitzler) probably disturbed a lot of sensitive minds at the dawn of the 1970s, and it can still threaten your sanity when heard today. Softening their name from the more Teutonic KLUSTER didn't immediately change the music, if in fact this dystopian noise can even be classified as music, a debatable point even now.

The remaining duo of Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius were known at the time for generating sounds instead of playing music, but what a sound it was. Harsh, atonal, abstract, mechanical, and more than a little scary: like the better German bands of that era providing the perfect sonic escape hatch from an unsavory national past. But the results were far removed from the interstellar meditations of other Krautrockers, even kindred cybernetic rebels like the embryonic TANGERINE DREAM, fellow travelers at the Zodiak Free Arts Lab in Berlin and related to Cluster through the common denominator of Conny Schnitzler.

Moebius and Roedelius weren't interested in exploring the cosmos; they were too busy dissecting their brave new electronic world from inside the machine, looking out. Even within the freewheeling musical landscape of the German counterculture this was pretty extreme stuff, shattering every convention of melody and rhythm, and daring the listener to pick up the pieces. Just when you imagine there might be a hint of some harmonic stability to grab hold of, the floor shifts again and that illusory safety net is pulled away, leaving you in exhilarating freefall once again.

My advice is to forget about the soft landing and simply go with the flow. It's not as if you have much of a choice: you won't even find a convenient parachute in the album name or track titles, which merely catalogue when it was recorded and the length of each segment.

One silver lining is that the album still sounds remarkably contemporary. Unlike other early experiments in electronic music this one hasn't aged a day in over forty years, partly because it avoids the easy clichés of the time: endless sequencer arpeggios and so forth. Later Cluster albums would follow a more user-friendly approach, but in 1971 their avant- garde edge was sharp enough to draw blood.