CLUSTER II

On the second album, simply titled CLUSTER II, the duo of Hans-Joachim Roedilius and Dieter Moebius continue their collaboration with producer Conny Plank to craft another spaced out journey through some of farthest out there trips that the electronic side of Krautrock had to offer. This album came out in 1972 and was the first to land on the famous Brain label which would release the next couple of CLUSTER albums within its huge list of Krautrock and progressive rock roster. Technically Conny Plank was a member of this group on the first album and then continued to act only as the producer until his death in 1987 but as far as the end product is considered his contributions were immeasurable as a vital third member of the project.

While "Cluster 71" was about as amorphously abstract as a cosmic tripper could hope for, on CLUSTER II this trio began to rein such liberties and started to replace the disorienting and nebulous swarms of sound with rhythmic oscillations and while far from the world of commercial music at least allowed the listener to latch onto a familiar pattern while the sound effects sort of were expansions of the electronic pulsating sounds that oft employ the use of a repetitive guitar riff. "Plas" starts things off with a dark, cold as space detachment from the traditional music world while "Im Süden" takes a simple guitar riff and incorporates various ascending and descending pitches to simulate a journey into some unexplored regions of the cosmos.

CLUSTER II is definitely in the camp of what Klaus Schulze was crafting after his departure from Tangerine Dream. While the previous project Kluster was all about discordant proton-industrial soundscapes with a jarring disregard for convention, CLUSTER focuses exclusively on electronic sounds and electroacoustic manipulations and with the magic of Conny Plank turned rather mundane sounds into frightening even multi-dimensional phantasms that seemed to be reverberating and phasing out of the limited perception capabilities of our known reality. The accumulative effect is nothing less than amazing and the desired effect of crafting the ultimate transcendental escapism is without a doubt achieved.

Due to the fact that CLUSTER II has microbeats and percussive drive due to reverberations, oscillations and other frequency modulations, this set of six tracks makes me think of some kind of atomic disco party where where gluons are bumping and grinding with muons and electrons are getting all jiggy with neutrinos. The ambiguousness of whether this is a cold icy cosmic journey or playing Antman and going to the world of the molecular is totally up to the listener's imagination and the very reason i love this kind of tripped out inchoate romp through sound. This kind of "music" is truly one that activates the creative processes that allows the imagination to fill in the gaps as well as simply providing the soundtrack for an astral trip.

CLUSTER would refine their trippy ambient Kraut weirdness even more for the third album "Zuckerzeit" where avant-garde melodies would replace seemingly random swirls of sound as the main focus but for the first two albums, CLUSTER provided an anarchic liberating stylistic approach matched only by the earliest works of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze. Having proved themselves in this arena, the duo would focus on tighter comparisons that included more "normal" sounding beats, recognizable melodies and less free floating soundscapes that evoke the deepest recesses of space and the quantum worlds. While i have to be in the right mood to endure these harsh soundtracks of the unknown, when i do have the hankering to escape Earth's gravitational pull, the first two CLUSTER albums rank high on my list to do so.