Archive Review: Cluster & Eno (1977)

More musically adventurous than his Roxy Music bandmates, Brian Eno left that successful British band and struck out on his own in 1973 to follow his own unique musical vision. Although he would later build a significant body of solo work, become the superstar producer of bands like U2 and the Talking Heads, and record groundbreaking collaborations with artists like Robert Fripp, David Bowie and David Byrne, one of Eno's first stops along the road to fame and fortune was in Germany.

Cluster & Eno

Fascinated by the conceptual possibilities of ambient music – one of many logical endpoints for the fledgling art form of electronic music during the mid-70s – Eno would team up with the duo of Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius for a series of albums that, while not earthshaking in their scope and ambition at the time, have nevertheless crept into the shared consciousness of popular music over time to become influential pieces of the puzzle that is Eno's wonderfully enchanting canon of work.

Eno's first collaboration with the two members of Cluster would be released in 1977 as Cluster & Eno. By the time of the album's release, Eno had already made his first forays into creating ambient music with the release of 1975's Discreet Music and the recording of Before and After Science, which included Cluster in the studio. His first album with Moebius and Roedelius, however, an entirely instrumental affair, would serve to define the boundaries of ambient music and then shatter them. Utilizing a series of set pieces – loosely-structured songs, really – the three visionary artists experimented with various found sounds and instrumentation, studio wizardry and the electronic synthesis of sound. The resulting mix of musical styles, instrumentation and sonic manipulation flows from your speakers like watercolors on a canvas. Cluster & Eno is a challenging and invigorating listen, with fragments of the album's compositions blending, chameleonlike, into the background (Eno's vision of ambience) while others jump up from the grooves to grab you by the ears and demand your attention.

The Reverend's Bottom Line

Although the trailblazing electronic experimentation by Eno, Moebius and Roedelius, as well as other fellow travelers like Klaus Schulze would later become the foundation of prog-rock and, much to our dismay, the keystones of both techno and new age music, at the time of this recording, this was revolutionary work, weird in both its ambition and its execution. Recently reissued on CD for the first time, Cluster & Eno deserves a listen by any music lover interested in this essential touchstone in the evolution of electronic music. (Water Music, reissued 2005)

Review originally published by Alt.Culture.Guide™, 2005

Buy the CD from Amazon.com: Cluster & Eno's Cluster & Eno

Fossils: Kraftwerk's Radio-Activity (1975)

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Kraftwerk – Radio-Activity

German electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk enjoyed an unexpected level of success when the band’s fourth album, 1974’s Autobahn, scored a surprising Top 30 chart hit with its title track. The popularity of “Autobahn,” cut down from the album length of 22+ minutes to a mere 3:27 for radio airplay, pushed the album itself to number five on the Billboard chart. It would be the band’s lone U.S. hit, and although they would continue to make music well into the 1980s, they’d never again achieve this level of commercial success stateside.

The band’s modest achievement didn’t go to their collective heads, as shown by the 1975 release of Kraftwerk’s Radio-Activity album. A return to the more electronically-oriented noise-making of their earlier work, the album’s conceptual aesthetic – exploring the subject of radio waves and outer space – was bolstered by scraps of bleeping sound, silent passages, raucous noise, and overall electronic weirdness. The album’s lone concession to commercial reality came in the form of Kraftwerk’s first English language song in the title track. While garnering critical accolades, the album’s lone single (the title track) stiffed badly, and Radio-Activity only rose as high as #140 on the charts.     

Capitol Records really had no idea what to do with Kraftwerk or Radio-Activity, but the simple B&W ad created for the album was oddly effective. Utilizing the simple black box from the album cover, they tacked on a photo of the band in a frame on top. For Krautrock fans, this was more than enough as the announcement of a new Kraftwerk LP was cause for rejoice in certain circles. The band would find a modicum of success with subsequent albums like Trans-Europe Express (1977) and Computer World (1981), especially when their electronic tunes were adapted to 1980s dance culture. Kraftwerk’s influence would be wide-ranging, their musical innovations touching such disparate genres as hip-hop, EDM, keyboards-dominated new wave, and avant-garde composition.

CD Preview: Climb on board the Mothership with Guru Freakout!

Almost 40 years after its critical and commercial ascent, the progressive rock sub-genre known as “Krautrock” continues to intrigue and excite listeners. At its height in the mid-1970s, the German-based phenomena counted bands like Can, Kraftwerk, Amon Düül, and Cluster at the forefront of the experimental, largely electronic-based musical revolution. Formed in 1970, Guru Guru was one of many memorable bands from the era, and for almost a decade and with several albums, they exploded the expectations of what music could be.

Mani Neumeier – Guru Guru singer, keyboardist, and drummer – it still kicking around and making mad music, and he has teamed up with multi-instrumentalist Jürgen Engler of German industrial noisemakers Die Krupps and bassist Scott Telles of the band ST 37 for a new project called Guru Freakout. On September 2nd, 2014 Cleopatra Records will release Mothership, the debut album from Guru Freakout.     

In a press release for the new album, Engler tells how the band was formed. “Mani is an old friend of mine,” he says. “Near the end of 2012, he came to visit me in Austin where I had organized a show for him to play. We also planned to do some recording for a follow up project to Cosmic Couriers' Other Places, which was released on Cleopatra in the ‘90s.”

“At the same time,” says Engler, “I was working with bass player Scott Telles of ST 37, and when Scott heard that Mani was in town, he wanted to meet him since he had always been a big fan of Guru Guru. So the three of us got together at his rehearsal studio and started jamming right away. We had a great chemistry, so we decided to record a few tracks with a little digital recorder, and also at Ohm Recording Studio. When we listened to the tracks later, we realized that we had some really good material that should see the light of day, and so those recordings became the Guru Freakout album.”

The album features two lengthy free-form jams, including the 30+ minute “Notre Dame (Mothership)” and the extended-length “The Snows of Mt. Bonnell,” which takes up the other side of the album’s vinyl release. Both songs feature Engel’s hypnotic, psychedelic blues guitar; Neumeier’s thundering percussion; and Telles’ throbbing bass lines that, when woven together, create some tasty “stoner rock grooves” (sez the press release). The CD release of Mothership includes three bonus tracks, including studio rehearsals of “A Little Bit Spacier” and “Elektrolurch-Mutation,” as well as a live version of “Elektrolurch-Mutation.” If you’re up for taking a ride through the cosmos, Guru Freakout might be what you’re looking for!

Buy the CD on Amazon.com: Guru Freakout's Mothership