Revivalism is an essential component of creating a cultural body of work that spans generations. In the arts, originality is usually crowned king, but reviving and celebrating previous artists might be just as important. Without being influenced by older generations, there would be no canon, no tradition, no common thread tugging artists together into a geist-ridden heap. Which brings me to Cluster. With nearly 40 years of albums behind them, Cluster is a German experimental band without a cohesive sound, but instead a wide-ranging sonic landscape defined as avante-garde and inaccessible to many. But in the pantheon of krautrockers, Cluster is a bright star in its firmament, a group of sonic experimenters whose influence on modern music is being recognized as they kick off a California tour. You can check them out tonight, Friday, May 23, 2008 in Big Sur, Saturday, May 24, in Santa Cruz or Sunday, May 25 at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco.
Cluster got their start at the Zodiak Free Arts Lab in West Berlin in 1969, an experimental live music venue and art collective that lasted only a few months, but played an important role in developing the spacey German sound of krautrock, sometimes called Kosmische Musik. Dieter Moebius, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Conrad Schnitzler emerged from the collective as Kluster and went on to release three albums before Schnitzler left the group and the duo re-formed as Cluster. As a trio, the group was highly improvisational with live performances that involved everything from synthesizers to alarm clocks and kitchen utensils. As a duo, Cluster went on to a lengthy career recording albums into the late 1990s that experiment with feedback, ambient sounds, and atmospherics.
I got a chance to listen to the 3-CD box set Kluster: 1970-1971, a compilation of some of Kluster’s earliest works (out this week from the San Francisco-based Water label), which was recorded by the band’s first line-up, when Kluster was still spelled with a “K.”
I also checked out Cluster 71, the first recording by the band’s second incarnation. Composed of three tracks named for their lengths, Cluster 71 is a series of aural investigations that feature pulsing synths, drones, and feedback. Sometimes lulling you into a peaceful reverie, sometimes escalating into more urgent sequences with rapid percussive tempos or massively-distorted unease, the album is a feast of German proto-industrial noise that wouldn’t be unusual to find in any modern experimental music venue, like Recombinant Media Labs here in San Francisco. The album was the first major label release for Cluster, and forms a distinct phase in their musical evolution.