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Electronic Sound DECEMBER 2021 - by Scott Blixen

CLUSTER: CLUSTER 71

Epochal electronic opus reissued

It's a shame the sleeve of Cluster's first album has shed its Philips logo in the fifty years since its release. It seems appropriate they were once signed to an industrial giant, as famed for domestic appliances as music. Overtime, this record of humming electricity has picked up more hypothetical fluff than a vacuum cleaner and listening to it in 2021 requires some internal rewiring.

Received wisdom will tell you Cluster 71 (the "71" was added to the title later) is a foundation of electronics, ambient and industrial music, but this makes approaching an already monolithic album feel dutiful rather than joyful. If we tune out the reverential feedback and try listening through unjaded ears, like the handful of listeners who bought it on release, we open ourselves to an enlightening experience.

In 1971, this was the major label debut of a group who had just lost a member. Originally named Kluster, Conrad Schnitzler had left the band to renew his career as a one-man art storm, while Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius continued as Cluster. As Kluster, this trio of non-musicians had toured Europe's art galleries for two years and recorded three albums before Schnitzler quit. Inspired by Schnitzler's art training under Joseph Beuys, they built a modest audience for their sculpted noise.

Transitioning from Kluster's strident sounds to mellower atmospherics, the three tracks on Cluster 71 are titled according to their duration. 7:42 locks into a pattern of noise pulses and percussion, around which swarm oscillators and remote voices that vari-speed their pitch. 15:43 is calmer, locating us in a haunted space where fatigued machines hymn their years of hard labour. Divested of Schnitzler's urge to terrorise, and produced by Conny Plank, the album describes a more serene industrial landscape than the insistent klang of their previous work. 21:32 inhabits a zone similar to Klaus Schulze's Irrlicht and reminds us that industrial music was the spawn of dark psychedelia. If I describe it as an immersive head trip, I trust you won't smirk derisively.

Knowing the historic significance of this release won't make you love it, attentive listening will. To paraphrase a befuddled and repentant critic of The Velvet Underground, "it was prophetic but there was no way to know that at the time".