Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Electronic Sound MARCH 2025 - by David Stubbs

IN GOOD HANS

Cluster and Harmonia co-founder Hans-Joachim Roedelius reflects on his early life experiences and momentous 1970s work, which featured the input of a certain Brian Eno

"My life's project started a very long time ago indeed," Hans-Joachim Roedelius once told me. "Perhaps as far back as Adam and Eve."

Certainly, Roedelius' life has been long, extraordinary and foundational in the world of electronica. Born before Elvis Presley, at 90 years of age he is one of the oldest active musicians on the planet (though he has some way to go before catching up with Sun Ra Arkestra saxophonist Marshall Allen, who has just released an album at the age of 100). Fixated as he is on his present-day projects and the future, dwelling on the past can be a little irksome for Roedelius. But it is some past.

His first foray into the entertainment business came when he was just a few years old, as a child actor in Nazi Germany, obliged to feature in films such aa Reitet Für Deutschland (Riding For Germany). During the Second World War, he found refuge in East Prussia, a pastoral solace amid the noise and carnage raging across Europe. Striving for that peace, and getting beyond the noise, would become central to his aesthetic.

The traumas and schisms of conflict did eventually catch up with him. however, once the war had concluded. Stranded in East Germany, he was arrested as a supposed spy and only managed to get himself back into West Germany in the nick of time, before the Berlin Wall went up. He eked out a living undertaking a variety of jobs from gardening to nursing, eventually becoming a masseur, most often for well-to-do clients he felt were spiritually impoverished.

"I worked a very long time as a beauty therapist," says Roedelius. "It's a hard job listening to customers every day, listening to their stories. These were people of all kinds, everything from politicians to wine merchants, and every kind of social circle. I worked with old ladies in their beds first thing in the morning - I was really able to connect with them, I had a gift for it so I worked first as a therapist, and then as a therapist through music."

Both Roedelius' prodigious output and the make-up of his work have a great deal more to do with his life experiences than any great formal musical training. Although he has amassed a huge discography, he didn't get going until he was in his early thirties. A fateful meeting with fellow outsider artist Conrad Schnitzler saw them, along with Boris Schaak, co-found the radical Zodiak Free Arts Lab in West Berlin, a cradle of the city's kraut rock scene, which was emerging in parallel with other similar movements in towns and cities across West Germany. Schnitzler took the older man under his wing.

"We were all non-musicians," admits Roedelius. "None of us really knew how to structure or compose. You could say that we were music actionists. We had to do all that we were able to do, to see if it worked or not. And after a while, it did work."

Cluster began as Kluster, with Schnitzler on board. But collaboration rarely sat well with him and he left both the short-lived Arts Lab and the band to plough his own singular furrow.

"Cluster with a 'K' was the name given by Conrad Schnitzler as a founding member of this group," explains Roedelius. "With him, the music was much different - much harsher, more revolutionary, unknown then and surprising."

Without Schnitzler, Roedelius and Dieter Moebius would eventually go on to create music that was, as Roedelius puts it, "more warm, more songlike, more classical, and approachable". Their first, self-titled album as Cluster (later renamed Cluster 71) was very much in the vein of their earlier work, only this time they were joined by producer, engineer and (in this instance) musician Conny Plank, who Roedelius describes as "our midwife and dearest friend".

As much as Schnitzler had offered the chronically impecunious Roedelius personal as well as musical assistance, Plank offered the Cluster duo food and lodging in the months of their direst need.

The three tracks which comprise Cluster are unnamed, as if labelling them would be limiting in the mind's ear. Roedelius played electronically treated cello, organ, amplifier and audio generator, with Moebius on organ, Hawaiian guitar, amplifier, audio generator and "helias", while Plank is credited as producer and for "electronics and effects".

The impact of this heady combination of electronics and modified and distorted instruments in collision/collusion with one another is wonderfully nebulous, with little sense of how the labour is divided - it's just a collective, sweetly sculpted, non-discordant noise.

Although it was the third Kluster/Cluster album, Cluster feels like some reimagining in improvised sound, like the very dawn of the universe. It feels "ancient" in that sense, rather than futuristic. Beginning with just a raw signal, a pulsation, over a pattering percussive throb, one thinks of new elements being birthed, of black holes, of galaxies erupting into being as reverberations of the Big Band resound throughout - the Big Bang's dub remix.

IT delineates a cosmos that predates all human existence by billions of years. Comets hover, planets fly off and take their early, molten forms.

Then again, all of this amounts to no more than a visual allegory, constricting the imagination despite its vastness. Even better to leave that analogy behind and accept this music/non-music in the abstract, to close your mind's eye.

This is music that comes from nowhere, adheres entirely to the principle of absolute innovation in krautrock, and assumes no precedents. In some ways, it is action painting in sound, buckets of tonal noise hurled from unexpected angles with unpredictable ferocity. Its vast palette of sounds and textures, uniquely filtered and hand-distressed, provide a precedent for illbient and a host of artists like Aphex Twin, 23 Skidoo, DJ Spooky and the outer reaches of Boards Of Canada, but more than merely beating a path for others, ft hangs alone, monumental in the electronic heavens.

The Dutch label Philips had made an unexpected offer to Cluster, but despite their pedigree in terms of promoting innovative, avant-garde music, they were not satisfied with the poor commercial response to this album. In fairness, it would have been a stretch to imagine a piece of work like this, unencumbered by rhythm or melody, to knock Schlager, the prevailing oompah pop of the day, off its perch.

It would probably have required not just a significant shift in musical tastes but an entire transformation of humanity to make Cluster a smash hit. As it was, despite the patronage of a local DJ, Philips and Cluster parted company. Roedelius, however, says today that he was actually happy with the response to the album - more so in the light of its subsequent influence.

"Of course, we were really very pleased because the echo from it was enormous," he says, beaming. "People actually liked it very much and asked after more products as well as live gigs."

Cluster subsequently relocated to Brain Records, where they released Cluster II, once again with Plank at the controls, and then made a move to Forst, a rural retreat and commune in the German countryside, where they built their own studio and were joined by their third collaborator, Michael Rother, who was taking a creative sabbatical from Neu!.

Together, the trio formed Harmonia, whose three albums (1974's Musik Von Harmonia, 1975's Deluxe and a superb 1974 live album recorded to an audience of fifty people, retrospectively released in 2007) represented a shift towards a richer, pacific and rhythm-based sound, thanks to Rother's influence.

A wholly devout Catholic, Roedelius evokes the Dada co-founder Hugo Ball, who ultimately left the anarchic, anti-art movement, stating that he could no longer "bid chaos welcome". Roedelius was on his own path to peace, not unlike Brian Eno, whose art sensibility had led him to devise systems and ambient music to go against the noise of 1970s pop and rock culture and explore the art of "subtraction". Recognising kindred spirits, Eno sought out Moebius and Roedelius and would be their fourth great collaborator.

"Eno knew a long time about us and our output, whether our albums or playing live," says Roedelius. "He joined us once in concert, came onstage and used one of our keyboards. After that, he became very interested to join us more intensely in our community in Germany, which he did some years later. He stayed for a couple of days and improvised with us, and what first came out was called Cluster & Eno."

The eponymous album was released in 1977. A series of miniatures, it demonstrates just how far Cluster had come since 1971, and the sprawling, cosmos-straddling abstractions of Cluster. Eno was himself in a miniaturist phase at this point, having previously luxuriated in 20-minute-plus instrumental stretches on the likes of (No Pussyfooting) with Robert Fripp.

Schöne Hände (the titles were mostly German) darts in and out like a tiny but elaborate gizmo, an entirely new electronic compound product in the world, before buzzing off. Selange, with its measured, almost martial tread, is something else again - piano counterpoised by fluid waves of synth, a thing of light and grace. The album was recorded at Conny Plank's studio and one senses the value of that engineering maestro, bringing the sound to maximum brightness and deep shine, rendering it future-proof.

After The Heat then followed in 1978, although, as the credit of Eno, Moebius and Roedelius reflects, this was more of a solo project abetted by the Cluster boys. They had been similarly referenced on By This River from Eno's 1977 solo effort Before And After Science, a deceptively slight and limpid piano piece. Co-composed by Moebius and Roedelius, it's a track that the latter remains immensely proud of.

"Brian wrote the lyrics of By This River at our idyllic place in Forst," he recalls. "It's the most beautiful song and one that conquered the globe. It got 19 million clicks on Spotify - 19 million! I wrote the basic music of that song. The first meeting with Brian for recording was dominated in style and genre by Cluster's music. And how we did it on a 4-track tape recorder was special.

"After The Heat is dominated by Brian's ability to approach composing and making music, and was made at Conny's. Moebius, who was mixing the tracks with him in the studio, was a congenial partner of Brian while making the record."

Do you think you learned much from each other?

"Yes, of course, for Cluster. I'm not sure about Brian because he already was kind of a hero in the scene of contemporary music and art, and very well known."

That said, After The Heat was less artistically effective than Cluster & Eno, perhaps due to an imbalance in the way the trio worked. More successful (though it didn't emerge until 1997), was Tracks & Traces, recorded in 1976 when Eno joined Moebius, Roedelius and Michael Rother to constitute Harmonia '76.

Eno had boldly proclaimed Harmonia to be "the most important band in the world" when he initially heard them, and Tracks & Traces certainly lives up to its billing, with Eno adding a tangible sense of processed atmosphere to eerie psychogeographical musings like Luneburg Heath.

The music that Cluster made in the early 1970s could not have been more different from the utterly dated, largely forgotten Schlager that dominated West German radio during that period.

Meanwhile, the music they made with and without Eno in the late '70s must have felt entirely remote from what was "really" happening - namely the high-volume, high-energy era of punk, disco and new wave-like some small, pretty but deserted islet located twenty miles offshore from a large coastal city.

And yet, Cluster have become a true lodestar for new music - a crucial source not only for the great oceans of ambient but also less placid contemporary electronica. Hans-Joachim Roedelius was one of those figures chalking out patterns on the stone walls in the days when electronica was barely heard of.

"We were surprised at how influential Cluster were," he says. "But we were very proud of it indeed."