 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
  Cluster - ZuckerzeitBy Daniel JohnsonOctober 29, 2007 Imagine if that old toy Casio keyboard gathering dust in your attic only had one button: the "awesome" preset. One press and the sounds of drunken droid-speak, grainy analog synth pads and bubbling loops falling in and out of synch would play as if generated randomly by an algorithm for beauty. Melodies? Compared to those hypnotic ATATRI beats, they're just incidental dressing. Now imagine you left the thing running for an hour and made a high-bias Maxell tape of the results. You're not far off from the sound of Cluster's masterful anomaly of German space rock, 1974's Zuckerzeit. In some ways Zuckerzeit was the culmination of everything Cluster founders Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius had tried to do with their ambient, improvisational Berlin project to date. But the addition of Neu!'s Michael Rother, and the rhythmic backbone he stapled to their krautrock gadget jams, was the active ingredient needed to erupt the duo's precious toy volcano. Two exemplary records in a similar vein would soon pour out of that chemistry (as Harmonia) as well as a typically fertile collaboration with electronic wonderkid Brian Eno. I don't know what a Zuckerzeit is, but I prefer not to look it up. It sounds like one of those monolithic pyramids in Blade Runner, and that's a perfectly fitting image for an album that sounds like someone poured water over Vangelis' keyboards, let the circuits rust, and then recorded the sound of their malfunction with glorious results.
|
||