ENO and CLUSTER - which one first?
- Thread starter Buick6
- Start date
jenks
thread death
I just downloaded Grosses Wasser the other day by Cluster - i hadn't realised just how brilliant they were. It's been on heavy rotation late at night, especially on headphones.
I would be interested to hear what people think of Eno/Cluster combo too. I have pretty much everything else by the great man but somehow have never found any of his work with Cluster.
I would be interested to hear what people think of Eno/Cluster combo too. I have pretty much everything else by the great man but somehow have never found any of his work with Cluster.
those albums are patchy with some really outstanding moments - begegungen is good for one amazing track, really really amazing, can't remember the name of it for the life of me 
after the heat is good for some of the experiments with afrobeat etc bt they strangely sound like work in progress, good work in progress though.
the beautifully packaged roedilius 2 cd comp is very good too.
after the heat is good for some of the experiments with afrobeat etc bt they strangely sound like work in progress, good work in progress though.
the beautifully packaged roedilius 2 cd comp is very good too.
Cluster ...
Sowisoso
and Harmonia !
Very much seconding that After The Heat (w/ the big Brian),
while worth a listen or burning some cuts , on the whole pretty patchy/Non essential .
Must have been fun jams /sessions - but B E didn't really add much they didn't have already
Sowisoso
and Harmonia !
Very much seconding that After The Heat (w/ the big Brian),
while worth a listen or burning some cuts , on the whole pretty patchy/Non essential .
Must have been fun jams /sessions - but B E didn't really add much they didn't have already
O
Omaar
Guest
Dude, you already started a thread on this last year.
http://dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=2089
Maybe you've been smoking too much of that lebanese gold
I was pretty disappointed by the Rother/Moebius gig at the ICA last month, have to say
http://dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=2089
Maybe you've been smoking too much of that lebanese gold
I was pretty disappointed by the Rother/Moebius gig at the ICA last month, have to say
saw Rother and Moebius at the Cooler in NYC a few years ago and was blown away.
as far as these 2 albums, according to a good friend of mine there is a clear choice to be made. here is his review (from popark.blogspot.com):
____________________
The first of the two records, called Cluster and Eno has one of my all time favorite album covers. Unfortunately the music inside to my ears didn’t quite live up to the task, and like the Eno/Harmonia album is not really essential. However the second collaboration, billed to Eno Moebius Roedelius and titled “after the heat” is outstanding.
These two albums are not at all alike; the first album still comes in as a bit of a mix between the second Harmonia album and Another Green World. However After the heat goes off into totally different territory, perhaps the best way to describe it is picking up where the Instrumental mood pieces Eno and Bowie did together in Berlin left off. However, much of this album features Eno’s vocals unlike the first one, perhaps we can think of this as being something like the record Eno had hoped Heroes would come out as before Bowie tried (and failed, thank God!) to make it a stadium rock album. Here Eno had musicians of his caliber, and was engineered and produced by Conny Plank, the greatest record producer who ever lived. What makes the cluster collaborations radically different then any other Eno project is Eno is always brought into bands or other musicians records to teach them, to bring in radical new ideas and inspiration. However with Cluster he was more of a student, he admired them greatly and learned from them. By this album he’s more on his own feet and you can tell they are all more comfortable playing together as equals then perhaps was the case in Harmonia. This is probably the closest to an absolute democracy that Eno has ever played in, with two musicians and a producer he saw as his superiors, people he couldn’t teach or strike as radical. Eno at his most esoteric (say for instance the “on land” period) still sounds very conventional if compared to early Cluster albums.
You can hear in the output of all three musicians from this time onward the changes in their individual styles that come to light here on this album, as if it was a new birth for them, cluster sounded more like this album as did Eno in his solo works from this point forward. You can also hear the breakdown of each member of cluster into separate musical entities for the first time that would become much more explicit in their solo work.
So as I’ve waxed poetic about the band and it’s dynamics, what does it sound like? Well, that’s a very difficult question to answer. Again the example I created above about being what came after the Eno/Bowie sessions is perhaps most accurate, or parts of the first Music for Films record. It’s a very eclectic album, mixing gorgeous electronics, reverbs and processed acoustic instruments, as well as impressionistic piano playing. It’s actually one of the most melodic records Eno ever worked on, in his solo work only Apollo would be quite this melodic. It’s quite a lush record; one can only really come up with similitudes and technical details to describe, because it’s such an abstract work. I can compare it to albums it was an obvious influence on, early David Sylvian works, the early Colin Newman solo albums, Martin Hannet’s production style, some of Cabaret Voltaire’s work. However it doesn’t sound like any of these, it sounds only like an Eno and Cluster record. Really nothing on earth had ever sounded quite like I t, I won’t bore you with the standard music journalist bullshit about how influential cluster were on “electronica” because there’s plenty of that in the liner notes and it’s not true anyway, as most popular electronic musicians from Juan Atkins to The Chemical Brothers didn’t likely ever listen to Cluster a day in their life. However they were tremendously important in the history of both experimental and electronic music, and certainly in experimental pop music. Tracing the nature and scope of their influence however is far beyond the scope of this article, maybe I’ll write about it at a future date in regard to another Cluster album.
The first track “foreign affairs” is an interesting time, almost like what we can Imagine Steve Reich would think funk was, time kept by piano chops and pulses met with throbbing bass guitar punches. Like several tracks on this set there is gorgeous use of analog string synthesizers like the solina that gives it the mood of a future that never quite was. It also has all manner of percussive echoes and flanged harmonics, met with filtered synth lines falling out of moogs and arps.
The second track “the belldog” is gorgeous, one of my absolute favorite pieces of music Eno has ever been a part of, it’s certainly in his most beautiful, up there with “an ending (ascent)” from Apollo or “spider and I” from Before and After Science. Fantastic song, with a gorgeous proto trance synth bass arpeggio dripping resonance as the lfo brings the snarling filter up and down, met with beautiful piano glissandos and vibraphone lines and all manner of sound effects, echoed bells and tambourines. A song so good it makes the album itself worth buying just to have it. Has a very catchy Eno vocal as well, once you hear it you’ll catch yourself singing in the shower “most of the day/ we were at the machinery”. I could listen to this song all day, a textbook example of the beauty that results when experimental and pop music marries. I’ve been terribly cynical about electronic music of late but when I hear a piece that bloody good it makes me want to dust off the synths and get to it.
The next track is Base and Apex and revolves around two killer resonant moog bass sequences, met with solina and piano counterpoint and some Subotnick-esque S/H wave chromaticism and detuned slide guitar chorusing. A fantastic track as well that gets more and more interesting every time you hear it.
“Tzima n’arki” is next, where Holger Czukay drops in to play bass. This is a bit like Fela Kuti playing with Steve Reich as it’s based around this slinky funk bass groove stacked on top of with pulsing piano fifths and echoes, with tape delayed electric guitar harmonics that get into Lee Perry territory and occasional arp odyssey percussive notes that are straight off picture music era Klaus Schulze. Has a really nice Backwards vocal by Eno.
Next comes Luftschloss, a gorgeous piano, farfisa and synth lullaby. A lot of this record has an almost lullaby feel to it, it’s night music for sure, but a lovely warm summer night, quiet and dark, but never threatening, eclectic but never quite mysterious, as strange an album as it is it always sounds almost familiar, it has such a friendly and welcoming feel to it, which is a true rarity in electronic music.
Oil is the stinker on the album, arp leads and piano chords with terrible wendy carlos style synth brass patches. One of the more Bowie sounding pieces, not at all good, but not offensive enough to make you sour on the album.
Next up is “broken head” a long time favorite among Eno aficionados. It resembles in some ways the Byrne/Eno album, and is almost proto industrial in that you can hear where parts of this track were developed later by Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, the guitar parts especially remind me of TG’s “hamburger lady” and the bass line is a bit like what Richard H. Kirk would do at times before getting into the slap bass meets Peter Hook thing he did. It’s also got excessive abuse of modulation effects which became a TG trademark and was symptomatic of most C grade industrial music until the bubblegum industrial disco movement began in North America in the mid eighties. Don’t want it to sound like I don’t like this track or early Industrial music, I like them both quite a bit.
Light arms is the next track, doesn’t do a lot, actually reminds me a bit more of the Michael Rother style guitar tracks that would be done in later Harmonia. I could swear he played on this album, he had already broke up Neu for good and put out a few lovely solo records by this time, but he’s not on any of these tracks. Some nice timbres, but not much of a track though, still it adds to the overall mood of the album, and kind of cleans the palette from Broken Head to the more ambient finale of the record.
“The Shade” is really gorgeous, lots of lovely slow ambient square wave melodies with piano arpeggios and later chords. Similar in mood to “sparrowfall” from music for films with an octavia pitch bent guitar lead that recalls some heavenly music corporation era fripp and eno. The gratuitous piano pulse minimalist composer comparison for this track however is In C era Terry Riley, seems I should’ve worked a Charlemagne Palestine reference in there somewhere.
The album ends with another lovely piano and synth number titled “old land”, soft solina chords swell up to meet piano notes and a floating set of filtered triangle wave synth drones as occasional pieces of percussion like triangles are tapped, and flanged cymbals go off very softly in the mix, panned off to one side with filtered gongs just on the threshold of hearing….
This is such a wonderful album; it is one hundred percent essential for any fan of Eno or of Electronic music. If you’ve ever wondered about Eno’s great works, this is just as good of an album to start with as any other. Eno spent several years in Berlin at this time, playing with Cluster and Bowie, but this album is by far the masterpiece of the lot, rivaled only by Bowie’s “Low”. An album that still, almost 30 years later, sounds fresh, alive, and interesting. Electronic music often dates poorly, but this passes all the tests, I’m very glad to have this back in my record collection at last.
as far as these 2 albums, according to a good friend of mine there is a clear choice to be made. here is his review (from popark.blogspot.com):
____________________
The first of the two records, called Cluster and Eno has one of my all time favorite album covers. Unfortunately the music inside to my ears didn’t quite live up to the task, and like the Eno/Harmonia album is not really essential. However the second collaboration, billed to Eno Moebius Roedelius and titled “after the heat” is outstanding.
These two albums are not at all alike; the first album still comes in as a bit of a mix between the second Harmonia album and Another Green World. However After the heat goes off into totally different territory, perhaps the best way to describe it is picking up where the Instrumental mood pieces Eno and Bowie did together in Berlin left off. However, much of this album features Eno’s vocals unlike the first one, perhaps we can think of this as being something like the record Eno had hoped Heroes would come out as before Bowie tried (and failed, thank God!) to make it a stadium rock album. Here Eno had musicians of his caliber, and was engineered and produced by Conny Plank, the greatest record producer who ever lived. What makes the cluster collaborations radically different then any other Eno project is Eno is always brought into bands or other musicians records to teach them, to bring in radical new ideas and inspiration. However with Cluster he was more of a student, he admired them greatly and learned from them. By this album he’s more on his own feet and you can tell they are all more comfortable playing together as equals then perhaps was the case in Harmonia. This is probably the closest to an absolute democracy that Eno has ever played in, with two musicians and a producer he saw as his superiors, people he couldn’t teach or strike as radical. Eno at his most esoteric (say for instance the “on land” period) still sounds very conventional if compared to early Cluster albums.
You can hear in the output of all three musicians from this time onward the changes in their individual styles that come to light here on this album, as if it was a new birth for them, cluster sounded more like this album as did Eno in his solo works from this point forward. You can also hear the breakdown of each member of cluster into separate musical entities for the first time that would become much more explicit in their solo work.
So as I’ve waxed poetic about the band and it’s dynamics, what does it sound like? Well, that’s a very difficult question to answer. Again the example I created above about being what came after the Eno/Bowie sessions is perhaps most accurate, or parts of the first Music for Films record. It’s a very eclectic album, mixing gorgeous electronics, reverbs and processed acoustic instruments, as well as impressionistic piano playing. It’s actually one of the most melodic records Eno ever worked on, in his solo work only Apollo would be quite this melodic. It’s quite a lush record; one can only really come up with similitudes and technical details to describe, because it’s such an abstract work. I can compare it to albums it was an obvious influence on, early David Sylvian works, the early Colin Newman solo albums, Martin Hannet’s production style, some of Cabaret Voltaire’s work. However it doesn’t sound like any of these, it sounds only like an Eno and Cluster record. Really nothing on earth had ever sounded quite like I t, I won’t bore you with the standard music journalist bullshit about how influential cluster were on “electronica” because there’s plenty of that in the liner notes and it’s not true anyway, as most popular electronic musicians from Juan Atkins to The Chemical Brothers didn’t likely ever listen to Cluster a day in their life. However they were tremendously important in the history of both experimental and electronic music, and certainly in experimental pop music. Tracing the nature and scope of their influence however is far beyond the scope of this article, maybe I’ll write about it at a future date in regard to another Cluster album.
The first track “foreign affairs” is an interesting time, almost like what we can Imagine Steve Reich would think funk was, time kept by piano chops and pulses met with throbbing bass guitar punches. Like several tracks on this set there is gorgeous use of analog string synthesizers like the solina that gives it the mood of a future that never quite was. It also has all manner of percussive echoes and flanged harmonics, met with filtered synth lines falling out of moogs and arps.
The second track “the belldog” is gorgeous, one of my absolute favorite pieces of music Eno has ever been a part of, it’s certainly in his most beautiful, up there with “an ending (ascent)” from Apollo or “spider and I” from Before and After Science. Fantastic song, with a gorgeous proto trance synth bass arpeggio dripping resonance as the lfo brings the snarling filter up and down, met with beautiful piano glissandos and vibraphone lines and all manner of sound effects, echoed bells and tambourines. A song so good it makes the album itself worth buying just to have it. Has a very catchy Eno vocal as well, once you hear it you’ll catch yourself singing in the shower “most of the day/ we were at the machinery”. I could listen to this song all day, a textbook example of the beauty that results when experimental and pop music marries. I’ve been terribly cynical about electronic music of late but when I hear a piece that bloody good it makes me want to dust off the synths and get to it.
The next track is Base and Apex and revolves around two killer resonant moog bass sequences, met with solina and piano counterpoint and some Subotnick-esque S/H wave chromaticism and detuned slide guitar chorusing. A fantastic track as well that gets more and more interesting every time you hear it.
“Tzima n’arki” is next, where Holger Czukay drops in to play bass. This is a bit like Fela Kuti playing with Steve Reich as it’s based around this slinky funk bass groove stacked on top of with pulsing piano fifths and echoes, with tape delayed electric guitar harmonics that get into Lee Perry territory and occasional arp odyssey percussive notes that are straight off picture music era Klaus Schulze. Has a really nice Backwards vocal by Eno.
Next comes Luftschloss, a gorgeous piano, farfisa and synth lullaby. A lot of this record has an almost lullaby feel to it, it’s night music for sure, but a lovely warm summer night, quiet and dark, but never threatening, eclectic but never quite mysterious, as strange an album as it is it always sounds almost familiar, it has such a friendly and welcoming feel to it, which is a true rarity in electronic music.
Oil is the stinker on the album, arp leads and piano chords with terrible wendy carlos style synth brass patches. One of the more Bowie sounding pieces, not at all good, but not offensive enough to make you sour on the album.
Next up is “broken head” a long time favorite among Eno aficionados. It resembles in some ways the Byrne/Eno album, and is almost proto industrial in that you can hear where parts of this track were developed later by Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, the guitar parts especially remind me of TG’s “hamburger lady” and the bass line is a bit like what Richard H. Kirk would do at times before getting into the slap bass meets Peter Hook thing he did. It’s also got excessive abuse of modulation effects which became a TG trademark and was symptomatic of most C grade industrial music until the bubblegum industrial disco movement began in North America in the mid eighties. Don’t want it to sound like I don’t like this track or early Industrial music, I like them both quite a bit.
Light arms is the next track, doesn’t do a lot, actually reminds me a bit more of the Michael Rother style guitar tracks that would be done in later Harmonia. I could swear he played on this album, he had already broke up Neu for good and put out a few lovely solo records by this time, but he’s not on any of these tracks. Some nice timbres, but not much of a track though, still it adds to the overall mood of the album, and kind of cleans the palette from Broken Head to the more ambient finale of the record.
“The Shade” is really gorgeous, lots of lovely slow ambient square wave melodies with piano arpeggios and later chords. Similar in mood to “sparrowfall” from music for films with an octavia pitch bent guitar lead that recalls some heavenly music corporation era fripp and eno. The gratuitous piano pulse minimalist composer comparison for this track however is In C era Terry Riley, seems I should’ve worked a Charlemagne Palestine reference in there somewhere.
The album ends with another lovely piano and synth number titled “old land”, soft solina chords swell up to meet piano notes and a floating set of filtered triangle wave synth drones as occasional pieces of percussion like triangles are tapped, and flanged cymbals go off very softly in the mix, panned off to one side with filtered gongs just on the threshold of hearing….
This is such a wonderful album; it is one hundred percent essential for any fan of Eno or of Electronic music. If you’ve ever wondered about Eno’s great works, this is just as good of an album to start with as any other. Eno spent several years in Berlin at this time, playing with Cluster and Bowie, but this album is by far the masterpiece of the lot, rivaled only by Bowie’s “Low”. An album that still, almost 30 years later, sounds fresh, alive, and interesting. Electronic music often dates poorly, but this passes all the tests, I’m very glad to have this back in my record collection at last.
hamarplazt
100% No Soul Guaranteed
'After the Heat' is indeed a good choice, I must admit that I'm pretty surprised that some people here call it non-essential and patchy, I'd say it's one of the best things any of the involved parts - Eno, Roedelius, Moebius, Plank, Czuckay - have ever done. Where 'Cluster and Eno' is very much exactly what you'd expect from a Cluster/Eno-collaboration (which is of course a pretty good thing in itself), AtH transcends this and is even better than the sum of its already brilliant parts, full of weird things that seem to have no antecedents at all. A few tracks are in the style of 'Cluster and Eno', but they're still excellent (and that includes "Oil" IMO), and work very well within the album. For some reason, the new version seem to have the tracks in a completely different order than on the original LP. Have anyone any idea why they've done that?