Caramel
Song by Cluster
Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius left West Berlin in 1971. They moved to the countryside to the German village of Forst to build their new studio.
It sounds so easy to do nowadays. You pack your stuff, bring a couple of bags and your computer. Instead of a laptop and an audio card, they brought with them an arsenal of synthesizers, drum machines, and guitar amps which they then used to filter every sound they were producing. Laptops didn’t exist in 1971.
Their band, Cluster, together with bands like Can, Neu! and Kraftwerk, was already a reality of the Kraut Rock and the German Prog/Electronic/Experimental music scene of the seventies.
Their first two albums, Cluster and Cluster II, were mainly made of ambient music, abstract, beat-less compositions composed and produced with Conny Plank.
These first two albums started a journey we now know and describe using the term Industrial.
A term which was then brought to extreme levels of experimentation from another German band: Einstürzende Neubauten.
Zuckerzeit, their third album, redefined their style, adding crispy beats composed using the Elka Drummer One drum machine and Michael Rother’s (Neu! guitarist) Farfisa and four-track recorder, which he lent to the band.
The three supposedly ended up working together with Rother (however, Rother has said he never helped with the album and believes his name is only on the credits for letting Cluster use his equipment) on production and Roedelius and Moebius as composers. Thanks to filtered loops, the album reshaped their style in a more accessible way, adding a prog/pop element that they didn’t have in the two previous works.
Irregular beats and Keyboards melodies, a typical element of Prog Rock, mixed with synthesizer arpeggiators made a track like Caramel stand out.
It inspired a whole generation of musicians growing up in post-apocalyptic Germany. Divided during the cold war but already unified by the will to explore the possibilities of sound and the recently invented tools to express creativity that led us to the wide variety of genres we know today.
It’s hard not to be grateful for having had bands like Cluster. It is also hard not to think about what happened with all the music released by electronic music labels like Warp and Ninja Tune. This music evolution would have never been the same without the pioneers of electronic sounds of the 70s and 80s.
Hundreds of musicians still mention Zuckerzeit. It’s an incredible experience if, as musicians or producers, you are still discovering the history of electronic music.
This is one of the albums that surprised me the most when I realized it was published in 1974. When you think about the 70s, it’s hard to imagine this type of music was already around in a world dominated by guitar bands.
