Qluster - Rufen (2011)

Onnen Bock and the 84-year-old Hans Joachim Roedelius are still going strong as Qluster; Rufen was one of their first two releases.  A collection of live recordings from 2010, Rufen (along with Fragen - see below) set out their stall as fresh, forward-looking keepers of the Cluster flame for the 2010s, although still sampling their own past work here and there.  All the gear on Rufen is analogue, and in these four hands sounds spectacular.

Rufen's opening track is a 15-minute recording from the Roedelius-curated More Ohr Less festival in Linz, August 2010.  A vast, gaseous Vangelis-like open soundscape offers both melodic, meditative music in the Roedelius tradition and some darker moments.  Tantalizingly, it fades out just as a rhythm track gets going - wonder if the full concert will ever see the light of day. 

The remainder of the album is a three-part recording made in Schönberg in December 2010.  The first part opens in sampling mode with cut-up whispered voices, moving through piano melodies quickly submerged in whizzing electronics to water sounds and more.  The second establishes a more weightless ambience, like an update of the very earliest Cluster recordings, and the third burbles around nicely over a gentle rhythm.

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pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG: Fragen / Tasten

Qluster - Tasten (2015)

For their fifth album as Qluster, Roedelius and Onnen Bock - by now expanded to a trio with Armin Metz - decided to forego the electronics of previous albums for this sublime album of music for three pianos.  Sound familiar?  What you get here, though, is first of all nearly twice as long, and as distinctly European as the Budd-Garcia-Lentz minature masterpiece was distinctly American/Latin American.  Tasten is also more sparingly produced, largely allowing that timeless Steinway resonance to speak for itself in triplicate.

As might be expected, the result of this setup - and one of course that involves Hans-Joachim Roedelius - is absolutely gorgeous both melodically and harmonically.  Picking standouts is difficult on such a strong programme of material, but I'll plump for Brandung, the longest track, with the perfectly evocative Spuren im Schnee a close second.

Here and there, little interesting touches flesh out the nine pieces on Tasten, such as the string plucking on Über den Dächern, and more subtly so on the following Il Campanile.  That track actually brought to mind for me Zeitkratzer's treatment of Kraftwerk's Wellenlange (see last week) in the way it takes the minimal material somewhere sublime.

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Previously posted: Fragen

Qluster - Fragen (2011)

A year after Qua, Roedelius and Moebius announced that Cluster had come to an end; that same year, Qluster was announced as the next Roedelius project, described as "the extraordinary shedding of skin of one of the most important German electronic groups".  This album, the first of six and counting, was the first under the new name.

Joining Roedelius was sound artist, producer and musician Onnen Bock, who had barely been born back when Cluster made Zuckerzeit, and first met the living legend in 1991.  Fragen wasn't their first recording together, but as the first Qluster release it was the ideal introduction to this great project.  On this initial evidence at least (I've only heard half of the Qluster catalogue so far and it's quite diverse - they later become a trio), Bock brought out the more free-form, kosmiche ambient side of Roedelius that stretched all the way back to the Cluster II album and beyond, whilst updating the sonic palate perfectly.

Only one of the seven tracks on Fragen stretches out quite as much as Cluster of old, though - the 13-minute Wurzelwelt even brings to mind latter-day Coil in its extended dark ambience.  The rest average about four minutes, and pulse away in gentle, exploratory space, occasionally bursting into a more melodic light (the end of Auf der Alm), and more often stark and austere with a subtle rhythmic pulse when needed.  All in all a fantastic album that bode well for this latest chapter in the Roedelius story.

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