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THIS JUST IN FROM IMPORTANT RECORDS!!
Cluster, Berlin 2007, Important Records, USA
Release Date: May 13, 2008
"Berlin 2007 was a monumental performance for Cluster as it marked the first time that they had peformed live in Berlin since their 12 hour concert in the Galerie Hammer in the Europacenter in 1969. The performance was a massive success as a sold out crowd cheered loudly for Cluster to return to the stage. Fortunately, the concert was preserved for posterity and is proudly presented here on Important Records."
-Important Records
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For press contact with CLUSTER, please contact their European booking agent:
PLANET ROCK BOOKING
christoph [at] planetrock-booking [dot] de
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Excerpt from
Friday April 8, 2005
The Guardian
Interview with Hans-Joachim Roedelius
Roedelius... made his live solo debut with a home-made flute and an alarm clock.
In the spring of 1977, Brian Eno was living in Berlin, working with David Bowie on his seminal albums Low and Heroes when he journeyed into Lower Saxony to visit a remote farmstead called Forst. Two years earlier he had seen Cluster, the German duo comprising Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius, perform in Hamburg and now he was finally taking them up on their invitation to see first-hand how they worked.
Surrounded by dense woodland, Forst had been transformed into an idyllic artistic community, where Cluster and their fellow musicians spent their days chopping wood and renovating buildings and their nights making music. Cluster and Eno jammed together in an old riverside farmhouse and recorded an album, the first of four collaborations. The title, Cluster & Eno, was prosaic. The music, mesmerising and pioneering, was not.
"We exchanged a lot," says Roedelius, his face gently creasing into a grin. "The main thing we exchanged was don't take music too serious. Life is more serious."
Roedelius is enormously restful company. He turned 70 last October but is trim and healthy enough to appear at least a decade younger. He has the close-cropped, salt-and-pepper hair and goatee of a hip college professor, and clear blue eyes. Although he converted to Catholicism in 1984, he emanates the benign calm of a Buddhist. His attitude is simple: if you make yourself open to the music, it will come.
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Of all the so-called Krautrock performers who defined German music in the 1970s, including Kraftwerk, Can, Neu! and Faust, Roedelius is perhaps the most underrated and most intriguing. Compared to Woody Allen's Zelig by biographer Stephen Iliffe, in his seven decades he's encountered Nazis and communists, hippies and terrorists, Kraftwerk and Hendrix. Cluster played with Jimi Hendrix at a notoriously hellish German festival, one of the guitarist's last performances before his death in 1970. Roedelius saw a man for whom music had become a prison. "He looked like a broken-hearted man by that point," remembers Roedelius, sitting in the east London offices of Lunz's record label. "He was sick and tired of the business he had to do. It made me so sad because it wasn't true any more, what he did. He did it already and he had to do it again and again and again."
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I wonder how he felt about being German in those post-war years. "I never did feel that I was German. I hated what the Germans did to the Jews. It was so horrible to me. I didn't understand why it happened. Of course, German is my mother language but I think I learned very early to be more cosmopolitan."
He fled to West Germany but, with no work and no friends, he decided to return. Having promised he could come back without fear of punishment, the Stasi swiftly reneged, accusing him of being a spy. He spent two years as a prisoner, working in the coal mines, until he secured early release by penning what he describes as "awful socialist poetry". In 1960, one year before the Berlin Wall was erected, he moved again, this time for good. He drifted through a series of jobs - gardener, waiter, rubbish collector - before becoming a masseur. "From '43 to about '73 I was always on the road. Never in one place for a long time. It was a good process to learn about things that you would never normally learn about. I was thrown here, thrown there. It took me a long time to become a musician."
Slowly, Berlin's avant-garde scene drew him in. He met the controversial cult artist Joseph Beuys and joined the cutting-edge eight-person electronic collective Human Being. Musically untrained, Roedelius made his live solo debut with a microphone, a handmade flute and an alarm clock. It was that kind of era. "It was a real movement," he enthuses.
Older by a decade than most of his contemporaries, Roedelius none the less embraced the zeitgeist. He took acid, sometimes while on stage; spent time in a Corsican nudist camp; performed a 12-hour Cluster show in an art gallery; and released what he claims was Germany's first protest record, funded by the Catholic church.
His age was significant in one respect, however. Unlike many in West Germany's counter-culture, he had lived through the war. "I met Ulrike and the Baader-Meinhof scene but I didn't like it at all. I was there to take care of the children because their parents were always talking and talking and talking. And you see what came out. Nothing came out. I had to see a lot of violence in the war and after the war so for me it was easy to decide, 'No, I don't want this. This is not my thing.'"
One person with whom he did connect was his Cluster colleague, Moebius. "We are completely different people. He is Capricorn, I am Scorpio. But because we liked each other personally we didn't care. We did everything together. The only thing we didn't share was our girlfriends!"
Music critics have explained Krautrock as an attempt to create a distinctly European soundtrack, entirely divorced from the blues roots of Anglo-American rock, but Roedelius never saw it like that. Cluster listened to quintessentially American groups like the Band and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and tried to translate their spirit, along with musique concrete, psychedelia and Stockhausen, into radical, free-flowing electronica. When recording their first album, they would improvise for 20 minutes, then producer Conrad Plank would raise his hand to mark the end of side one and they would do the same for side two. Their music was stubbornly individual and hopelessly uncommercial. Despite working with more successful peers - jamming with Kraftwerk, recording two remarkable albums in Forst with Neu!'s Michael Rother under the name Harmonia - they never found mainstream success themselves. They split up in 1981, briefly reforming in the mid-1990s for tours of Japan and America, during which the Chicago Tribune branded them "20th-century music's best kept secret".
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