Description
This is a review of Cluster & Eno's 1977 album, "Cluster & Eno." The album is a collaboration between German space-rock pioneers Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius and British soundscapist extraordinaire Brian Eno. The album is notable for its ethereal washes of keyboard, repetitive piano sequences, and occasionally edgy guitar and bass accents. The album is also notable for its freshness today, as it predates the glut of ambient and IDM music of the mid-1990s.
Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius, core members of the
pioneering German space-rock outfit Cluster, join British
soundscapist extraordinaire Brian Eno for this 1977 excursion into
early ambient electronica. Sophisticated, rhythmic, and evocative,
the music on CLUSTER & ENO blends ethereal washes of keyboard,
repetitious piano sequences, and occasionally edgy guitar and bass
accents to create strange, beautiful cerebral landscapes. The
recording is notable on two points, in particular. The first is
that, while delicately atmospheric, CLUSTER & ENO transcends
the flavorless fare made by some of the ambient and New Age artists
that followed the footsteps of these European innovators. The music
here is always challenging and engaging, and rewards both
concentrated listening and background absorption. The second virtue
is that CLUSTER & ENO predates the glut of ambient and IDM
music of the mid-'90s by almost 20 years, while matching, and
arguably surpassing, much of that material. Though this music is
not beat-based, its attention to pulses and off-kilter atmospheres
anticipate the aesthetic of the trance and ill-bient styles by
decades. In part, because the sounds produced here are organic
(i.e. not computer-generated), this mesmerizing music is as fresh
today as upon its release.
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