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Cluster: Grosses Wasser LP (1979, Sky Records)
It’s been a week of ups and downs for me. On Monday, Scarecrow played with Subhumans, which was awesome. It was my third time seeing Subhumans (the first was way back in 1998), and they were great as always. They’ve always been a huge band for me as their music is so powerful and unique, and it’s really special that they still do such great gigs and they bring them around to all corners of the world. Very cool. Unfortunately, though, it was a rough night for me physically. I’ve mentioned my recent skateboarding injury in the newsletter; I was grinding a parking block two weeks ago and fell hard right onto the block, taking it directly to my ribcage. I felt like it was getting better, but Monday was a long day with a full day’s work, playing a set, standing around a lot at the gig, and moving more equipment than I should have (though Jeff and Usman kindly handled all the speaker cabinets). By the end, I was in a lot of pain, so on Tuesday I broke down and went to the doctor. I’d avoided that because I read they couldn’t do much about a rib injury, but I got x-rays confirming I didn’t fracture any ribs, and they prescribed me some kind of medication. I’m not sure what the medication was, but two days later I’m feeling way, way better. Maybe it’s a coincidence or a placebo effect, or maybe I should have just gone to the doctor two weeks ago. Either way, it’s nice to feel like there’s some positive movement.
Between the gig, doctor’s appointments, and driving around my wife, whose car broke down on the way back from the Subhumans gig, I have had little time for listening to records. I got in a good listening session Tuesday night, when I spun the Die Letzten Ecken LP (this week’s Record of the Week!) a few more times and got to soak in the new Fairytale LP, which is phenomenal. I’ll write about those for other sections of the newsletter, so what to write about for my staff pick? I scanned my pile of recent acquisitions and landed on this 1979 album from Germany’s Cluster, which I took home a month or so ago. I was at the store one day and it was sitting at the front of a bin, unclaimed after a few weeks in the stacks. I commented that I hadn’t heard it and was interested, and Jeff was like, “you should just take it.” So I did!
Grosses Wasser is the seventh album by Cluster… well, the seventh if you don’t count the two albums they recorded as Kluster before Conrad Schnitzler left the group and they changed the “K” to a “C,” but you do count the two collaborative albums the group did with Brian Eno, 1977’s Cluster & Eno and 1978’s After the Heat. That sentence alone hints at how deeply embedded Cluster’s two official members, Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius, were in the 70s German progressive music scene, so I won’t go too deeply into that here. Trust me, these two guys are super important. Grosses Wasser, though, I don’t think is seen as a crucial part of their discography… which is weird because many bands’ seventh albums are their most popular, right?
Besides coming rather late in their discography, perhaps Grosses Wasser lacks the sense of discovery of Cluster’s classic periods. Their first two albums are out there on the fringes ambient music, while 1974’s Zuckerziet and 1976’s Sowiesoso found them condensing their compositions into compact instrumental nuggets that had all the impact and melody of the best pop and classical music. The two Eno collaborations came next, which were front page news for weird music heads. Grosses Wasser, though, has weak branding. Peter Baumann’s production is a new wrinkle, giving the group a polished, crystalline sound that’s less organic, but very cool and modern (much like the cover artwork). Grosses Wasser splits the difference between the two early eras of Cluster’s work, with a bunch of compact tracks on the a-side and a more progressive, multi-movement piece taking up the entire second side.
I didn’t know any of this when I first dropped the needle on Grosses Wasser. All I knew was that it was a Cluster album I hadn’t heard, and it just delighted me. Each shorter piece has a different musical character, but they’re all beautiful, combining rich textures with a strong sense of composition and structure that many synth and progressive artists lack. The long piece is also interesting. It’s not droney like the longer pieces in Cluster’s early catalog, more like a short symphony with discrete sections that link together. As a whole, the album is like an anthology of tight, readable short stories with a longer story at the end, and it works well.
I’m not sure if Grosses Wasser is the place I’d start with Cluster, but if you enjoy their first six albums, there’s no reason to stop here. Cluster made one more album, 1981’s Curiosa, before disbanding for the first time that year. I’ll have to keep an eye out for that one and see if it maintains the same level of quality as this.