CLUSTER

Some reviewers have mentioned their surprise that no synthesizers were used in the recording of 'Cluster 71' but what surprises me more is that such archaic devices as guitars and cellos were in fact employed, because conventional music graces us with its absence from the album. Be warned, its mysterious auditory explorations are about as far as you'll get from standard melody and rhythm while the lack of track titles further reinforces the disorientating nature of the music. This album is so impenetrable that it doesn't erect mere earthworks in its defence but throws up entire mountainsides.

The warped sounds and primal monotony of 'Cluster 71' are also the stuff of nightmarish space opera, so the next time you're alone late at night and obsessing about what music to listen to it might be best not to play this because it could just scare the sweet bejeebus out of you. It isn't so much a ready-roasted turkey flying into your mouth as a synthetic toxin for you to choke on.

The first track alone is like some industrial hell-world that's under the spell of Cocteau's kick, and where the mournful screaming of the Banshee echoes through the depths of timeless time to the rhythmical cla-clank of its metallic beating heart. And the remainder of this device- driven racket of an album sounds as if it's inhabited by other shapeless phantoms, all-seeing tyrants and abandoned interstellar hulks that all in all represent a very disturbing world of electronic expressionism.

'Cluster 71' is a work of pure menace and perhaps its major importance lies in its power to evoke such vivid mental images. I need to be in a certain frame of mind to listen to this album but it's possible with a little imagination to really lose myself in it without doping the jockey as well as the horse.