MUSIK VON HARMONIA

Behind this tackiest (and goofiest) detergent gatefold artwork sits one of Germany electro-pop avant- garde's most endearing albums, even if it didn't make its way in the sales dept. Originally a side-project to further on Cluster's musical explorations, Harmonia integrated Michael Rother (of Neu!'s fame) and made this album, one that will redirect the main project to change the course of its adventures, creating the Kraftwerk-like Zuckerzeit the very next year. The inside gatefold shows the trio in their rehearsal room and one can easily understand how such music evolved from this trio let loose with tape machines around them.

Musically, the album is a bit like if you've thrown some of the Harmonia detergent and it acted as javel would hit the speakers of your stereo, cleansing it from all previous musical conception, but leaving intact the speaker cones and the coils. Half the tracks sound a bit Neu! than the fore-coming Zuckerzeit, but it's also much closer to Zuckerzeit than their previous album Cluster 1 or II. An odd thing is the closing track, the 5-minutes Hausmusik, which predates by almost two decades the famous house music movement.

Certainly Harmonia's most interesting album, it might just be their most groundbreaking as well, as this will lead the Cluster trio into Kraftwerk-type of music with the fore-coming Zuckerzeit album. As close to essential as you can get, especially for electronic music historians, every kid into techno should also its birth.

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