ERUPTION [AKA: SCHWARZ]

This is Conrad Schnitzler's atypical music during the activities of the avant garde collective "Zodiac free art lab". Extremely experimental, cerebral, maniac proto-electronic atmospheres. The compositions are made for a small ensemble of electric guitar, cello, tape loops and percussions. It contains haunting, noisy fragments exploring the darkest side of the subconsciousness. "Part One" starts with monotonous, almost "gothic" cello chords surrounded by chaotic noises and echoing bass lines. The track ends up with claustrophobic sounds, an imminent explosion of sounds, totally crazy and druggy."Part Two" is much more industrial with massive, doom like bass guitar parts, destroyed guitar lines and heavy noises, a true apocalyptical soundscapes. The track also features high frequencies and pre- sampling techniques. Conceptual, extreme, painful, creative primitive electronic exercises.

Being already, by two grand and more than hypothetically connected albums, a band of pure revelation and clear industrial marooning, Kluster, by the craft and chaos trio of Conrad Schnitzler , Dieter Moebius and Hans Roedelius, does another mind-dazzling, style-culminating and imperiously deprived composition, in the same year of the 1971 and in the same motive of creation and destruction. In fact, it is a fundamentally thicker and more unimaginable experiment, in contrast with the other two classics, and it is almost a parable to the fact that, after enough innovation and "absurdification" in the realms and inconvenienced tastes of krautrock, acid rock, electronic waste, sound-feast, noise and independent wave special signs and treats, an even more dark, conceptual, sardonic, cold-blooded and mechanical exploitation is close to unreal and paradigmatic. Add the avant-garde, for sure, because nothing is of simple logic, blatant technicality or fantasy of an enjoyable convention. Instead, this excelled program is nightmarish, haunting, neurotically and industrial, fractal and micro-tonal, insensitive and without color, harsh and without gravity, colossal and without sensibility. It's a freakin' masterpiece.

Titled as Kluster & Eruption, this album also wants to be a sort of Kluster and Eruption collaboration, though the Trio plays the music and the entire sense, and only the mix, the arrangement and the producing effort gets a tenacious help from Klaus Freudigmann. In a listened way, there's no possible chance you can differentiate the music's brand from the band's geniality - so that it is a clear-clean Kluster. Only musically it is so different, strong and deep-imploded that it seems the bigger and more audacious artistic work of the band with a special influence - the Eruption on. Anyway you take it, this creation is droopingly unbelievable in force, gluttony and sensation.

From scratching the living aesthetic out of you to studying the microcosms of a sound's second, this work has nothing to do with normal metrics and patient forms. First of all, hardly there is allowed a melody, a calibrated rhythm, ambiance or self-simple vibrations - which can make the beautiful music lovers have a grunge against this entire avant-garde; also it can point how interesting it is that this postmodern, narcissistic, derisory and malformed album is recommended among the most essential works. At least without doubt it is worthy its independent subtlety. The German krautrock lies under transfigurations and transformations, and the acid of it is touchingly depressive and aggressive. The electronic fiber is impossible to pronounce as absurd or rather accomplished, but it sure lies on edges, mechanics and supporting breaks - though a lot of "traditional" electronics and components do the massive thing. By experimentalism this is big, studying brutal minimalism, clenching great lengths of tone and sound rictus, reaching nerve collapses and valorous techniques of undetermined raw sort. Noise, the last ingredient, is ultimate, exploiting almost every heavy, dystrophic, tech-macabre resource imaginable.

This is a violent art and a heartless creation, but it also resembles a suffering of improvisation towards perfection. I personally regard this a masterpiece and Kluster's best because the detail of their initial protological and scientific experiment has reached a crass and overwhelming idea: electronic/krautrock mechanical and psychotic satisfaction on the extremest verge of a restless noise and minimal improvisation. An essential, visceral and hardly accessible rage craft album in the genre or the big movement.

Kluster were, at least for their original run, Conrad Schnitzler on the rebound from Tangerine plus Moebius and Roedelius. Eruption captures some live improvisations from the trio performed as part of their final gig together. Schnitzler has reassembled new Kluster lineups since, but in these revivals he has been the only old hand to return.

Since the recordings were captured by Klaus Freudigmann of Schnitzler's subsequent group Eruption, it was inadvertently mislabelled as a Kluster-Eruption collaboration, though it wasn't intended to be one. This is useful context to bear in mind when listening: creatively, the parties involved here are right on the verge of parting ways, with Moebius and Roedelius dropping that harsh K for a gentler C and becoming the Cluster who would be so important on the electronic krautrock scene later on.

The shift in name is apt, because the subtlety and softer edges of Cluster's work are more or less absent here... as, indeed, is much in the way of a cohesive creative agenda. Perhaps precisely because of the differences that would prompt them to part ways, Kluster produce material here which doesn't quite hold the attention, and when you combine that with rather shaky recording quality you have a release which is of interest more to Krautrock historians than for those who are primarily after something rewarding to listen to in its own right.