Zuckerzeit

In 1974, Cluster entered the sugar era. This doesn’t mean that they had finally arrived in their promised land, but they had simply moved from Berlin to the country, to a small place called Forst on the river Weser.

Many a thing had changed for band members Moebius and Roedelius since Cluster II: They had moved from boisterous Berlin to this calm rural village, they had founded the band Harmonia, had set up their own studio, and had bought new equipment. As a result of this and many other things, new impulses were noticeably spurring the evolution of their music.

The album Zuckerzeit (“sugar era”) launched a revolution for Cluster. Strictly speaking, Zuckerzeit is not really an album by Cluster. More precisely, the LP contains two mini solo albums by Moebius and Roedelius. Those who were familiar with the stylistic peculiarities of the two musicians could easily relate the solo pieces to either one of them.

One thing they did have in common was the consistent use of the analogue rhythm machine. Zuckerzeit, on the contrary, is designed in a clearly rhythmical way: a rhythm machine, triggered synths, and harmonic patterns played by hand inspired life and imagination on the melody lines. This was different as well.

Once again, Roedelius and Moebius took on work in such a remarkably lighthearted and down-to-earth manner as was typical of Cluster. The friendliness of the music is clearly due to the two personalities of Roedelius and Moebius; its down-to-earth character possibly comes from Michael Rother, the album’s co-producer.

When comparing Zuckerzeit to the works of other electronic combos produced at the same time, it is first of all the shortness of the tracks that seems most striking (2’20” to 6’10”). Listeners who were expecting long and booming pieces were badly advised with this album—what kind of trip is this that lasts for six minutes only?

The fact that Cluster worked in such a calm and collected way, that they concentrated on their musical ideas instead of losing themselves in long-windedness, that they took their time working on the album and not least that they could rely on the ideas of their co-producer Michael Rother—all this taken together gave way to the creation of electronic miniatures that sounded as extraordinary in the 1970s as they still do today.

Nothing reminds us of psychedelic music that was common at the time. Instead, we find transparency, a hint of utopia, and above all new sounds and noises, something which was unheard of in popular music until then.