Grosses Wasser

Following their collaboration with Brian Eno, yet another collaboration beckoned the duo of Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius, this time with long-time associate Conny Plank, electronic artist Asmus Tietchens, Dutch sitarist Okko Bekker, and Kraan's Hellmut Hattler and (ex-Kraan) Johannes Pappert for the mise-en-scène of the Liliental album in 1978. They reunited as Cluster in 1979, now at Peter Baumann's Paragon Studios in Berlin. Opening their seventh album, "Avanti" ambles forward over a percolating sequence and a simple motif played on synth. "Prothese" adds electronic drums and some tribal voices, or whatever you want to call them. "Isodea" turns more to chamber music, played on a clavinet-like keyboard, while "Breitengrad 20" continues with sequencer and piano added, but with some guitar added for effect. Rising from a gentle piano, the album's title track encompasses the second side of the record. Throughout its course, it travels a range of moods and sounds, from darker, more pre-industrial passages that harken back to the earliest days of Kluster, to more forward-looking tribal rhythms. It's a weird pastiche of electronic sounds, but a veritable one at that. Throughout, the album is ripe with Baumann's typical style of production (here with William Roper assisting); clean, stark, yet never sterile, it's very much a "rock" production, but, of course, without the rock music! Recorded for the Sky label, the duo's Grosses Wasser would be the penultimate Cluster album. Both Roedelius and Moebius would put their partnership on hold as the former continued his solo work, while the latter began an inventive collaboration with Plank, starting with 1980's Rastakraut Pasta. A final (for the next decade, anyway) Cluster album, Curiosum, would see release in 1981.