Noise: SFBG Music Blog - Cluster klatch: Krautrock poobah Hans-Joachum Roedelius gives it up

By Matt Sussman

Kosmiche godfathers Cluster have been back from the future for more than three decades now, with the core duo of Hans-Joachum Roedelius and Dieter Moebius having offered a rich and varied body of studio albums and collaborations - most notably with Brian Eno - as well as live documentation and solo outings. Through the analog mists and drum machine clicks of their ‘70s albums one can discern many of the splinter groups, such as ambient and synth-pop, which electronic music would break apart into in the ensuing decades.

I engaged in a quickie Q&A session with Roedelius over e-mail, prior to the duo taking the stage at New York’s annual noise jamboree No Fun Fest. (Ed: For more on Cluster, see Matt Sussman's "Cluster luck: Krautrock's darkest stars reappear in our firmament.")

SFBG: Since 2007, you and Moebius have been engaged in a second reunion of sorts, following a ten-year hiatus. Do you find it challenging to work together again, especially in a live setting, after such a long break?

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: It's challenging and fun!

SFBG: Going back to your early days as a musician, could you please describe the scene at the Zodiak Free Arts Lab when you first started playing with Moebius and Conrad Schnitzler as Kluster?

HJR: It was the first free arts lab in Berlin where many people gathered and tried to do something together, but Kluster never played there, Kluster’s first appearance was at the academy of fine arts and later on (1969 the two) in a gallery. Schnitzler (who was co-founder of that lab) and I were playing there together with other people in the beginning but Schnitzler left the community right after the club opened.

SFBG: Improvisation has long been a guiding process for your music. But along with the more experimental passages on your albums, there are also moments that could very much be described as almost “pop” in tone (here I’m thinking of Zuckerzeit [1974]). Have you always started from improvisation?

HJR: Yes, all my music has started from point zero in an improvisational process.

SFBG: In previous interviews you’ve described producer Conny Planck as Cluster’s “silent member.” Could you please talk some more about Conny’s influence and contributions to the group?

HJR: Conni was most important for us from the beginning in 1970 (Klopfzeichen and Zwei-Osterei). His abilities as a producer and also as a musician helped Cluster a lot to become what the finally became.

SFBG: The three (if you include 1997’s collection of previously unreleased material, Tracks and Traces with Brian Eno) Harmonia albums that resulted out of your collaboration with Neu! member Michael Rother are some of my favorite entries in your discography. Even though you were based in your Forst studio at that time, how closely were you following the output of your contemporaries such as Kraftwerk, Manuel Gottsching and Ash Ra, Faust, Can, etc.?

HJR: I myself wasn't much into the music of my German contemporaries. I knew all these people and groups, but I had to take care of my own solo work and my work with Cluster and Harmonia.

SFBG: I’ve always loved the cover photo for Cluster & Eno (1977). That lone microphone in the field at dusk is such a melancholy image - and so fitting for the music contained within - but it also seems suggestive of the openness to chance encounters and unforeseen possibilities that has characterized your music. Do you remember how that cover came about?

HJR: It was my idea to use a photo that my wife shot somewhere around the place we all lived at the time.

SFBG: Do you find that your audience has changed over time?

HJR: It's till the same audience, but there is a new constantly growing audience as well.

SFBG: What have you been listening to lately?

HJR: Mostly classical music - Russian composers such as Rimskij Korsakoff, but also French ones like [Erik] Satie and [Francis] Poulenc, and my new collaborator and colleague, Alessandra Celletti from Rome.