Session Transcript:
Cluster
Red Bull Music Academy, London 2010

The video stream for this lecture can be watched here.

Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius are Cluster. Highly influential and unique as a fingerprint, these two German gentlemen have shaped the direction of popular music without even intending to. From their early days on with Conrad Schnitzler as Kluster or their works with Michael Rother, silent member Conny Plank and Brian Eno, Moebius and Roedelius can look back on a heap of albums and different takes on krautrock, ambient, avantgarde and experimental music. But this is just a hint; an attempt to categorize their music would come to nothing. They were doing loop music way before the sampler was invented, took a hiatus whenever they felt like it and have just recently started to play live again. Whatever we could say about them, their music doesn't need any words. This, our friends, is Kosmische Musik!


RBMA: »Please welcome Cluster to the Red Bull Music Academy (applause).«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Hello.«

RBMA: »It’s nice to hear that applause for two guys as great as these. We could talk about their music from a number of perspectives, because their music has gone on to influence tons of music, such as industrial, minimal synth, dark new wave; tons of music I’ve heard over the years seems to spring from the music these guys and their peers created. I’m most qualified to speak on it from a hip hop perspective, so you guys will have to pardon me if I indulge myself and talk about how I first found their music. In the mid-’90s, when most of us who were intrigued by hip hop started seeing producers buying records from Germany’s ’70s scene, the first records they were finding were those that were the most distributed. Can – I’m sure many of you have heard of Can – Embryo, Amon Düül, Kraftwerk, Neu!. Of course, there were legendary records that related to these bands, many of us had heard of them, but these were the days before eBay, so no one was selling these records. You had to be a guy in your fourties with an ungodly sum of money and a network of psychedelic collectors to have even heard of the first press of Can’s first record, Monster Movie, which came out on Scheisshaus as I was telling you the other day. Great label. On one of my first trips to Germany I was lucky enough to have stumbled into a record store and seen this incredibly packaged dark-looking record by this band Kluster, then with a ‘K’. These were bands you might have heard about, the net was bringing a little more information to those of us who were interested. I saw it and it was prohibitively priced at about $1,000, which was about the same as the guy was charging for the original press of Monster Movie. So, of course, I had to hear it, I had to know what it was, it hadn’t even crossed my radar. And so this is the track, let’s see if I can play the track I heard from the first Kluster album. This was called?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Klopfzeichen.«

RBMA: »Which means?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Knocking sounds, like when you knock at the door.«

RBMA: »Let’s see if this works.«

Dieter Moebius: »Very quiet music.«

RBMA: »Yeah, very nice. No wonder you guys went on to create ambient music (laughter). Maybe someone can help me while I figure out which channel this is supposed to be on. My DJ days are unfortunately long behind me.«

(music: Kluster – Klopfzeichen Pt. 2)

»(fades music) That goes on for another 20 minutes and you could obviously hear why I was happy that I didn’t have $1,000 as I would’ve had nightmares for years, if I had bought that record and listened to it. They went on to create a bunch of other records, which we’re going to speak about, but that record in particular came back into my life about three years ago when a group from San Diego who I was interested in signing, two kids, played me a song, and like the first album Knocking Sound by Kluster, they didn’t have any titles for their songs, and I put on the first song, and it was as much of a cover of that as I’d ever heard. That was very impressive to me because I realised there was a new generation after mine that had discovered this band. When I was texting this producer on the label I manage, Madlib, and told him I’d be interviewing Cluster, he said: “That’s funny, I was just making a beat with a Cluster record, on Brain.” Of course, some of the later work. We only have a limited amount of time so we’re not going to go through this duo’s incredible history, we’re only going to go through part of it, but I figured it would be good to start by playing you this so we could try to out this into some context, play some songs from the landmark records they recorded throughout the ’70s. They’ve given their tacit approval to this approach. So let’s begin. When were you born?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »I was born in October 1934, before World War II.«

RBMA: »Where?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »In Berlin.«

RBMA: »And by the time you created this record, were you trained musically?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »No, I wasn’t trained. I was a physiotherapist before I went over to being an artist in the late ’60s.«

RBMA: »So by the time you recorded this record you were in your mid-thirties?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Yes.«

RBMA: »And how about you, young man?«

Dieter Moebius: »I was in my mid-twwenties. I was born in ’44 in Switzerland, but I’m German, because my parents didn’t want to be in Germany at this time, as you can imagine.«

RBMA: »So what was the catalyst for forming this group? Were there two of you or was there a third person?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »No, in the beginning there was Conrad Schnitzler, a pupil of Joseph Beuys, a fine artist, very famous in Germany. I don’t know whether he’s famous here, but I think he is as well, everybody knows about him. The Fluxus movement in fine arts, he was the head of it and Schnitzler was a pupil of him. He was the one who collected the two of us to be in the group Kluster, with a ‘K’.«

RBMA: »This was in Berlin now?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Yes.«

RBMA: »In the mid-’60s?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »End of the ’60s, ’68/69.«

RBMA: »There was a club, too, that you guys were a part of, an organisation, a venue.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »The venue we built in ’68 and it went on for about one and a half years, and when it closed the group Cluster was born.«

RBMA: »And what was the venue called?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: » Zodiak in Berlin.«

Dieter Moebius: »And the guy Beuys, with whom Schnitzler was a pupil, his idea was that anybody could be an artist. So what Schnitzler learned from Beuys is that anybody can be a musician.«

RBMA: »So were you a trained musician?«

Dieter Moebius: »Not really, I played the saxophone but not very well. My mother was a pianist, so I grew up in a house with lots of music, but more classical.«

RBMA: »Now, one of the things that’s often said about your music, in reviews or in third-party treatises on your music, especially the music you created at this time, is that you can hear Karlheinz Stockhausen’s influence. Is that true, were you influenced by Stockhausen?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Not at all.«

Dieter Moebius: »I never heard anything by him until I was 50 perhaps. I knew his name but I didn’t know his music. I got to know his music when we played a festival in Stavanger, Norway, where he also played, so that was the first time I got to know his music.«

RBMA: »So then, if you weren’t influenced by Stockhausen, you must have at least been influenced by Pierre Henry, the musique concrete composer in France?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Our biggest influence was ourselves, our lives and the way we were appreciate living, not really other musicians. We can’t count names, we listened to many people, of course. I listened to Pierre Henry and Iannis Xenakis at the time, just to know about them, not to copy them or do something that they did.«

RBMA: »That’s an interesting question then: what music were you listening to for your enjoyment when you’re making music like this in 1969?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Pop music, like Third Ear Band, Hapshash And The Coloured Coat. I don’t know whether anyone knows these bands anymore. Later on, Jimi Hendrix.«

Dieter Moebius: »Velvet Underground.«

RBMA: »You were listening to Jimi Hendrix and Velvet Underground and making music like this?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Of course.«

Dieter Moebius: »We tried to imitate them (laughter).«

RBMA: »Thank God you weren’t trained musicians then. Another thing that’s been said is that there are similarities between your music and free jazz, although I personally don’t hear that. Is that a fair assessment, were you listening to any free jazz?«

Dieter Moebius: »Not free jazz, I was listening to John Coltrane and later groups like Mott The Hoople, for example.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Chet Baker and this famous guy, Frank Sinatra. I liked it at the time (laughs).«

RBMA: »There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s interesting to hear you guys talk about these pop influences, even though a lot of the music you refer to had much more of a sensibility than just being pop. This music, dark as it is, forces us, 40 years after it was created, to look back and say: “That you must have been influenced by the Gruppo di Nuova Consonanza. The techniques, the way you were recording, the styles were similar.” And you say you weren’t even aware of the group.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »No, we had to find our own tone, whether it really works. We wanted to be musicians, we didn’t know anything about music, we knew a little about music theoretically. But we had to practise in public, or wherever we played music, in the studio as well, to become aware of the possibilities of the material, to handle it.«

Dieter Moebius: »We had no intellectual approach to what we were doing, so we always rehearsed in public. We were always on the road in our truck. When we had somewhere to play in public, that was the only time we’d play.«

RBMA: »So how was this first record recorded then?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »It was one session in one night. This was one of the two records that came out. We played a concert for about two hours with one constant flow.«

RBMA: »Where was this?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »In Cologne, with Conny Plank, our sound engineer.«

RBMA: »Conny Plank, the producer and recording engineer. You guys all read the newspaper that was floating around yesterday with one man’s recollections of working with the legendary producer, right? We don’t need to explain who he is.«

Dieter Moebius: »He’s the guy who produced groups like Devo and Neu! and Kraftwerk and also – this is how he made money – another band, I forget the name.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »(inaudible)«

Dieter Moebius: »No, no, an English or American group, a supergroup. (pause) It’s OK, he’s a very, very well-known producer.«

RBMA: »So how did you create a record like that? Did you go in with synthesizers and Moog’s and things like that?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »No, we each had an electric organ. He had a knee violin, I had a cello, all picked up by microphones. But we didn’t use it to create normal sound, we had some tone generators.«

Dieter Moebius: »Wah-wah pedals.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Little effect machines.«

Dieter Moebius: »Echo.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Echo machine, yes, we just fiddled around with what we owned at the time.«

RBMA: »And this was all recorded and manipulated live?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Yes.«

RBMA: »I read somewhere that the way you knew to stop recording is when he raised his hand and signalled the end of a side. Is that true?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Possibly (laughs).«

RBMA: »You mentioned a second album recorded during the session, Two Easter Eggs is the English title. I’ll play a bit of that, I believe this is track one on the Two Easter Eggs record.«

(music: Kluster – Electric Music & Text)

Dieter Moebius: »(inaudible)«

RBMA: »He said it’s a nice short song, this goes on for another 20 minutes like this. Not understanding German at all, he could’ve been talking about anything, he could’ve been talking about baking bread or the end of the world. It sounded terrifying to me.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Incredible voice.«

RBMA: »Yeah, this leads into the way these records were pressed and released, and why they’ve all turned into grails of sorts that we all try to seek out. They were pressed and released on a very small label that didn’t specialise in this kind of music at all, the Schwann label.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »The Schwann label, it was called new church music.«

RBMA: »New church music?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »It was produced by the Catholic church.«

RBMA: »So exactly how did you guys pull this one off?«

Dieter Moebius: »For us, it was an opportunity to get some records done without seeing any record companies.«

RBMA: »The Pope just heard this on the radio and…(laughter) How did it work, how did you get funded by the church?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »It was a cantor of the church. He listened to one of our concerts in a basement in Düsseldorf somewhere and said that it would be great to put text over it from the ecumenical movement.«

RBMA: »So the vocals were added afterwards?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Yes.«

Dieter Moebius: »And only on one side of the record.«

RBMA: »Was that a deal you worked out with the church?«

Dieter Moebius: »We tried to have it all clean, but it wasn’t possible (laughs).«

RBMA: »And is it true that they only made 200 copies of each record?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Yes, the first editions were 200 each. But in a beautiful cover.«

RBMA: »Beautiful covers, both. Beautiful covers with inserts. These were really well-packaged, well-produced and as you can hear, really good-sounding records. And this was just the beginning. There was a transition period where you split with Schnitzler, and recorded and released two other very rare albums. Was it as Eruption?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »No, it was with Schnitzler, the last concert we ever did as Kluster with a ‘K’ was called Eruption. That was the name of the group he worked with all the time, Eruption. It wasn’t meant to be the name of the Kluster group, it was just the name of the record.«

RBMA: »And somehow in the midst of all this you managed to get picked up by a major label. How did that happen? Philips signed you to an album deal.«

Dieter Moebius: »They didn’t know what they were doing (laughter).«

RBMA: »They had to have had some idea. I was positing earlier that one of the reasons they signed you is because they were investing a lot of money into an avantgarde series in France, based around the musique concrete movement and making some very well-packaged, rather incredible albums, full of music like this. That was in France, of course, you were signed to Philips Germany. So what did the A&R say to you when you turned in an album? Did you even have an A&R to help you develop the sound?«

Dieter Moebius: »What is an A&R?«

RBMA: »It’s the person who works with you to develop a project before it’s released.«

Dieter Moebius: »Oh no, we didn’t have anybody like that (laughs).«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »I think it was Conny Plank who managed it.«

RBMA: »Did he have any relationship with Philips?«

Dieter Moebius: »No, he just recorded with us but we had to make…«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »We just managed to terrify the people at the company.«

RBMA: »Well, let’s hear your first commercial release then, to see if we can discern any difference between that and what came before it.«

(music: Cluster – Untitled)

»This must have sold tons.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »It didn’t (laughter).«

RBMA: »It’s amazing that you were able to get this record out.«

Dieter Moebius: »As I told you, they didn’t know what they were doing. They were in a strange situation. They had this group Can, I think, that was successful, so all the companies in Germany wanted one of these progressive groups. If you’re lucky, you get a contract, but without much money, of course, and that’s how it happened to us. Philips took us for one record, and that’s the only one, of course.«

RBMA: »You mentioned Can. Were you guys living in Cologne at the time?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Near their place, and Holger Czukay played with us on two records with Brian Eno.«

RBMA: »The later ones, but in the early ’70s, ’cause this is ’71, were you aware of the music bands like Can and Embryo and Amon Düül were making?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Of course.«

Dieter Moebius: »At this time we lived all around Germany. We left Berlin, which was an island surrounded by a wall and East Germany, so we left this little island and went to Düsseldorf and Cologne and then to Munich, Frankfurt and all these West German towns where we met all these other groups, like Can in Cologne and Kraftwerk in Düsseldorf and Amon Düül in Munich.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »And Popol Vuh in Munich as well.«

RBMA: »Now, this was very rhythmic, beat-heavy music, yet you guys never had a drummer or a rhythm guitarist. Did you feel a pressure to create music that was akin to that which had commercial success in your own country?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »We were never under pressure, we always did what we wanted to do. It just happened.«

Dieter Moebius: »We wanted to be commercial, of course, but we weren’t able to be commercial.«

RBMA: »You mean you wanted to be commercial with this music (laughter). You wanted to change the taste of the entire world? But at the same time you mentioned earlier that you were also listening to Pink Floyd.«

Dieter Moebius: »Yes, but I was also listening to Mott The Hoople and the first Roxy Music album, which was very successful and I went to a concert of theirs in Hamburg, one of the first. (to Hans) Didn’t we go together?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Yes.«

RBMA: »You managed to get signed after you were dropped by Philips after the first record. They didn’t option a second record after the first, you mentioned that earlier. You were signed by Brain Records, then a fledgling enterprise based in Hamburg. But they’d got out some really serious releases before you signed, including the first Neu! Album. How did you get signed by Brain?«

Dieter Moebius: »Perhaps they didn’t know what [he was doing](laughter)«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Again, again.«

Dieter Moebius: »Same old story.«

RBMA: »The Brain label later went on to be quite a powerful enterprise, but when they were first releasing records like yours they were still quite small and very independent-minded, so it’s not surprising they would pick you up. I was just curious as to how it happened. There’s a track on the first album you released on Brain called Cluster II, which is quite well-known among the psychedelic rock community, probably the closest thing you’ve done to a psych jam.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »I’m curious to know what track you mean.«

RBMA: »Let’s play it.«

(music: Cluster – Imsüden)

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Oh, yeah.«

Dieter Moebius: »(music fades / applause) And so on.«

RBMA: »That goes on for another 11 minutes, and believe me, I can listen to fuzz guitar going through various effects and pedals processors for 11 minutes myself. Still, although this is rhythmic music and you guys were making music that could be lumped in with your peers, it’s still lacking in any drumming, there’s no bass player.«

Dieter Moebius: »We just listened a bit to a very fast drummachine on this track.«

RBMA: »Whose idea was it to bring a drummachine into this music? Did it come from you, did it come from Conny Plank?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »We got the first drummachine, Drummer One P, the two of us, and we played with it live all the time.«

RBMA: »When did you buy it?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »I don’t know.«

Dieter Moebius: »It was meant to bee a drummachine for these guys in the dancing halls where you push one thing and it’s foxtrot, the other is waltz.«

RBMA: »The machine would become the backbone for a lot of the later work you did, including your next project with Michael Rother, right?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Zuckerzeit was the next one, I think. Musik Von Harmonia?«

RBMA: »Yes, that’s the one I’m talking about. Did that come after this?«

Dieter Moebius: »Almost at the same time, the same year.«

RBMA: »Let’s talk a bit about this because many people who came to your music were introduced to it through the Harmonia project. So can you explain how that came together?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »After Neu! split Michael Rother came to our place and wanted to join our group.«

RBMA: »That’s the guitar player from Neu!. Where were you based at this time?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »In a very beautiful place in the middle of Germany, besides a river, called Alter Weserhof in Forst and it was a utopia.«

Dieter Moebius: »A house from the Middle Ages.«

RBMA: »You guys bought a house there?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »We didn’t buy it, we had to build it.«

Dieter Moebius: »The government gave it to us. It was a house that was historically protected by the government, you are not allowed to tear it down. It was rotten and we had to fix it.«

RBMA: »So Michael Rother comes there.«

Dieter Moebius: »He came after it was fixed (laughs).«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »He found a perfect situation, so he liked to play with us and we played once, we had a concert in one of these big houses. It worked out well so we decided to found Harmonia alongside Cluster.«

RBMA: »This was a group that existed at the same time, you didn’t disband Cluster, you just decided to do collaborative work with Michael Rother and call it Harmonia. And luckily you were able to get signed by the same label and put together a record called Musik Von Harmonia. This is sort of a bridge between the early sound that we were hearing and the sound for which you’re best known. There’s a track on this record, I don’t know how to say…(makes several attempts to pronounce it).«

Dieter Moebius: »Ohrwurm.«

RBMA: »Thank you, man. Like I said to these guys before, I had to apologise 15 times before I even speak ’cause I’m going to mispronounce every thing I say. My record collecting buddies and I look at these German records and just butcher the names. Not on purpose, of course, but here is ‘Earworm’.«

(music: Harmonia – Ohrwurm )

»Now that sounds very much like the thing that came before in my opinion. Did this song spring from the two of you or was Michael a part of that as well?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »It was more the Cluster kind of music but Michael played an important role in it, the strong guitar in it.«

RBMA: »From the same album, this is the aptly titled Watussi. Musik Von Harmonia, 1974, Brain.«

Dieter Moebius: »Nice drummachine.«

(music: Harmonia – Watussi / applause)

RBMA: »That’s mighty progressive for 1974, and I mean that in the best possible way, not in a wonky rock way, that sounds like it could’ve been made in the studio here by some of these participants. So whose idea was it to programme the drummachine like that?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »I don’t know who played the drummachine. Was it you?«

Dieter Moebius: »Could be, it was still the same drummachine. This was going out of the drummachine into a tremolo, an effect pedal, so it cuts it in a different way from [where] the real rhythm goes.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »It makes it much more interesting.«

RBMA: »It sounds like you made a hip hop beat by J Dilla in 1974, sort of. Anyway, I know you said you didn’t feel pressure but were you in any way reacting to the success of Kraftwerk or the first Neu! record in making music like this.«

Dieter Moebius: »Not like this, but the next Harmonia album we very definitely tried to be really commercial. In a way, it’s the most commercial record we did. Then we wanted to go on tour with that programme but he and I don’t really like repeating the songs on stage that we have on the record, so we would have to rehearse and rehearse. We hate it, really, so now we improvise, always.«

RBMA: »So was all this improvised?«

Dieter Moebius: »This was improvised but in the studio. We had a four-track, so you can still add some things later. But even nowadays, we improvise first then work on the song.«

RBMA: »So this record was just you three doing you. You weren’t reacting to anything that was going on around you and trying to respond in any way?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »I don’t think so.«

RBMA: »Well, after this record came out, or around the same time, you released the Cluster record Zuckerzeit. And on that album you quite evenly split the songwriting duties, if you can call it that because it was all improvised.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Yes, each of us did six songs.«

RBMA: »Let’s play one and you guys can figure out who’s behind this one. Is it James, is that how you say it?«

Dieter Moebius: »Yes, James.«

RBMA: »From the Zuckerzeit album, still approximately 1974.«

(music: Cluster – James / applause)

»(fades music) So whose is that?«

Dieter Moebius: »Me.«

RBMA: »When I hear it, the first thing I hear is Ethiopian folk music.«

Dieter Moebius: »If you think so, if you’re half Ethiopian (laughter).«

RBMA: »But again, I assume you’re just doing you, am I right? Were you listening to any African music at this time?«

Dieter Moebius: »I don’t know if I was at this time, but for a long time I’ve listened to Indian and African music. Arab music as well.«

RBMA: »Let’s play another song from the same album, Hot Lips.«

Dieter Moebius: »That must be Achim over here, he’s a very romantic guy.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Hot Lips sounds kind of sexy.«

RBMA: »What’s the German title?«

Dieter Moebius: »Heisse Lippen.«

RBMA: »Sounds like something the dentist would do to you.«

(music: Cluster – Heisse Lippen / applause)

»(fades music) Hot Lips. You estimate these Brain records might have sold 10.000 apiece back then.«

Dieter Moebius: »Hopefully, but I told you that probably includes all the re-releases.«

RBMA: »In all formats?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »In a period of 20 years.«

RBMA: »Well, they are still very obscure, hard to find, but not as obscure as the first ones we were listening to. But this is a short song, we didn’t play it in its entirety but it’s only 1.50 long. It seems like while you were trying to make pop music, or while you were influenced by pop music and were making whatever you could make. By this time you’d figured something out, you put your finger on something and you were a little bit ahead of your time.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Good, very good.«

RBMA: »The issue that comes with that is that often, if someone’s astute enough to pick up on something that innovators like yourselves are doing, he can swoop in and appropriate that certain sound and make it his own, just by being the first person to pay attention to it. I’m referring specifically to Brian Eno, who you met at around the time you were creating this record. How did you meet him?«

Dieter Moebius & Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »We met him in Hamburg.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Oh, let’s talk together.«

Dieter Moebius: »Stereo (laughter). We had a show in Hamburg and Brian Eno happened to be in town. He came and talked to us in the bar in the middle of the show and then asked to join us for the second half. We were thinking, ‘Ah, does this guy have come on stage with us?’ But it was OK, and then he decided to come and visit Cluster in Forst some months later. Or some years later?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »No, we invited him to come and join us for a studio session and he came two years later.«

RBMA: »So this would be at the end of his tenure with Roxy Music. He was striking out as a solo artist.«

Dieter Moebius: »He was beginning to make a solo career.«

RBMA: »So he met you guys, dug what you were doing, then some time later accepted an invitation and joined with you in Forst. Was this when you were making the second Harmonia record?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »No, it was after Harmonia had already split.«

RBMA: »So let’s talk about the second Harmonia record. You guys went back with Michael Rother and made a second Harmonia record, around the same time as he did a second Neu! Record.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »I don’t know about the second Neu! record.«

RBMA: »Around ’76 is when you did this for Brain. You said this album, we’re about to play a track from, called Deluxe, you said this was your attempt at making a commercial record.«

Dieter Moebius: »Yes, the whole project. You can see it on the sleeve, it’s all very sophisticated and we even sang on the first track.«

RBMA: »You say this with a bit of embarrassment.«

Dieter Moebius: »In a way.«

RBMA: »So this is a new thing for you, you’re going in and for the first time trying to make a commercial record.«

Dieter Moebius: »If it had been a big success, perhaps I could have felt differently about it, but since it wasn’t I can say that maybe we shouldn’t have done it.«

RBMA: »Well, let’s play Notre Dame. You said this has more of a Cluster influence.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »That’s a nice track, yes, more of a Cluster feeling.«

RBMA: »So this is Harmonia from 1976 with more of a Cluster influence.«

(music: Harmonia – Notre Dame / applause)

»1976. And the band split up shortly thereafter. Why?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Because we didn’t want to rehearse.«

Dieter Moebius: »Because we hated each other (laughter).«

RBMA: »Could it be because, as you said yourself earlier, you classified yourself as a lazy musician?«

Dieter Moebius: »Lazy, yes, because we don’t rehearse, we just go in the studio and in three days we finish a whole CD. We are really fast, we play with mistakes and we think the mistakes are great, so we don’t go back over them.«

RBMA: »And Michael Rother didn’t agree.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Oh, not at all.«

RBMA: »So you parted ways.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »We didn’t want to rehearse the same tracks over and over, it’s impossible for us.«

RBMA: »But you did manage to record two records with Brian Eno around this time.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »We did two records with Brian and he took over one of the most beautiful tracks, By This River, which I think has been covered a hundred times around the world. A beautiful song, he took it over to his first solo record, Before And After Science.«

Dieter Moebius: »Our houses in the country, where I still live, Michael as well, was directly by the riverside. So Brian had the idea for this song when he was in Forst and saw the river flow by the house.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »The text was born as part of the Harmonia album and later on he used the same text as Cluster with Conny Plank.«

RBMA: »That’s something we didn’t mention actually, throughout all of this Conny Plank was your engineer. Was he a source of inspiration to you? He seemed to be an incredible man.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »He was a very, very good friend, he helped us to survive for a long time. We lived in his house in Hamburg, we had a great time in the studio. He had to earn his money, of course.«

Dieter Moebius: »I remember the group he also produced – Ultravox. That was quite a lot of money.«

RBMA: »And around this time Brian Eno was producing for David Bowie and that’s how this music that was originating from Germany spread out for the first time.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »That’s what people say nowadays, that he took a big influence from working with us, and being with us especially. The main thing was we liked each other. We lived together, we took Brian into the forest to pick up wood, to go shopping and cook with us. He had my first baby (gestures rocking baby), he was taking care of my first child and relieved us from restless nights. So it was like a family and it’s all clear in the atmosphere of our music.«

RBMA: »How do you feel about the fact that when the Red Bull [Music Academy] guys want to get Brian Eno to speak, he says: “I might have a free day in two years”? We’re sitting on the couch talking about this when he took a sound in many ways influenced by you and was able to become very successful -– and I’m not saying you guys haven’t been successful, you’ve been successful in your own right.«

Dieter Moebius: »We just have some more hours than he has, that’s why we are here now (laughter).«

RBMA: »So there’s no bad blood between you. You feel happy for his success and don’t feel like your influence has been underappreciated?«

Dieter Moebius: »Not at all. Why?«

RBMA: »I don’t mean for the kind of people who are here, but in the general public’s eye, Brian Eno is this great producer who took a sound and spread it across the world, invented ambient music. But we listen to the music you’re creating and we hear these stories about the music you’re creating, how you were hanging out with him in the forest chopping wood, we must assume there was a big amount of influence there.«

Dieter Moebius: »He once said to me: “Don’t worry, Mobi. You will be rich one day.” Still hasn’t happened (laughter).«

RBMA: »You don’t seem too upset about it, you seem quite happy about the fact you don’t have piles of wealth in the corner based off this music. You seem to be happy with the music you’ve created and are still creating.«

Dieter Moebius: »Of course, at the moment we are very happy about the new CD we made. It’s working very well, but it’s not enough to get rich. I have to tell Brian (laughs).«

RBMA: »After this album you did one more for Brain. Or was this the last one?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »I don’t know. What did we do for Brain afterwards?«

Dieter Moebius: »I did something, Sowiesoso we did and I did something with Conny Plank.«

RBMA: »So then you moved onto the Sky label for the last Cluster releases.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Yes, and some other labels. There was Inquisitive Records and one in Barcelona, Nova Era.«

RBMA: »But you disbanded for a while and pursued solo careers in the ’80s.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Oh, yes, fortunately, we hated each other (laughs).«

RBMA: »I can’t believe that’s possible. You moved to Austria.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »I moved to Austria but we still met for recordings. We made a very funny recording, I think it’s called Curiosum, on a four-track machine on a farm in the north of Austria in I think ’86. Then another one, One Hour.«

RBMA: »And when did you reform as Cluster?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »2007.«

RBMA: »And what was the impetus, why did you do it?«

Dieter Moebius: »Because we loved each other again (laughter).«

RBMA: »But you’re not going to renovate another house in the middle of the forest, go collecting berries and all that.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »The first reunion concert was here in London in a basement club somewhere.«

RBMA: »And how was it received?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »We just found it could work again. Now it’s really going to work again.«

RBMA: »Yeah, you’re making new music and realising there are leagues of musicians you’ve influenced across different genres you might not even have been aware of.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »No, we hadn’t been aware and we don’t care anyway because we still like what we’re doing and we have fun doing it and we don’t listen too much to what people are saying.«

RBMA: »Do you still listen to any of these old recordings, do you ever go back and revisit them?«

Dieter Moebius: »Very seldom. Today (laughs). I was astonished to hear one thing I didn’t like.«

RBMA: »Which one?«

Dieter Moebius: »The one off the second Harmonia.«

RBMA: »You didn’t like that?«

Dieter Moebius: »No, although it was me playing the organ.«

RBMA: »I could try to expand on your influence, but I think everyone here can take it now and ask you questions. I’m sure there are many and they’ll come from different fields. So I just want to thank you for breaking this down for us. It’s been a great pleasure and now we’re going to open it up the audience.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Thank you.«

(applause)

Participant: »I’ve always wondered, ’cause I wasn’t even born in the ’70s and we hear a lot about the German scene, people just call it krautrock. But what I’ve seen about you in documentaries is that there was obviously a common thing happening and the musicians knew each other, but was it a scene like you have in London where people are working together and trying to make a specific sound? It seems in Germany you were just making pure music. So how do you feel about the krautrock label, does it have any meaning?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Not to me, we were never really krautrockers at all. With Harmonia possibly, but Cluster never did rock or krautrock.«

Dieter Moebius: »But we are krauts.«

Participant: »But the thing is even Kraftwerk have been labelled as krautrock, even though it’s not rock music.«

RBMA: »But you bring up an interesting point. When people said Can were art rock, I always wondered what the hell was art rock. Are Velvet Underground art rock?«

Participant: »Velvet Underground have tracks that cannot be considered rock music.«

RBMA: »This is something we were talking about earlier. You said you felt there was a krautrock scene, it’s just you weren’t a part of it.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Of course, we were part of it because we knew everybody from the scene, but each city had its own music community and all these guys were concentrated on their own stuff. Little collectives in Munich, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Berlin, the so-called Berlin School of Electronic Music – Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream. The Düsseldorf school was Kraftwerk and Neu!, Amon Düül were more rock than all the others.«

Dieter Moebius: »Mostly, they all had the classic arrangement with a drummer, guitar, bass, singer. We were really different.«

RBMA: »It wasn’t like there was going to be a festival of guys coming together from these different scenes and calling it the krautrock festival.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Who invented it? Julian Cope?«

RBMA: »It must have been longer than that, right? But I think we just accepted it as it’s just been used for so long to refer to a load of different music. It’s interesting to hear about the scenes though, ’cause that’s still going on today. Then, of course, you’ll have people in Los Angeles talking about a scene in London. And vice versa.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »It works, even for us.«

Participant: »What are your thoughts about your music being sampled all over the world, not just yours, but Kraftwerk’s? The whole krautrock movement has been a huge influence on electronic artists around the world, especially hip hop artists. Why do you think that happened with German music and not music from another country?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »It’s great, it brings us money.«

RBMA: »So you have made money from being sampled?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »They have to declare, yeah, if you take big samples.«

Dieter Moebius: »But when they take little samples, they just do it. I do it as well (laughter / applause).«

RBMA: »Aesthetically, do you like the idea?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »If it works, if it’s relevant music, of course it’s good.«

Dieter Moebius: »It’s happened once or twice that an English group and an American group really made a contract with us because they’d used our songs for a record, but that’s really an exception.«

RBMA: »A related question, did you maintain control of your publishing rights and master recordings?«

Dieter Moebius: »I don’t have any control.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »I have about five publishers and nobody works, nobody is really doing what they should.«

RBMA: »But do they own it or administer it?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »They own it for some time, they just collect the money. If they did something with it, it would be nice, but I have the feeling they don’t do anything. They don’t approach radio stations, theatre or TV stations, they just wait.«

RBMA: »And the master recordings that are all owned by Philips or Brain or Sky, they all own the recordings, or whoever they sold to?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »The Philips record we got back, it was re-released by Water Records in San Francisco and many of my solo records were re-released by different companies.«

RBMA: »Does the Catholic church own the first two? You didn’t do a contract with God for that?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »(laughter) I don’t know.«

RBMA: »Next question.«

Participant: »Hi, I’m from Mexico. You mentioned when you made the first Harmonia album you guys were living together in a sort of utopia. Do you think the scene you were in brought electronic music to pop culture? Because before that it was only in the Radiophonic Workshop and the universities. Do you think there was a sense of utopia in the music?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »I think so, yes. For me especially, the place where we made Harmonia and Sowiesoso was like utopia. It was beautiful and I had to work like a farmer and go into the forest and chop wood and garden and repair the house just to be able to live in it, so it was like getting back to the roots of civilisation. At the same time, I was able to do what I like most, music, and any minute I’d be in our studio with my Revox and an untuned piano, trying to find out…«

Dieter Moebius: »It was my Revox (laughter).«

RBMA: »You guys really are like brothers. And did you feel like it was a seriously great place?«

Dieter Moebius: »Oh yes, you can’t deny it, it’s like he said.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »An exceptional place, it still is.«

Dieter Moebius: »It’s not just a house, it’s three houses. They’re from 1600-and-something, big walls, big rooms and the river, only nature all around.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »No noise, no street, just pure nature.«

RBMA: »And a bunch of drummachines.«

Participant: »Do you think recent electronic music has lost that sense of utopia?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »I don’t have time to listen to recent music, I have to do too much. I have to work.«

Dieter Moebius: »Sometimes when we do festivals we get to hear modern electronic musicians. Sometimes they’re on stage with their laptops and some of them are really great, but a lot of them have to have certain programmes they can use. I don’t know, I feel it’s not so deep and warm.«

RBMA: »What would a live Cluster show involve? What was the process?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Back then, huge equipment: organ, cello, violin, guitars.«

Dieter Moebius: »Sound generators.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »It was heavy stuff, we had to work to bring it onstage.«

RBMA: »How long would it take to set up?

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »More than an hour.«

Dieter Moebius: »Then we had all these cables that were always broken and you had to find out where the fault is, and repair it yourselves. Now it’s much easier.«

RBMA: »And it was just the two of you, you didn’t have any assistants?«

Dieter Moebius: »Oh yes, we had ten roadies (laughter).«

RBMA: »If you were chopping your own wood, you’re certainly setting up on stage live. Anyone else?«

Participant: »Do you still work with just analogue equipment, or do you use laptops?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »The analogue equipment is heavy stuff.«

Dieter Moebius: »We’re happy we can now travel with the smallest gear you can imagine. We also use pre-prepared CDs that we always change, no one knows what the other one has. So we improvise while playing a little bit like a DJ. We also have synths, but small, and Kaoss pads, and I have a sampling machine.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »It’s a good thing we can travel with less heavy weight.«

Participant: »Andrew from Canada. You mentioned you improvise most of your catalogue, if not all. Can you explain how you conceptualise your songs before improvising them. Obviously, a lot of it is avantgarde, but do you have any concept of it before?«

Dieter Moebius: »No concept, our concept is to have no concept.«

RBMA: »No song structure whatsoever, you wouldn’t even write out melodies or chord changes?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »We’ve been working for 40 years now, we should know what we’re doing (laughter).«

RBMA: »Do you?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Of course.«

RBMA: »So you write the songs out now?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »No, we write the songs on stage, otherwise it wouldn’t make sense for us.«

RBMA: »You were talking about putting drummachines through different tremolo effects so you weren’t always getting a foxtrot.. That was improvised too?«

Dieter Moebius: »Of course, you have the idea to do that, then maybe next time you don’t do it. Or next time you don’t push the button foxtrot, you touch the other one. That’s all improvisation (laughter).«

Participant: »There have been a lot of artists who were big in the ’70s coming back and a lot of the time they play all the hits. We’ve been exposed to a lot of great music from the past, for very good reasons. But you guys aren’t doing that, you’re playing completely new music. What do you think of the canonisation of artists from the past and how do you think as young people we should take those influences but also create new music and not get too tied down in that?«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »You shouldn’t get too fixed on the history of music. You should do it from your stomach and heart, not from your head. Listening to the richness of sound in nature is something you should be aware of, to select what you really want to do, to find your own tone language. That’s really the most important thing. Not listening too much to others ’cause then you get mixed up. Also with all this modern technology, it’s so easy to do something, but you never know whether it’s your music or a machine.«

RBMA: »You bring up an interesting point. You guys are in your fourties now – just kidding – you’re 75-years old and you’re 65. I find this more in music than in film, but a musician who made his name in the ’70s and comes back in the 2000s and says “I’m going to work with contemporary artists,” the first thing they do is listen to what’s new and approximate that. And the only way you can enjoy them is by picturing this canonisation, this ideal you had of them a long time ago, ’cause they’re not doing anything like it now, they’re just reacting to something. But it seems you guys never reacted; well, maybe once or twice.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »We are part of it.«

RBMA: »But you’re not downloading the top ten electronic music chart from iTunes to figure out how you can make music that mimics that. As a result, that’s why you’re still here and we talked to people all over who say Cluster are back. I was talking to a producer from the BBC, buying some records from him, and I remarked that I’d be talking with you and he said: “I heard Cluster were back.” That was a nice thing to say ’cause it wasn’t qualified with anything, like: “They’re back and not doing anything that sounds as good as what they did.” It was just, “They’re back.”«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »We are there, still. We are privileged, we can do what we want to do.«

RBMA: »I don’t think you’ve ever had a problem with doing what you want to do. Somehow you’ve been able to flop through record after record doing what you want, execs be damned. Good for you, both.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Also our solo careers, we’ve been able do what we really liked to. That’s the other part.«

Dieter Moebius: »Where the other part can’t fuck your music up (laughter).«

RBMA: »You guys need a sitcom. The Odd Couple Part Two. Any more questions?«

Dieter Moebius: »Thank you for coming.«

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: »Yes, thank you.«

(applause)