Top 100 Albums of the 1970s - #63 - Cluster - Zuckerzeit (1974)

Before they were Cluster, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius were Kluster, a German experimental band that churned out three albums of noisy, metallic, experimental music full of tape loops and cacophony before the name change. C is inherently more gentle than K, and the new Cluster reflected that, although their first album was still mostly spacey drones and electronic swoops with little resemblance to what most people consider music (they didn't even bother with song titles, simple using the track lengths as identifiers).

By the time they got around to Zuckerzeit, which translates as "Sugar Time", the duo had started leaning more towards traditional song structures and actual melodies. They ditched Krautrock legend Conny Plank as producer and brought on board Michael Rother, another Krautrock legend famous for his work with Neu!, and the difference is immediately apparent.

None of this is to say that Zuckerzeit is in any way normal. The music is still wildly experimental and sounds distinctly homemade, constructed as it is from clunky analogue synthesizers that are charming in their own way, but not exactly built for slick, highly produced pop singles. Still, the gang gives it their best attempt.

The songwriting duties are split evenly here between Moebius and Roedelius, and there is an immediately evident difference in their styles. Roedelius has a gift for melody, and embraces the chugging Motorik rythms Michael Rother is known for. His compositions like Hollywood, Marzipan, and Heisse Lippen sound almost radio-friendly.

By contrast, Moebius is obviously the more experimental of the two. His tracks seem to focus on playing around with loops and rhythms. This makes them less immediately accessible to modern listeners, but I find them a fascinating counterpart to the honey-sweet electro-pop of Roedlius. Although Zuckerzeit is a distinctly electronic record, the Moebius track James is mainly built from guitar loops.

The albums longest track, Rota Riki, is a Moebius composition that I find particularly interesting.  It sounds an awful lot like the early sequencer experiments done by Raymond Scott in the 1950s. It's an abstract study in synthesized rhythms and changes in tape speed, and while Scott's work was used for sound effects in advertisements, here the same style of music is presented for active listening.

Zuckerzeit is undeniably crude by today's standards, but that doesn't make it any less fun or charming. Additionally, its influence on later electronic music is pretty clearly felt. I would be hard to imagine modern IDM or ambient electronica without pioneers like Cluster.

Top 100 Albums of the 1970s - #88 - Giorgio Moroder - From Here to Eternity (1977)

Disco is a much maligned genre, and I guess I can see why. It supplanted the lush, technical, hyper-musical, heavily expressive, virtuosic, jazz- and classic-influenced progressive rock of the early seventies with throbbing, soulless beats, computer rhythms, and synthesized, phony baloney strings and horns. Great songwriters like Jeff Lynne and Freddie Mercury away from their sublime melodies and towards repetitive, inhuman grooves. I get it.

Still, I've never had this visceral hatred of disco, and this list, which contains several of the best albums from the genre, has given me a new appreciation for it. It's hard to criticize disco for being robotic when you listen to Kraftwerk. It's hard to criticize it as soulless when you listen to Throbbing Gristle. It's hard to criticize it as artificial or inauthentic when you appreciate lost genres like Exotica or Bubblegum. So I'm not ashamed to say I enjoy disco, especially for its influence on New Wave and much of modern electronica.

Nevertheless, in this enjoyment, I find something deeply depressing about it, and about this album in particular. Giorgio Moroder was an Italian producer who helped raise Donna Summer to stardom with his programming prowess. Here, he steps out from behind the mixing desk and lets his work stand on its own, untainted by any exterior interpreter.

And stand it does. The music is tight and well-produced. The melodies are catchy. The background vocals are superb. So why depressing? I think it has to do with the sense of fatigue that comes from the repetitive beat. The first track starts out sublime, but as he human vocals fade into robotic vocoders, its exuberance slips into a minor key and turns dark. All the time the four on the floor beat remains constant, monotonous, inexorable.

Like Lou Reed singing about the pointless, yet inescapable, life of the hard partying drug user, this feels like an early commentary on club culture, almost before there was such a thing. Moments of occasional euphoria fade away to reveal a deep emptiness, and yet through it all you keep desperately dancing, even after all enthusiasm or joy for the activity has died.

Make no mistake: I don't regard this as a weakness of the album. Instead, it's really what makes it so strong. There are a million records of cheerful, upbeat, one-dimensional techno. From Here to Eternity has an emotional depth lacking in similar yet inferior records. Even the title is perfect. At first glance, it sounds inspiring, but upon further reflection it suggests fatigue and hopelessness. Just like the eternal, thumping, bass beat, there’s no end in sight to an existence of empty hedonism.

Giorgio Maroder is one of the pioneers of electronic dance music, and this remains his most popular and influential work. Even if you're not a fan of disco, you have to appreciate his technical savvy and artistic vision. As a high water mark of pristine electronic production, From Here to Eternity totally holds up 40 years after its release.

Top 100 Albums of the 1970s - #92 - Kraftwerk - The Man-Machine (1978)

In many ways, The Man-Machne is the synthesis of everything Kraftwerk had been doing musically for the preceding decade. Having played around with vocoders, mechanical rhythms, songs about the soullessness of the modern world, and making synthesizers sound as remote from anything human as possible, the band now embrace the stereotypes of what everyone imagines them to be, and actually portray themselves as robots.

This is not my favorite Kraftwerk album (that title belonging to the earlier Radio-Activity) but I certainly think it's their tightest, most consistent, and most fully realized in its concept. From the Soviet-Constructivist artwork to the assembly line synth rhythms that open the record, everything here is steeped in futurism and automation.

What separates this album from earlier Kraftwerk records is the clean production. They’ve figured out how to transform their early synth experiments into tight, catchy, dancefloor anthems. It's hard to believe this is the same band that, a few years earlier, used gentle flute melodies in songs about going for a morning walk (Autobahn).

As ever, the band seems to have an ambivalent relationship with technology. It's hard to see a track like Spacelab as anything but optimistic in it's cheerful and soaring protrayal of science and exploration, despite the absence of lyrics, and it's clear that the band has embraced new technology in music making with both love and devotion. On the other hand, Metropolis is the dark, pessimistic counterpart to Spacelab, painting a picture of a grim and impersonal city of the future.

This dichotomy is summed up in the track The Model. At first, it seems out of place. After all, it's about an actual human being, and it's sung without the usual robotic vocoders, omnipresent elsewhere on the album. But in fact, the song fits in perfectly. It's fundamentally about objectification and the substitution for an impersonal, glamorized image for real humanity. Yet at the same time, it glorifies the subject for her beauty and style. Two sides of the same coin, progress and the sense of leaving something behind, are captured here as well as anywhere else on the record.

The penultimate track on the album is the gently drifting Neon Lights, which again seems to celebrate the wonders of the modern age while at the same time expressing a sense of loneliness. After the vocals fade away, the track continues as an instrumental of lovely, melancholy melodies, drifting effortlessly into the title track, in which man's transformation into machine is finally complete. Honestly, it's the final track that impresses me most every time I hear the album. More than anything else they’ve ever done, it sounds like it was made by robots for robots. Robots who want to dance.

Not too many people listen to Kraftwerk these days, which is a shame because few bands have had a greater influence on electronic music. Without Kraftwerk, there would be no techno, and while other acts like Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze where plenty adventurous with analogue synths, none of them displayed the same commitment to tight rhythms and a compressed pop structure. It's hard to imagine what modern, mainstream electronica would look like had The Man-Machine never been released.

Coil - Musick to Play in the Dark Vol. 2 (2000)

Continuing our Halloween month theme, we turn to masters of post-industrial, electronic brilliance Coil and their Musick to Play in the Dark series. With these albums, Coil announced, they were leaving behind their old style of "sun music" and transitioning towards "moon music." I'm sure that makes sense to someone, but I will not worry too much about it because the music on both these albums,, solar or lunar, is among the strongest of their extremely impressive career.

There's definitely an atmosphere of the sinister here, and they spare no expense in creating spooky atmospherics throughout. The opener, "Something," is just the title word spoken in a whisper again and again, slowly fading in surrounded by wind sounds and subtle electronics. The second track is a full fledged electronic workout that bears all the hallmarks of later-day Coil hired gun and analog synth wizard Thighpaulsandra. His utterly unique approach to playing the synthesizer is endlessly entertaining and a regular feature on most Coil albums from this period. Think of a more demented Tangerine Dream and you get the basic idea.

Te showstopper on the album is the eleven minute "Ether." Its arcane references to the creepy, old-fashioned drug are chilling enough, but towards the end it becomes downright terrifying when John Balance intones the line "I'm going upstairs to turn my mind off... to turn my mind off... to turn my mind off" over a gradual fading backdrop of dark ambient sounds until only his desperate rasping remains. It's tremendously effective and one of the scariest songs I've ever heard.

The rest of the album remains strong throughout. Volume One of the series was a little uneven, and it's nice to see that that mistake has not been repeated here. The closer, another eleven minute track call ed"Batwings: A Limnal Hymn," is oddly the most sedate and straightforward track here, with no vocal processing for Balance and minimal instrumentation, yet it's strangely effective. It's unsettling without being over the top, and send the listener off into the night feeling just a little unnerved and eager to get home to a safe, warm bed.

No other band has ever really sounded like Coil, and it's wonderful that they have such a prodigious and varied discography. It's only a shame that the members died so young and were unable to leave us with even more great music.

Vangelis - Heaven and Hell (1975)

Vangelis is a Greek composer and multi-instrumentalist most famous for his score for the film Chariots of Fire. As surprising as it may seem, he actually has a long and productive career with many studio albums to his name. This is one of his most well known and celebrated, a collection of two side-long suites based on the concept of - you guessed it - Heaven and Hell.

This is a difficult album to review, because musically, it's all over the place. I'll be frank, there are a lot of cringe-worthy moments here. The use of the synthesizer was still relatively unrefined in 1975, but Vangelis dives in with gusto, producing sounds that now seem very badly dated. The first half of side one is bombastic and unpleasant, with annoyingly abrasive synths and hackneyed vocals by ominous sounding Greek choirs. This is supposed to be Heaven?

Side two, Hell, is, in general, much less prone to these sorts of problems and has plenty of lovely moments with tolling bells and a lovely female vocal melody, although the tasteful creepiness is still occasionally interrupted by obnoxiously dated sound effects, including an incredibly annoying siren-like synthesizer that won't shut up.

So why am I featuring this album when it seems to have so little going for it? Because Vangelis makes up for all of it, all of the tacky synths, the lack of restraint, the bombast, the hokey choirs, and the general vagueness of his concept in the second half of side one. He makes up for it, and then some.

About ten minutes in to the Heaven half, all the choirs and keyboard riffs drop out and a sense of cosmic peace washes over the listener. This section may be familiar to some as the theme from the Carl Sagan TV series, Cosmos. The music here is absolutely perfect, capturing the vastness and beauty of space, and then just when you think it can't get any better, it does.

The last section of the Heaven side is a song called "So Long Ago, So Clear" sung by Jon Anderson of the band Yes. It's utterly gorgeous, with Anderson in fine voice and the melody one of exquisite grace and tenderness. This section along with the previous one comprise roughly a quarter of the album, yet they are so good that they force to (almost) overlook the record's other flaws. Honestly, that ten minutes is worth the price of admission.

Maybe other listeners are less bothered by the synth parts (or less taken with Jon Anderson) than I am, but for me Heaven and Hell is a bewildering listen, a product of its time that leaves me feeling both moved and vaguely annoyed.

Edgar Froese - Aqua (1974)

 
Fans of Tangerine Dream who have neglected group leader Edgar Froese's solo output are really missing out on something special. Specifically, they're missing out on what are basically more Tangerine Dream albums from their most respected period!

Aqua is Froese's first solo outing, released the same year as the celebrated Phaedra, and in my view every bit as good. It contains the same sequencer driven analog synth soundscapes that became the group's trademark, as well as a few slightly more experimental touches here and there.

While the sound is similar to Phaedra in many ways, Aqua nevertheless feels like its own record, with a tone that is if anything more unified than that of its sister album. The title suggests that we're in for a watery experience, and to a certain extent that's true. The title track is basically seventeen minutes of bubbling noises with slow synth melodies layered underneath. However, on the whole I think the album sounds more airy than liquid, with a sort of high, thinness that puts one in mind of jet engines.

Indeed, the second side of the record opens with a jet engine kicking off the track NGC 891. It was on this track that Froese attempted some (not entirely successful) experiments with early surround sound. It is a very spacey track and in my opinion the more enjoyable of the two long pieces on display here.

Another track, Panorphelia, conjures up images of touring the beautiful countryside in a hovercraft, while the album ends on a slightly spooky Hammond organ workout called Upland. The record as a whole seems to me very positive and future-centric, focused on flight and exploration. It's lighter in mood than the concurrent TG releases, and reminds me of that 1950s brand of science fiction filled with unbridled optimism at the joy of new technology.

Froese seems to be reveling in that joy as he discovers the possibilities associated with synthesizers, and is having great fun making music of the future. A thoroughly enjoyable slice of vintage electronica.

Klaus Schulze - Mirage (1977)

Good evening, music lovers! It's very cold out and there is ice coating all the roads, so I am effectively confined to my apartment until the next thaw (most likely tomorrow morning, but that doesn't sound as dramatic.) Bearing that in mind, I thought it would appropriate to write a review of one of the iciest albums I have, Mirage by Klaus Schulze.

To quickly recap, when we last left Schulze he was drumming for Ash Ra Tempel and working with Tangerine Dream on their first album. I guess the latter made an impression on him, because he has spent the rest of his career crafting intricate, long form electronic works that have a lot in common with TD. Mirage is no exception.

While I've only sampled a fraction of his massive discography, and everything I've heard so far has been good, this stands out as a high point for Schulze. It is subtitled "an electronic winter landscape" and it sure sounds it. I still can't figure out what the title "Mirage" and the horribly dtaed seventies cover art have to do with the music though. The album is divided into two sides, "Velvet Voyage" and "Crystal Lake," each running nearly a half hour. The are similar in structure, opening with chilly synth atmospherics drifting over slow and gloomy bass lines. After ten minutes or so of build up, Schulze busts out the sequencers and we are treated to a coldly beautiful rhythmic ostinato that devlops throughout the rest of the piece. While Schulze uses the same formula for both tracks, the melodies are distinct and they each have their own personality.

All of the sounds Schulze manages to tease from his synths are cold and distant sounding. There is none of the warmth or friendliness of something like "Autobahn." In places, the music is reminiscient of the best parts of "Phaedra" by Tangerine Dream, but Schulze has a longer attention span and is willing to stick with a single idea for a really long time to see what develops. On other albums, this tendency has at times proved somewhat tedious, but the material is strong enough here that it never gets old.

The 2005 reissue adds a an additional twenty minute bonus track, but it feels superfluous and does little except dillute the tightly focussed original album.

COH - Above Air (2006)

COH is the work of the Russian soundsmith, Ivan Pavlov. The band name is actually written in the Cyrillic alphabet, is pronounced "sohn" and means "sleep." The resemblance to the English letters C, O and H is purely coincidental.

Now that we've got that cleared up, on to the music. This is an album of all electronic pieces with a common theme of airiness. While airiness may seem like a hard concept to get across, musically, Pavlov is very succssful in the implementation of his plan by using a rather restricted pallette of sound. The synths are mostly high pitched and somewhat thin, with bell like tones playing a prominent role. There is a bit of a hissing quality to many of the tracks, sounding like a jet engine might if it could only relax and turn down the volume. Some of the tracks are rather rhythmic (although nothing a sane person would dance to) and others are more free flowing and open ended. There are also elements of glitch present, such as minor clicks that sound a little like a CD skipping, and at times the music reminds me a lot of Coil's work as ELpH, which is appropriate as this release was dedicated to the memory of the recently deceased John Balance.

The overall tone of the album is very subdued and open, at times bordering on ambient. It's easy to imagine oneself drifting through the stratosphere, alone and peaceful, with only the sounds of moving air and occassional faint radio signals passing through your ears. The unity of sound that Pavlov has achieved, while still maintaining nine aurally distinct tracks is impressive. Usually albums of this sort are either overly monotonous or else they abandon their concept in search of a more varied sound. That Pavlov deftly avoids these traps and delivers a rich and satisfying listening experience is a tribute to his creativity and to his skills as an electronic musician.

Raymond Scott - Manhattan Research Inc. (2000)

I can't say enough good things about this amazing collection of recordings. Most people know Raymond Scott (if they know him at all) for the large number of his jazz compositions which were licensed for use in Looney Tunes cartoons. Almost everyone has heard "Powerhouse" or "The Toy Trumpet" at some point in their lives, even if they don't know it.

What people don't realize is that Scott was instrumental in the evolution of electronic music, to the point of designing and building prototypes of equipment still used today. He even claims to have built the first sequencer, but the evidence is not conclusive.

This stellar two CD collection compiles the bulk of his electronic output for radio and television commercials from the 1950's-1960's, and what a body of work it is! Tremendously ahead of its time, there are tracks on here that still sound like nothing else, even after all this time. For those of us interested in the plastic pop 50's aesthetic in general, there is a feast for the ears, including wonderfully dated TV announcers, maddeningly catchy radio jingles and delightful voice of Scott's wife, Dorothy Collins. However, it is so much more than a nostalgia trip.

Scott was interesting in music that generated itself with limited input from the composer, and designed a number of machines capable of producing this effect. The result is like the aleatoric John Cage mixed with the electronic beeps of Stockhausen wrapped in a catchy melody and condensed into a thirty-second commercial for Sprite. And as if all that weren't enough, we are also treated to a number of vocalizations from a young Jim Henson.

Truly a priceless artifact and one which the discerning fan of electronic music cannot do without.

Tangerine Dream - Zeit (1972)

When most people think of Space Rock, they think of Pink Floyd style psychedelia, extended jams with trippy melodies and lots of swirly little arpeggios. That is to say, Space Rock designed for tourists. Zip along in your rocket ship, snap a photo of the pretty nebula and wave to the Martians. It's all very fun, but it resembles space about as much as It's A Small World reflects world politics.

Space is dark. Space is cold. Space is mostly empty. Such is the music on Zeit. Yes, that's right; before Tangerine Dream became insipid purveyors of New Age treacle, they made some truly adventurous and influential albums. Zeit is the longest, the strangest and certainly the most sinister record of their career.

At seventy-five minutes long, Zeit (the German word for "time") is certainly an appropriate title for this double album. The music is divided into four sides, but it might as well be one long piece. The music begins with a cluster of cellos slowly fading in, basically the only acoustic sound on the whole album. The following hour is made up of analogue synths droning and shifting very...................very.........................slowly. One can imagine planets forming out of primordial darkness, rivers of magma gradually cooling and hardening into the crusts of what will - in just a few billion years - become mountains and oceans.

Needless to say, Zeit is a difficult listen, particularly if you try to pay attention to the whole thing. However, those fascinated by the infinite mysteries of the cosmos will be hard pressed to find better mood music for contemplation or stargazing.

Burzum - Hil∂skjálf (1999)

Once upon a time, Varg Vikernes, better known as Burzum, made horrible shrieking Norwegian black metal like so many other bands.But Burzum, not content to be one among legions of similar musicians, took things too far. He went and got himself arrested for murdering a fellow black metal practitioner, as well as for burning down some churches.

Now, even though Scandinavian prisons are world renowned for their soft treatment of prisoners, it just didn't seem like a good idea to provide Burzum with guitars, drums, microphones and all the other equipment he would need to continue recording. What they would give him, however, was a keyboard and a laptop. Hence, Hil∂skjálf.

Hil∂skjálf, which as we all know is the name of Odin's throne in Asgard, is an album of spooky yet majestic synth music. Despite its origins, it has a peaceful, organic quality that is at times quite beautiful. It calls to mind ancient and neglected Nordic forests, where perhaps there be trolls.

There are no lyrics, but the booklet contains written passages to accompany each track. These are largely descriptions of Gods, warfare and other traditional Viking concepts, used to express in allegorical fashion Burzum's anti-Christian worldview. While I by no means endorse any of his views (nor, for that matter, many of the artists I profile on this blog) I must admit that the music is compelling and well crafted. With the notable exception of some bad timpani samples, one often forgets that all the instruments are synthetic.

Burzum was released from prison in March of 2009, a full decade after this, his last album. As of this writing he has made no steps towards resuming his music career, which perhaps is for the best.

Thighpaulsandra - Chamber Music (2005)

Having had the distinct pleasure of seeing him perform live, I think I can safely say that Thighpaulsandra is the 21st century's answer to Sun Ra. Dressed in costumes so crazy that I doubt even people from Saturn would wear them, and employing a vast array of vintage synthesizers, it was a performance I'll not soon forget.

Thighpaulsandra rose to prominence as a member of Coil in that band's later years, and having heard his solo work, it's easy to hear his contributions to most of their later releases.

The music on this release sounds improvised, eschewing to a large extent any traditional notions of melody, harmony, or structure, but in reality it was painstakingly composed and rehearsed. While the instrumentation is primarily synth oriented, there are a few odds and ends such as xylophone and French horn that creep in from time to time, as well as some somber recitations in the artist's distinctive Welsh voice.

Since there are no melodic or rhythmic motifs to grab on to, the listener is forced to focus on sound for it's own sake, and the sounds Thighpaulsandra gets out of his synth can only be described with one word: weird. Sometimes one can detect similarities to early Tangerine Dream (though without the space rock vibe), but for the most part this music inhabits a world all its own. Over the course of four lengthy tracks, "Chamber Music" traverses a variety of musical terrain from manic to pastoral, giving the disc as a whole a nice flow and a satisfying conclusion.