8Sided Blog

a zine about sound, culture, and the punk rock dream

Roedelius’s Gentle Journey

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Hans-Joachim Roedelius is a gentle giant trotting through the timeline of kosmiche music (perhaps a better genre term than the maligned ‘Krautrock’ designation). As a giant, his influence is enormous, but Roedelius’s quiet insistence on working diligently in history’s background accords to his gentle demeanor. 

Roedelius’s role in the 1968 formation of Berlin’s Zodiak Free Arts Lab spawned Tangerine Dream, Ashra Temple, and his own Kluster trio with Dieter Moebius and Conrad Schnitzler. Kluster transformed to Cluster a couple of years later once Conrad Schnitzler departed, and the now-duo adopted the more organic and tranquil sound that remains Roedelius’s template. Famously, Cluster recorded two classic albums with Brian Eno — the second of which includes one of my favorite Eno vocal performances on “The Belldog“. 

To many, this ’70s period is peak Roedelius, but he keeps riding the spaceways with a solo discography that’s long and a collaborative discography that’s even longer. And there’s a newer incarnation of Kluster/Cluster called Qluster featuring Roedelius and audio engineer Onnen Bock.

Now in his late-80s, Roedelius is going strong, still composing and producing melodic, experimental music. He continued to play shows and tour internationally right up until the COVID blockade. In March of 2017, I was lucky to see Roedelius perform at Orlando’s Timucua White House. I wrote briefly about that show here where I called the music “experimental and quiet, not at all jarring, and serenely [transmitting] the artist’s feelings in a tumultuous world.” Afterward, I met Roedelius, who was cordial and talkative. He even told my friend who regularly visits Germany to “look him up” on his next overseas journey.

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As always, I’m fascinated with the creative habits of different artists. I ran across a couple of older interviews with Roedelius on the music magazine archive site Mu:zines and found a few notes about his process. In this 1984 interview, Roedelius describes an improvisational cut-and-paste method that is emblematic of the kosmiche pioneers:

I usually do most of the recording at home. Whenever the mood takes me, I sit at my piano – a lovely old Bosendorfer grand, over 100 years old – and play, and I put everything I play on tape. Then I play back that tape and select the best parts from it, and work on them until I’m happy with the way they sound.’

The piano features heavily in Roedelius’s music, and, indeed, it’s the starting point for most of his compositions. Treatments, synthesized sounds, and collaborating musicians get added once the edited tape is ready. Here’s another 1984 interview where Roedelius describes the recording of his album Gift of the Moment: 

I have a grand piano at home and the basic album tracks were recorded there using a Revox A77 in stereo at 7½ips, I made sure I got ‘space’ on the tape, then I went into the studio in Rotterdam and transferred the stereo recording onto one track of the 4-track — the album was done on 4-track with dbx — and then I started adding to the music using the different instruments…

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I bring up Roedelius because there are two new opportunities to discover and appreciate his music. First is the latest episode of the excellent SOUNDWAVE podcast featuring a retrospective mix compiled by Roedelius himself. This nearly 90-minute selection is the perfect primer for anyone seeking a historical sampling of Roedelius’s output. It’s also fascinating to hear the songs that Roedelius includes, whether these are his favorites or just pieces he thought were the best fit for a podcast mix. (“The Belldog” makes an early appearance.) Hearing Roedelius’s decade-spanning output in a curated context emphasizes the timelessness of his music. 

Next, here’s a rare (maybe the only?) Roedelius livestream performance from a little over a week ago. I received a text from my sometimes-Germany-visiting friend alerting me that Roedelius had just started a “surprise” livestream. I tuned in, and there he is, deep in concentration, beaming haunting sounds from a pair of laptops, an iPad, a controller, and a pair of keyboards. This performance is a mix of its own, featuring a few Roedelius classics, and it drifts pleasantly into your surroundings. Listening live, I lost myself in these sonics, writing several paragraphs and achieving that hallowed ‘flow state.’ But, if you attempt the same, be warned that Roedelius’s vibe is interrupted a couple of times by his laptop’s notification pings. And then there’s the endearing moment just past the halfway mark where Roedelius walks off for a moment after announcing, “I have to go for a pee.” Serious music doesn’t have to be so serious after all.

Holger Czukay’s Secret Code

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My friend Tom was years older than me, and he let me regularly visit his house to listen to records. I was a weirdo growing up isolated in Central Louisiana, and friends like Tom were invaluable. His record collection was immense and consistently opened my mind to amazing sounds. Tom introduced me to Krautrock, a music genre that was startling to a Louisiana teenager in the mid-’80s. I think Faust came first and I paid homage to the discovery many years later. But the wildest lightning strike occurred when Tom put the needle on CAN’s Monster Movie and a song called “You Doo Right”:

 

A lot is going on in that 20+ minute song, recorded the year I was born. The pounding drum line, a spiraling guitar, and Malcolm Mooney’s yowling vocal churn together like rotating machinery. The mesmerizing hook, though, is provided by Holger Czukay’s trampoline of a bass line. If repetition is a form of change then Czukay nails the concept. As Czukay once said, “The bass player’s like a king in chess. He doesn’t move much, but when he does, he changes everything.”

NPR Music:

It feels somehow inapt to simply identify Czukay as “CAN’s bassist.” Holger Czukay was the band’s co-founder, its center, its de facto leader, its producer and engineer, its tape editor, its bassist, its radio knob turner, and, effectively, its light and its shade. In its early-’70s prime, Can was dedicated to collective improvisation — as Czukay put it last year to Mojo, “We were not thinking. When you make music together, you have to reach a common accident.” At its best, the group sounded like a single organism. But one man, Czukay, collectively tuned them.

Holger Czukay was also a prolific solo artist and collaborator, working with the likes of Brian Eno, Jah Wobble, and David Sylvian. Pitchfork has published a solid sampling of Czukay’s efforts which is worth checking out.

Holger Czukay, 79, passed on this week, found dead in his home which doubled as the old Inner Space studio in Weilerswist, Germany. CAN drummer Jaki Liebezeit passed last January.

There’s little denying the influence of either, and theirs is an influence that’s obscured like a secret code. It runs covertly through so much music and so many genres. Some of us are indebted a lot, and others just a little, but we’re all indebted.

Jaki Liebezeit’s Eternal Rhythm

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Can drummer and founding member Jaki Liebezeit shuffled off this mortal coil yesterday at the age of 78. As far as drummers go, I can’t think of anyone more influential on my own music-making. I’m not alone.

The Guardian:

Along with Klaus Dinger, a founder member of Neu! and inaugurator of the “motorik” beat, Can’s Jaki Liebezeit was responsible for restructuring rock’s basic rhythm, influencing countless bands including early Roxy Music, Talking Heads and Joy Division. He devised a more continuous, open-ended alternative to the Anglo-American blues-based, verse-and-chorus model. In the late 60s and early 70s, while a new generation of heavy rock and prog instrumentalists were showing off their virtuouso prowess, Liebezeit and fellow Can members – including keyboardist Irmin Schmidt and bassist Holger Czukay – devised a way of playing and jamming that was about creating space, rather than soloing pointlessly. Theirs was a style, developed on albums such as Tago Mago, Future Days and Ege Bamyasi, that achieved its ends through loops and repetition, creating a cumulative intensity. When they played, with Liebezeit’s percussion in full flow, circling like rotor blades, they achieved a kind of lift-off.



{In his final years} he worked in a small studio in an arts complex on the edge of Cologne, where he kept a dazzling collection of percussion instruments from around the world. By rights there ought to have been a statue of him in the market square and a day of national mourning declared for him in Germany, so colossal has been his influence, but he went about his home city entirely unrecognised.

I’ve written here about my fascination with artists who are hugely influential while the general public are, for the most part, completely unaware. I seem to gravitate towards these solitary figures for my own inspiration and, from what I know about them, they are largely content and appreciative of their status.



The Quietus:

A rare innovator that saw the unlimited possibilities that rewarded a little altered thinking, Liebezeit – who first began his musical career as a trumpeter and later as Germany’s leading jazz drummer, playing with the likes of Chet Baker – helped pioneer the style of Motorik polyrhythms that came to define the genre. Where Can’s textures and compositional freedom blended Cage’s spontaneous music and Schoenberg’s dissonant explorations, Liebezeit’s craft – which he regularly said was influenced, above else, by machines – took repetition, accuracy and unusual rhythms to fashion stark, thrashing, hypnotic grooves that simultaneously married an open-ended jazz mindset with distinctly metronomic precision.



While Can’s Holger Czukay once said Liebezeit was “more inhuman than a drum machine” the drummer himself said it best when he told an interviewer back in 2014, “I can play a little bit like a machine but the difference between a machine and me is that I can listen, I can hear and I can react to the other musicians, which a machine cannot do.” By simultaneously marrying rhythmic precision with percussive vision, his ultra-disciplined, hypnotic approach has influenced generation after generation of musicians as mottled as various techno pioneers and punk bands, as well as the likes of Sonic Youth, Stereolab, The Fall, Beak> and countless others besides.

I’m pretty sure the very first drum sample I ever looped and used in a song (around 1990, pre-Q-BAM) was from Can’s “Mushroom”. “Mushroom” contains just one of Liebezeit’s many baffling (in a good way), kosmische-ly groovy rhythms, and that’s only the first time that I lovingly borrowed from him. The ‘he lives on’ cliché is undisputedly apt here as his beat is the heartbeat of many artists and producers, now and still to come.

Musik Von Harmonia

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The New Yorker:

The Germans invented electronic dance music, just as surely as German engineers, working between the wars, had invented magnetic tape. And, at the same time, groups like Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, Cluster, and Neu! were playing songs that seeped much more softly into the atmosphere. It took Brian Eno to coin the phrase “ambient music,” but it’s worth remembering that he did so after playing with German musicians, and after collaborating with David Bowie on “Low”—an album (the first in Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy) that might be heard as an homage to Krautrock and, at its worst, becomes Krautrock pastiche.



Harmonia was a sort of supergroup, composed of Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Dieter Moebius, and Michael Rother, a guitarist who had played in Neu! and an early incarnation of Kraftwerk. The trio made two albums: “Musik von Harmonia,” in 1974, and “Deluxe,” in 1975. They played to audiences that were indifferent or hostile. “Harmonia was completely ignored or hated,” Rother told me, over Skype, recently. “Ignored would have been the better thing. People did not understand it, did not want our music.”



The idea, Rother told me, was to scrape clean the musical palate. “By that time,” he said, in lightly accented English, “I had left behind the idea of being a guitar hero, of trying to impress people by playing fast melodies. So I went back to one note. One guitar string. It was quite a primitive music, really.” What this meant, in practice, is that Rother—who’d grown up covering Cream, the Stones, and the Beatles—had subtracted the blues (if not the funk) from his playing. Eventually, he’d simplified chord progressions, or removed them entirely, playing single-note runs against a tight matrix set up by his partner in Neu! and Kraftwerk, the drummer Klaus Dinger. The resulting songs, most of them instrumental, could sound like a stream or a flood; either way, the effect was one of constant, cleansing forward motion.



Yes, indeed, let’s listen to Harmonia today.
Here’s their music on Apple Music
and Spotify
and YouTube.

Music Break: Cluster – Zuckerzeit

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FACT:

Core members Dieter Moebius and Hans Joachim pioneered the industrial, electronic side of krautrock, the two genies utilising a drum machine for this recording, adding more textures whilst maintaining kraut’s hypnotic nuances. Produced by Michael Rother, the LP features the incredible ‘Hollywood’, which I imagine was a strong influence on early Detroit techno producers.