Qua

Product Reviews:

Cluster Qua Klangbad/Broken Silence CD Hans-Joachim Roedelius was born in 1934, a few months before Elvis Presley. By 1938, he was already a child actor. Recently, as part of activities pertaining to his rejoining forces with Dieter Moebius to reactivate Cluster, he was spotted at an electronica club, DJing for two hours, long after younger, more fatigued patrons had taken to their beds. His own tirelessness is exemplary and evident on Qua, just one of his many recent collaborative releases. Qua is a tribute also to Krautrock’s endless capacity to confound and shapeshift, rather than settle into retirement as a received and established set of musical tropes.

Built around enigmatic pulses which patter like living organisms rather than with machine regularity (a scarcity of bass drums, hi-hats), Qua’s titles are more like wordshapes – “Flutful”, “Ymstrob”, à la Autechre, as if to reflect that they are hermetic, one-off creations signifying nothing other than their own, fleeting existence. Unlike Autechre, however, there are no sharp edges, hard lines or definite articles here, rather, gentle, harmonic contours, albeit taking constantly arresting and unexpected forms and colours. Qua is an album which smoothly and consistently eludes the grasp, despite its looped repetitions; never settles long enough to invite easy comparison. From the babbling bass brooks of “Gissander” to the snaking, slippery shuffle of “Malturi Sa”, it hovers between the liquid and the gaseous. “Formalt”, throbbing and oozing, seems constantly on the point of fading out but persistently fails to do so – symbolic, perhaps, of the sheer, abiding qualities of both Cluster and the German music scene which first buoyed them up back in the early 70s.
– David Stubs, The Wire

Veteran experimentalists Cluster return with an album that’s all about “back to basics”; they’re here to remind us what electronic music is at its core: exploration. Back in the seventies, Cluster, and other German prog-musicians related to the aging modernist project at Darmstadt, possibly felt like space travelers in a non-psychedelic way, opening life to meaningful listening. They created sounds anew and incorporated others generally ignored by our cultural ear-training (up until this very moment, I was completely unaware of my neighbor’s washing machine making a racket, and now, I can’t stop listening to it), revealing that underlying tension between our bodies, the world, and the mediums we use to hear it.

Qua is, like in the commonplace phrase of ‘sine qua non’, just the middle word, the connector, the medium without which we wouldn’t understand the whole. Every sound is clear, as clear as the term ‘electronic music’; it’s all about artificiality, a display of sheer creativity that enables the appreciation for that which is not – the spontaneous, the “natural”, the uncontrollable and unwanted. We could spend hours playing a game of ‘spot the real sound’ (there is a doorhinge in “Flutful”, for example) before we realize they’re all so processed we can’t really be sure we’re right, and worse/better yet, that we needed someone to distort that sound and vaguely point it at us in order for us to appreciate it as such and not mere noise. Like the crumpled piece of paper in the cover of the album, we only know what it is and what kind of colors are apparently randomly strewn all over it, but we can’t follow the lines to their beginnings or endings as much as we can’t specify what size, or even what form, the paper has. An old question from the seventies then arises: just how truly real is it all? How truly is that doorhinge sound a doorhinge sound? Like magicians creating something out of nothing or a priest transfiguring a piece of bread into a holy symbol, electronic artists find their way through the seemingly infinite possibilities of sound and come up with something we won’t hear anywhere else; the German duo, at the same time, throws ‘real’ noises into the mix and turns them into sounds which, and here Cluster sets a distance from the older, more confrontational avant-garde, are fit even for casual listening.

Even if ‘casual listening’ is not something JunkMedia might be characterized for, this album drives its point even in general structure: there are seventeen pieces in total that are not exactly connected to one another. In other words, it’s like a pop record made of short songs that are intended to be heard however you want. In a way it’s a lot more Pop than pop, since the track length might remind us of those really short experiments in electronics back in the day. Yet, Stockhausen’s “Gesang der Jünglinge” in most versions lasts for at least nine or so minutes, and many other pieces in the incipient electronic movement were longer than your average music piece. Therefore, it could be said that Qua is something like pop avant-garde, registering a wide array of experimental practices in a format and music quite accessible for newcomers but not entirely uninteresting for veterans. It’s not as dark as Klopfzeichen (when they were still Kluster) but not as pop as Zuckerzeit, and it’s just as engaging as anything that has been released by the duo.

In a sort of very Romantic bottom line, this is space-age music for information-age audiences, daring, exploration and empiricism for people more used to apathy, disappointment, and speed-of-computer answers to their inquiries. At least, it prompts some interesting questions about current (electronic) music, and I suppose that as long as you don’t get philosophical mid-dance at the techno bar, it’s all in good fun.
– David Murrieta, junkmedia.org
http://www.junkmedia.org/index.php?i=2576

Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius played a pioneering role in the evolution of contemporary electronica, first as Kluster (with Conrad Schnitzler) and subsequently as the duo Cluster. Between Klopfzeichen (1970) and Sowiesoso (1976), via the Harmonia collaboration with Michael Rother, their work offered blueprints to later artists exploring electronic music's myriad possibilities. On Cluster's first studio release in 15 years, Roedelius and Moebius send 17 sound postcards from an exotic retro-futurist world. Although that aesthetic might seem outdated, paradoxically, it never goes out of fashion. The clunky, whimsical, space-age future envisioned from the '50s onwards didn't actually become a reality, so it remains charmingly abstract and elusive -- much like Qua's impenetrable track titles themselves, which appear to be in a language spoken by androids. Mixing minute-long fragments and more expansive pieces, Qua conjures imaginary cinematic sequences in both spartan monochrome and rich Technicolor, spanning diverse moods: from the austere, droning "Xanesra" and the somber, hymnal "Flutful" to the playful "Albtrec Com" and "So Ney," which could be, respectively, cocktail jazz and calypso reverse-engineered by aliens. While this material generally loops and drifts, in places its rhythmic elements also establish a stronger structuring core and a more purposeful sense of linear momentum -- on "Malturi Sa" and "Na Ernel," for instance, tracks recalling the minimalist, beat-driven sensibility of 1974's Zuckerzeit. Roedelius and Moebius have always delighted in the studio as an instrument in itself, and they happily incorporate the accidents that environment and its tools throw up. The looped creaking of a door on "Putoil" typifies this, also underscoring a playful tension between the soundscape's fanciful futuristic world and the earthbound here and now. Notwithstanding Cluster's enormous influence on modern electronic music, it doesn't automatically follow that, in 2009 (with the pair's combined ages totaling 140), they might still have anything relevant or credible to contribute. Qua proves that they do.
– Wilson Neate, All Music Guide
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:aiftxz9aldse