“Apropos Cluster” was released in Coralville, Iowa, in deepest provincial America. Youthful enthusiast Russ Curry (sic) set up the Curious Music label on his own initiative to release this very album. Emboldened by the spirit of the independent movement, he paid for manufacturing himself and took care of CD distribution, as well as doing his best to ensure that a few copies made their way to Europe. In common with so many independent label operations, Russ Curry lacked the financial clout to market “Apropos Cluster” effectively. PR and advertising were out of the question. Hence the album flew predominantly under the radar, reaching potential supporters more or less by chance. Or not at all, which was a crying shame, given that Cluster had risen like a phoenix from the ashes, picking up the creative thread where they had left off and taking it to an ingenious new level. Nobody would have guessed that a decade had passed since their last LP „Curiosum“.

“Apropos Cluster” saw the duo arrive in the digital world. Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius had indeed used digital sounds and corresponding recording technology on their solo albums in the Eighties, so they were no strangers to the latest in electronic techniques. “Apropos Cluster” was recorded in Roedelius’ home studio in Austria; Cluster combined samplers, grand piano and analogue synthesizers as only they knew how. The listener is invited into the legendary Cluster cosmos, a considerably more complex and fantastic place than it was ten years earlier. Horizons appear more distant, paths more labyrinthine. Moebius and Roedelius paid no heed to contemporary trends in electronic music, instead continuing to trace their own trajectory in a fathomless, surreal world for which they alone possessed the coordinates. Sonic and musical details abound to an almost overwhelming degree. One moment up close, the next far away, something new appears in the distance.

Asmus Tietchens