Cluster

LP version. CD version with color inner sleeve and liner notes by Asmus Tietchens. Originally released on Sky Records in 1981, Bureau B reissues Cluster's Curiosum -- the sixth duo collaboration between Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius. Curiosum was to mark a departure to pastures new. Little did they know that this would be their last release for the next nine years. Curiosum was launched into an atmosphere of musical turbulence. Electronic sounds had become commonplace in pop music and the voice of Cluster could barely be heard through the noise of a new generation of music.

Curiosum is a decidedly tranquil, almost melancholy album -- quiet being the operative word, as Cluster slipped out of the limelight. It was recorded in rudimentary fashion in Austria, now home to Roedelius. This is Cluster music at its most serene, a sense of profound humility running through the seven tracks of the LP. It says a lot about the state of mind of the two musicians, allied to the fact that this was the first time they chose to mix outside of Conny Plank's studio where, in the past, the finishing touches had been applied. Roedelius and Moebius laid their cards on the table for all to see, offering up Curiosum as an honest, unadorned selection of tracks, free of artifice and preconception.

The album represented a return to the virtues of their early work (when Cluster was written with a "K"), random and spontaneous. Curiosum is nothing if not a curiosity, wholly resistant to the cacophonous zeitgeist of the early '80s, stripped down and keenly focused on perfect shapes. This is Cluster's swan-song to the past.