Well, I finally got a chance to listen to my new CDs.
First came Wolfgang´s Riechmann´s Wunderbar. An instrumental album very ARP based. If you like Oxygene by Jarre you´ll like this one. Although the title track is not Oxygene 4 but is still a pretty good instrumental and did feature during the first part of Rusty´s (Egan) Blitz nights just to get the people in the correct ambience.
Then came some aural torture
in the form of industrial music as performed by Kluster. They may have been the guys who invented Industrial Music but it´s certainly not for me. Even Cluster 71 and Cluster 11 are in the same vein. I´d only rescue a track from the latter "Im Suden". Then came Zuckerzeit to my amazement. This is a great album and one which ranks alongside Autobahn and Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy as the electronic albums of 1974. The unfortunate thing is that Cluster´s pioneering synth pop only lasted one album. Their next releases were very good ie Sowieoso, Cluster & Eno, After The Heat and Grosses Wasser. Not too sure about the track from After The Heat "Broken Head" as featured on Rusty´s playlist. Their 1981 release, Curiosum, was going back to their industrial days, a real shame. Begegnungen and Begegnungen II are interesting compilations involving Conny Plank. Conny Plank was their engineer even during the Kluster days
! Conny was also involved in the production at some point.
I then listened to a series of albums by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, more noises! :rolleyes: . Interesting from an historical context. I´ll pick one, Doctor Who at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop Volume 1. Pre-synthesiser electronic music or so they claim. I´m sure they had some organ wired to some oscillators! The original Doctor Who Theme never seems to amaze me, probably the first electronic piece of music ever to be realised. This one was composed by Ron Grainer but surprisingly enough, although not credited originally, the track was performed and realised by Delia Derbyshire at the Workshop. With a track there is always the songwriting and the sound. Usually its the songwriting that carries the weight but in this case Delia´s work on sound outweighs what Ron may have written on a piano! Timeless classic!
Chris C
