*I never knew half this stuff. Joseph Beuys? The Baader-Meinhof gang? Gee whiz.
Cosmic Outriders: The Living Music of Cluster and Harmonia by Mark Pilkington
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Rewind 39 years to a back room of the Schaubühne theatre-bar in West Berlin. Here Roedelius, a 35-year-old masseur who has drifted into the city’s burgeoning experimental music community, and Conrad Schnitzler, 32, a student of the artist-visonary Joseph Beuys and the scene’s maestro, run the Zodiak Free Arts Lab. The Zodiak is a haven for freaks and avant-gardists to enjoy psychedelia, free-jazz, free performance and freakout; a venue and practice space and, as the birthing ground for Tangerine Dream (of which Schnitzler was also a founder member) as well as Kluster, a galactic centre for Kosmische Musik.
The Zodiak was the centre of a musical revolution in a country teetering on the edge of a political revolution, but for Roedelius, now a kind, dome-headed, twinkly-eyed but still imposing 70-something-year-old, the politics of the Zodiak were purely the politics of the imagination, a place to channel the madness outside into performance and sound. It’s an attitude that is quite understandable from one who had survived being press-ganged into the Hitler Jugend at 11, getting caught up on the Russian front in WWII, spending two years in a Stasi labour camp and, later, babysitting for the Baader-Meinhof crowd. Having seen the tumultous effects of political revolution at first hand, something that most of his Zodiak contemporaries had experienced only through its aftermath, Roedelius wasn’t sure if West Germany needed another one.
Schnitzler, however, was a very different animal. Known as something of a wild man even in the anarchic foment of late ’60s Berlin, Con was had for some time been creating obtuse and abstract ‘chamber’ music as Noises and Plus/Minus, drawing in accomplices including Roedelius, who also performed with the eight-piece gestalt-rockers Human Being, and solo, with ‘a microphone, a handmade flute and an alarm clock’. Amongst those digging the Zodiak sounds was another young student of Beuys (and then a steakhouse chef), Dieter Moebius. ‘One day in 1969, Achim and Conny asked if I wanted to join a group called Kluster,’ says Moebius, a spry, wiry and impish 63-year-old; ‘a few days later, on 17 July 1969, we were performing a 12 hour concert in an art gallery above a Berlin shopping centre.’
Early performances, which were – and still are – always improvised, had the trio operating in dense but open-ended cacaphonous driftspace, employing modified cellos, guitars, flutes, microphones, tape machines, organs, percussion and whatever else they could find to open aural doorways into otherness....
