Cluster

Walking to work today I dialled up my personal music server on my wireless-VWAN-enabled iPod. Flicking through the library via the retina-projected semi-transparent display mounted on my workaday shades I travelled the menu system. Presented in the style of an old CD collection that I’ve opted to organise by genre, I zoom in to the individual spines in all their glorious – and distinctly user-friendly – differentiation. Last night Neu! 75 serenaded my return journey home. Accordingly, the iPod asks me if I’m in the mood for more of the same , or want a little or a lot of distance from that music. On plumping for something pretty similar, but not exactly the same (by using the iris dilation-controlled slider) I choose Cluster from the Krautrock shortlist I’m presented with. The sleeves swim by like an echo of the advertising billboards that line the thoroughfare I’m traversing. I choose not to pause them, nor do I opt to purchase and watch the ultra-rare footage of the group working with Brian Eno in their country retreat. Instead, I return to my immediate surroundings, although the startling, marvellous music that’s flooding my consciousness proves infinitely more distracting than the browsing I’ve just been doing. I’ve listened to Zuckerzeit umpteen times, but this morning’s different. I’m unexpectedly and entirely immersed in it. Opener Hollywood and much of the rest of the album is music as moiré pattern, the listener a dot of bright colour within it. It may be cold in the world outside my headphones, but Zuckerzeit’s pure Readybrek central-heating. Hollywood’s percussion track is utterly striking. With its unreliable, frequently unsteady, shuffling quality, it seems to shift from moment to moment like a fractal kaleidoscope. This is rhythm as a part of something much larger – of course most rhythm is conceptually the same, but this really feels like it is. I’m on my way to work, but also somewhere else entirely.

MP3: Cluster / Hollywood