Mœbius & Beerbohm - Double Cut

If Strange Music announced an unlikely and brilliant partnership between Cluster's Dieter Moebius and bassist Gerd Beerbohm, Double Cut represents that partnership distilled to its purest and most radical essence. Recorded in August 1983 at Minimalstudio and mixed at Conny's Studio, then released on Sky Records in 1984, it is a more minimal, more focused, and more utterly singular record than anything either musician had made before, a masterful concentration on the single element that Moebius had decided mattered most: rhythm.

The album's four tracks move through progressively deeper levels of abstraction. "Minimotion" opens with dark, motorik autobahn sounds, captivating rotating rhythmic stasis for bass harmonics and electronics. "Hydrogen" explores colder, more austere territory, descending toward something that suggests the glacial slopes of Harmonia's most experimental work. "Narkose" pushes into post-industrial ethnic music reduced to its simplest expression, evoking comparisons to the work of Wire's Graham Lewis and B.C. Gilbert under the Dome alias.

Then comes "Doppelschnitt." The album's entire second side is given over to a single 22-minute composition that stands as one of the most prescient pieces of proto-techno ever recorded, two decades before the genre's most stripped-down practitioners arrived at similar territory. Moebius and Beerbohm graft an endless stream of rhythmical electronic particles onto an ostinato bass and drum figure, fluttering like the lightest of shimmering veils, mechanical rhythm and humming bass and spinning electronics creating a ultraminimal trance that is simultaneously a chill-out narcotic and a relentlessly driving force. The utter and deliberate absence of melody makes it easier than ever to be carried away by rhythm to somewhere entirely elsewhere.

Mastered from the original tapes with liner notes by Asmus Tietchens, this is one of the strangest, most intoxicating, and most genuinely ahead-of-its-time records in the entire German electronic canon.