Mœbius & Beerbohm - Strange Music

Proto-techno genius from 1982, reissued by Bureau B and mastered from the original tapes. Strange Music is the first of two collaborative albums between Cluster's Dieter Moebius and bassist Gerd Beerbohm, originally released on Sky Records in 1982, and one of the most genuinely ahead-of-its-time records in the entire German electronic underground.

Constructed in a punk DIY fashion from a sparse palette of guitar, dub-fuelled bass, forward-thinking synthesizer work, and warped electronics, the album represents Moebius drawing on three distinct sources simultaneously: the uncomplicated minimalism of the late 1960s, the archaizing instrumental rock and roll of the late 1950s, and improvisation. Beerbohm proved the perfect musical foil, affording Moebius complete freedom to pursue his own concept of pop music without the need to consider group concepts or external expectations. What "unleashed" describes here is not chaos but a forceful, energized directness, full of improvised ideas and entirely unencumbered by frills or embellishments.

The results range from the rough-cut primitive pop of "Subito" and "Glucose," which sit as comfortably in the post-punk and new wave world as they do in the experimental electronic tradition, to the surreal synth spirals and radically warped vocal signals of "White House," the sprawling six-and-a-half minute "883" which curiously combines jazz influence with Jamaican dub rhythms, and the strikingly modern "Clarks Shiraz," which sounds as though it could have emerged from the most far-out underground synth experiments of decades later. The fate of Gerd Beerbohm after these sessions sadly remains a mystery, making this record and its 1983 follow-up all the more precious as documents of a collaboration that burned brightly and briefly before disappearing entirely. Liner notes by Asmus Tietchens.