In 1982, the groundbreaking German electronic group Cluster began an eight-year hiatus. Though the band was originally founded as Kluster in 1969 at Berlin's Zodiak Free Arts Lab under the leadership of Conrad Schnitzler, it quickly became the project of Dieter Mobius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius. Together, this pair created one of the most singular and distinguished catalogs in electronic music, often working with collaborators, including Brian Eno, Conny Plank, Michael Rother (with whom they had a side project called Harmonia), Holger Czukay, and Asmus Tietchens. By the time Cluster took a break, Roedelius was already nine albums into a parallel solo career, on which he'd developed his own brand of calm, inward-gazing ambient music.
Odd, then, that on his second post-Cluster LP, 1982's Wasser Im Wind, he should have worked so diligently to sound a lot like Cluster. He dug out the Drummer One drum machine that was one of the group's signature sounds in its early days and crafted a series of keyboard sounds very similar to the ones he might have used in the early-to-mid 1970s. The resemblance is more than superficial, though. The convergence of strict, steady rhythm and drifting, amorphous melody on Wasser Im Wind has close relatives on Zuckerzeit and Sowiesoso. It's almost as if, one year removed from Cluster, he felt the need to go back and look around and make sure everything was still there.
Think about going back to look at a house you lived in long ago, one that's been occupied by another family for years. Provided they haven't done some sort of tear-down, it's going to look familiar, and yet somehow off. The bush they removed, the tree they planted, the new siding they put on. When Roedelius goes back home to check on Cluster a year later, he doesn't quite find the place he remembers. One of the first sounds that collides with that ticky, sort of muffled drum machine programming is a few little figures tumbling out of the middle octaves of a piano, which points toward his later work, and on several tracks, he's joined by a saxophonist named Czjzek, who haunts these songs with a tone that sometimes makes his instrument sound strangely ancient.
One of the most impressive things about the album is the variety Roedelius conjures using very basic ingredients. Drummer One may have been a limited machine, but he knew how to get a lot out of it, and he gets further mileage out of it by EQ-ing and tweaking the timbre of the clicks and thumps to make each beat feel very different. The standout track is "Auf des Tigers Spur", which goes some way toward predicting the complex ambient sound of the Orb's 1995 album Orbus Terrarum with its dense mix of pulses, drifting melodies, and sequenced melodic figures. Like the other songs, it rises and falls with no sharply defined beginning, middle, or end, but as you take in the album as a whole, there is something satisfying about that structure. These are songs that feel as though they shouldn't have sharp beginnings, middles, and endings: They lift the curtain and lower it again on something already in progress, something that could conceivably still be in progress.
