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Kluster: Admira & Vulcano dig up Krautrock treasures

  Tobias

On the homepage of Important Records, drummer Wolfgang Seidel, himself a leading figure of the German Rock scene thanks to his involvement in influential band Ton Steine Scherben, elucidated on how these two new Kluster albums took shape in a long essay, which we strongly recommend to anyone with an interest in Krautrock or in experimental music in the true meaning of the word.

“Two years ago I visited Klaus Freudigmann, member of Kluster and sound engineer for a lot of other bands from those early days of what eventually was coined ‘Krautrock’ (a term I did not like because it puts totally different people and music under one label that do not fit together)”, Seidel writes, “The reason for this visit was a planned book on one
of these bands. It turned out that Klaus Freudigmann still kept some of their recordings in a suitcase, mainly the intermediate stages of the recording process. Multi-track still lay in the future. He worked with two tape recorders playing ping pong between them (for Kluster he’d made long tape loops we used in our sessions).” As it turned out, there were treasures waiting there for them: “To our surprise out of that suitcase that hadn’t been opened for twenty years popped a bundle of tapes from the Kluster sessions (1970 – 1973). They had stood the time quite well and the sound wasn’t so bad either because we had amplifiers with direct recording outputs, which was an unusual feature at that time.”

Next to “Admira” and “Vulcano”, two of Conrad Schnitzler’s previous albums are also still available from Important.

Homepage: Important Records