TS: Boards of Canada, "Music Has the Right to Children" vs. Cluster, "Zuckerzeit"

"Zuckerzeit", easy.

I hate it when this happens. For a while I thought that certain CDs were protected somehow, but then they would work fine on my friends' computers. Crooked Rain, Rock Bottom, or Iaora Tahiti still refuse to be recognized. Maddening.

BoC do owe a particular debt to Cluster, but the thing about them is, they rip off _everybody_. Brilliantly enough to get away with it; all those woozy early 70's variable-fidelity synth records all go into the blender. The precision hip hop beats make it contemporary but the melodies just harken back.

The other Cluster record that BoC's particularly guilty of is 1981's Curiosum, the really lo-fi one they recorded at home... that's a fantastic fuzzy record, permanently vague. TD's Phaedra, also in there... right down to the echoey children's playground...

"zuckerzeit" still sounds like it's from the future.

(poortheatre = krautrock poseur)

One listen to "Rosa" (under proper circumstances) will floor you.

― poortheatre (poortheatre), Monday, February 21, 2005 6:47 AM (eleven years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This just happened. What a great track.

Is it wrong for me to tut when Moebius' tunes come on? I just adore the Roedelius ones so much. On this record at least I think they're far superior. I guess the Moebius crash bang wallop approach gives the album as a whole a depth and variety Roedelius' solo work sometimes lacks, as much as I love it.

Aphex took SO MUCH from Roedelius. It's almost comical. Just listen to Fotschi Tong.

Did poortheatre ever come back under a different username? I liked him/her.

Zuckerzeit sounding really great on this spring morning

was listening to selbstportrait vi earlier, it's good medicine

Zuckerzeit is one of those albums that I thought for many years I didn't love as much as others in the discography, and when I played it recently I thought, "ok, this is obviously the best Cluster album." I love when that happens!

I can't put it above Soweisoso but yeah its incredible, first album of its kind too isn't it? its so much weirder and more advanced than Autobahn, I could totally buy this is what inspired a large swath of 90s IDM. I mean the idea of just overlaying different Elka drum machine rhythms on top of each other, or melding them together into one broken beat...that's very much something RDJ would do.

incredible they did those two albums + all the Harmonia stuff along with some awesome Roedelius solo records in the span of like 3 years. and none of it sold particularly well. great example of how you can actually be too ahead of your time

you know what I never quite understood why this thread existed but with a little uhhh help I think I understand it now. Zuckerzeit is a kids album. but nothing like traditional kids music obviously. rather they're like symphonies to kids. not in the way the Baby Einstein shit is, no kid is going to understand the emotional sweep of dudes like Beethobven. their brains aren't matured enough to feel it. they max out emotionally when someone takes a toy away from them. Zuckerzeit however I think works on kids terms. it would seem so complicated and alien. which I think actually makes people feel like children again in a way that just sampling commercials from the 90s can't. BoC pull that trick off but in a different way.

the Elka Drummer having more in common with a $4 kids toy than any drum machine today definitely helps

I've seen people refer to "Caramel" as the 'pop' song, like the single you'd pull out, but conceptually I think it's supposed to be "Rotor"

I like this force of nature track that samples “Rosa”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUhi9TXczrM

definitely something very childlike about cluster!

It comes across as an innocence that they've earned after a struggle, especially if you arrive at this record after hearing Kluster, '71 and II. Not necessarily angst-ridden records, but long journeys through bleak landscapes that made them able to appreciate Sugartime.

yeah and those albums have sort of a primitive consciousness to them too, Cluster II is like your brain is melting

another thing about Zuckerzeit...I've always thought of this and Autobahn as the two big proto-electronica albums of 1974, but the more I listen to the Cluster record the more I realize that while they do retain sort of a primordial soup of melodic electronic music they also branch off into a lot of directions that never really got developed later on...Kraftwerk were the ones that got it right. but that makes Zuckerzeit more interesting to me, because now it's sort of like electronica on an alien planet, like music maybe you're not supposed to be hearing