HANS-JOACHIM ROEDELIUS
By anybody’s standards, Hans-Joachim Roedelius has led an extraordinary life. Born in Nazi-era Germany in 1934, he acted in films as a child and was forced to join the Hitler Youth aged 11. His family fled Berlin during the Allied bombings, moving east, where he was eventually pressed into service with the National People’s Army. Arrested by the Stasi after briefly returning home, he spent two years in an East German prison in the mid-50s, before finally making it back to West Berlin in 1960, a year prior to the Wall going up.
Roedelius was many things through the 60s – waiter, cook, roofer, mountain guide, physical therapist, ice-cream seller, flight attendant, nudist-camp worker in Corsica. All of which meant that he came to music comparatively late, at the age of 34, when he helped set up the Zodiak Free Arts Lab in 1968.
As the hub of West Berlin’s underground hippie scene, it was a place where music, art and theatre converged. Roedelius played in free improv collectives, including Human Being, and co-founded Kluster with the Lab’s prime mover, musician Conrad Schnitzler. Rounding out the trio was Dieter Moebius, a former designer and restaurant chef.
Kluster issued a couple of wildly experimental, proto-industrial albums before Schnitzler, who’d previously been part of Tangerine Dream, quit in 1971. Roedelius and Moebius decided to press on as a duo, relocating to the rural area of Forst in Lower Saxony, where they tinkered with consonants and re-emerged as Cluster.
After the radical psychedelic drones and untutored noise of their self-titled debut, Cluster’s music gradually evolved into something softer but no less striking. They helped pioneer a strain of ambient electronica that relied on spontaneity and instinct as guides, supplied by synth loops, drum machines and spacey effects. Neither Roedelius nor Moebius cared much for commercialism, preferring to create
