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Words by: Dennis Cook
Cluster/Ariel Pink/Howlin Rain :: 05.24.08 :: Brookdale Lodge :: Brookdale, CA
Mythology isn't just found in books or relics or tales handed down in temples. We generate our own super charged stories from profound experiences, embellishing and retelling them until they glow. Music is rife with this legend making; it's the hero worship part and the intimacy we feel as we listen to albums alone, feeling connected with people we will likely never meet in the flesh. We all have our crucial, cataclysmic musical moments – a show or album that reached us at just the right time and altered our lives. Probably many of them.
One key night for me was my introduction to 1977's Cluster & Eno. Flattened by strong psychedelics into the folds of a shocking yellow Big Bird beanbag chair, miles away from civilization in a woodland cabin, I teetered on the edge of profound freak-out, the kind that sends one into the snow, tearing at their clothes while screaming, "Soylent Green is people!" A calm, wise friend placed the sleeve for Cluster & Eno in my hands and set the turntable spinning. Like a slow rising, cleansing steam, the collaboration between Brian Eno and precocious, patient German electronic pioneers Cluster brought me profound, zapped-by-enlightenment peace. Both machine made and wholly organic, the sounds creeping and clicking from the big cloth covered speakers caressed me as no sweat lodge or mass ever had. Their reach into the cosmos had giant hands and an unspotted mind, Titans skipping lightly beyond the Milky Way.
That night, two sides flipped over and over for hours, led me to Cluster's other grand machinations, Can (bassist-sound whacker Holger Czukay plays on the album), Eno's back catalog, Roxy Music, Kraftwerk, Neu! and a rabbit hole full of wickedly creative Germans from '60s and '70s that forever changed my view (and that of many others) of synthesizers and electronic composition. It's a poignant reminder that no matter what we think we know about music there's always an ocean waiting just on the other side of our peninsula.
So, it is with this background that I walked into The Brookdale Lodge last Saturday to see Cluster perform live for the very first time. Reunited after a ten-year break in 2007, Cluster hasn't visited the U.S. many times so this was a treat, a chance to see legends move around. Not often star struck, I stammered a brief, "Hello, sir," as I passed Hans-Joachim Roedelius, one half of the Cluster duo with Dieter Moebius, collaborators in a frontier they helped create since 1971. You wouldn't think a balding, older man in a suit coat and button-down shirt could give a grown man butterflies but such is music's sway sometimes.
Brought to the area by the ever inventive cats at
(((folkYEAH!))), Cluster was grouped with an eclectic but never elusive lineup that included Oakland's Howlin Rain and nutjob Ariel Pink, as well as emerging acts Bronze and Ascended Master. None remotely touched upon Cluster's sonic territory in more than cursory ways but a shared artistic yearning and doggedly independent spirit ran through everything. Each cobbled together beauty and chaos, control and abandon, in their own way. There were flashes of jam band noodling, inquisitive keyboard tunneling, stadium rock, gothic shake, metal dissonance, ambient stillness and a fair amount beyond. One's ears never wanted for stimulation, and the facility was peaceful and roomy, including a glass bottom pool where a Mermaid Fashion Show made us smile and giggle during one of the set breaks. Nestled in the Santa Cruz mountains, Brookdale Lodge proved a secluded, conducive atmosphere for the bands and attendees to get lightly freaky.
Howlin Rain held the middle spot on the bill, and stepped up looking their wondrously ragged selves as their gear groaned to life, a buzz that dovetailed with the DJ spinning old school dance jams until fully revealing "Dancers at the End of Time."
Tones of history ring here like a gong
But the pitch is bent and queer
Upon a beach of bones the iron orchid stands
And casts her cobalt gaze across the years
Cluster :: 05.24 :: Brookdale Lodge by Terry Way
They cut across eras – '70s cock rock plowing into modern day psychedelia, '60s jazz changes butting against metal skull-fuckery – and grinned while doing it. Howlin Rain is classic rock if you gene-splice Peter Frampton, Sun Ra and Neil Young, an ingratiating but gritty thunderclap. Even as they incorporate more melodic elements there's still plenty of lightning striking around them. What this set made apparent is how well they've integrated the extremes, finding a very compelling merger that's both grand cruising-around-rock and something deeper and far less obvious. The poetry of the words dances instead of fights with the occasionally jagged instrumental parts. Singer-bandleader-guitarist Ethan Miller left many dumbstruck with his solos, which straddled Hendrix and Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen, boogie and explosive creation in just a few bars. The bloody band is playing like men possessed, fully given over to resuscitating tuneful rock from the doldrums found on mainstream airwaves. The complexity of their grooves, by turns lingering or razor sharp, was staggering. It was near impossible to not be swept up in their surge, and by the end of their short set most folks were fully in the swim. Howlin Rain make me want to stand on a chair and shout their names like triumphant Trojans returning from a campaign.
On the other hand, Ariel Pink tried my patience like a toddler with a bullhorn. After interminable fussing over their sound, Pink and his band dove into a handful of pretty generic indie rock songs. It's not that Pavement or Dinosaur Jr. are bad bands but it's been a couple decades since we needed more that sound like them. It's hard to get a bead on why Ariel Pink does this project. Given his groundbreaking, downright fun solo studio work, this seems like three steps back. In delivery, the longhaired Pink recalls Charlie Manson in his pre-cult musician days or a vaguely stoned, honky Wesley Willis, stammering and rambling, pacing and muttering. With the fantastic, innovative light show (a pleasure all night), moments felt like a black humored outtake from Laugh-In, where a flower painted Goldie Hawn upchucks a shrimp cocktail in your lap. At times, they bounced like early '80s alternative dance music, say Liquid Liquid or a hippie Blondie, that momentarily tipped into a swell Velvet Underground "What Goes On" feel at the end.
Cluster
If most music is a slap 'n' tickle speedway to sonic orgasm then Cluster is Tantric sex – a prolonged, mind-body wow. That such music comes to us from two kindly, civilized gents in their early seventies may come as a surprise to all the laptop kids and circuit board cowboys who think they know what they're doing. Amidst a snarl of cables and vintage analog noisemakers, glasses of red wine at their sides, Moebius and Roedelius improvised soundscapes of geological sweep, the feel of the elements swirling in their artificially generated notes, achieving naturalism and shuddering, non-synthetic realism.
Wordless but far from characterless sketches, drawn on a shifting light grid that recalled Tron or an electric spider web, were largely spontaneous and possessed of real beauty, the sigh of decaying stars and the slow, grinding turn of planets given voice in their four-handed cosmology. One section began with the crash of oceans and muttering voices gradually replaced by Buddhist temple bells, wide electric piano notes and flattened, mildly unwell strings. Beneath it all a voluminous, bass-filled heartbeat, Poseidon or Persephone breathing below our feet. Vernal, slightly scary and ultimately stirring, Cluster quietly rocked the world of anyone willing to go into their unquiet quietude and linger awhile. In these years of pseudo events and idol making, it was lovely to find some myths remain sturdy enough to hold the weight we heap upon them.
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