Dieter Moebius Poll 1978-2011 [Update: RIP, July 2015]

thanks liam. i like your descriptions!

though to me every song on 'zero set' sounds completely different! the first time i was introduced to it (ten years ago or thereabouts, via stirmonster) all i really knew was 'all repro' which stir would occasionally mix into a dj set

the next few times i listened to it i was obsessed with 'pitch control', the obvious favorite, which also mixes well into dj sets, but now the more i listen the more i am fascinated by 'load' and 'recall' and 'search zero'

just finished the interview--he comes across as such a lovely person, thanks geeta! liam's descriptions are kind of haunting me now.

nice descriptions liam

I agree the two Ersatz records are totally fun. Using extremely standard 80's/90's digital sounds but in the most ludicrous, malfunctioning & broken ways. I'm hearing a lot of things now that sound like these records, but retro-coated in nostalgia -- so the fact that the Ersatz records were doing something similar but while the equipment was still contempoary gives them a really bizarre edge (ok, I'm thinking of Ferraro's Far Side Virtual, which did send me right back to Ersatz II right after I heard it

)

& I don't have much to say about the first seven albums on the list because it should just be a given, if you like any one of them you'll like the other six

eventually

aw hell & Blue Moon too. it's a casual record w/ a lot of amazing casio synth on it but the track 'Am See' is as good as anything moebius and/or roedelius ever did

milton voted for 'select all'

should have given myself that option

almost included this comp, pretty good 10 minute percolator in the vein of 'Infiltration' from Material or the last (best) two tracks from Blotch: http://www.discogs.com/Various-Electroacoustic-Music-Vol-V/release/276348

the fifth track on an obscure comp that was only released in russia?

<3

Yes.

But in the end, I did not include it. That would have been insane. But it is worth mentioning & hunting down.

He put out a 4 track mp3-only ep on his site in 2009, but rolled different versions of those tracks onto Qua & Blotch & Ding so I didn't include that either.

For real fanatics, rare non-album Cluster compilation track, an outtake from Curiosum: http://www.discogs.com/Various-What/release/2412910

Would feel a bit of fraud voting in this, as I only know nine of these, I imagine that's nine more than most people though! "Liliental" is prolly the one that I've got most pleasure out of... that and "Rastakraut Pasta" but I don't know how much of that is down to Moebius. In which case I should probably vote "Tonspuren". Cannot share the enthusiasm upthread for "Double Cut"!

how does Zero Set 2 compare to the first one?

I haven't heard any of these records yet, just wanted to chime in to say that was a really great interview. What's the best entry point?

probably Rastakraut Pasta / Tonspuren / Zero Set

Zero Set 2: The sounds are there, the drumming is still great, but that extra layer of completely abstracted real-time sound mixing is missing. out of the three remix 12"s, the 33 minute Villalobos mix is great, it sounds like Villalobos but you can hear something of Plank in all the weird little detailed sounds that only happen once or twice

still worth hearing and I'm not selling my copy:

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a6/Sprad/zeroset2.jpg

wow, great cover!

thanks that Villalobos is great!

oh okay since no one would ever publish something like this

Liliental - Liliental (1978) - In 1976, Harmonia splintered into solo projects. Roedelius & Rother began recording their first solo albums, while Dieter booked six days at Conny Plank's studio to record a project with longtime friends Asmus Tietchens and Okko Becker. The band Kraan had just finished recording, and the sax and bass players get on well enough to hang out for an extra week, Conny joins in on guitar, and the new six piece band puts together six new tracks starting from scratch. The sounds aren't very weird in and of themselves, and the billowy sax and rhodes put this very close to 1970-1975 era Pink Floyd. For years I only had this on cassette, and it only grabbed me once it came out on CD; the production is pristine and there are a lot of layered tiny details when you listen, and each side rewards you by ending with a straight-up tune. Not really solo Moebius by a long shot, but the ad-hoc nature of the group's formation tells you a lot about his M.O.

Moebius & Plank - Rastakraut Pasta (1980) - What to even write about this one -- when Moebius and Plank started writing a Krautrock dub record, the title produced itself. The basic grooves are incredibly simple and don't evolve like traditional songs, but are covered with dozens, hundreds of bizarre little sonic details, acoustic and electronic instruments that wait their turn, make one incredibly odd sound, and then vanish, noises turned inside out by Plank's hot-rodded mixing desk. Most bands would capture one loop from any of these tracks and find them sufficient for a five minute track, Moebius and Plank just pile the sound design on. And even if these aren't normal songs, they are tunes; 'Two Oldtimers' makes it clear that Roedelius was not the only one writing beautiful melodies on those Cluster records.

Moebius & Plank - Material (1981) - Surfing right off the success of that one, this kicks off with a full tilt surf number 'Conditionierer' that promises a crazy Shadows guitar lead. Which never arrives; the music goes on forever like a backing track before the psychedelic layers slowly start to turn up -- by the time the guitars finally take over, you're lucky if you can count to eight. The rest of side one is even better, a ten minute bass line that keeps getting reenforced by a particularly great manifestation of Mobi's trademarked synthetic menagerie. Perhaps this lacks the can't miss focus given the previous one by its title; side two is just as strong, but unlike Pasta this album stops more than ends.

Moebius & Beerbohm - Strange Music (1982) - Moebius must have been getting sick of the meticulous hi-fi studios. After recording Cluster's Grosses Wasser with Peter Baumann and the two records with Plank, the last Cluster record Curiosum was all murky home recordings, and practically sounds like a Moebius solo record; Roedelius' tunes are there, but only played on the most detuned analog synths imaginable. Moebius plays with his friends, and Beerbohm is a guy who just plays whatever (usually drums) with maximum enthusiasm and energy. This record doesn't have the meticulous layering of the Plank records; it sounds like maybe each track gets one or two overdubs of strange sounds, run throughout, then a mixdown. Once a track starts, it doesn't evolve. But the processing here is so extreme that it doesn't matter; when it takes you 90 seconds to figure out that the lead instrument is probably just a saxophone, this really is strange music, and you can tell these guys are just going for it. This record was not liked by many Cluster fans; it's not pretty and very brutal, but once people started getting into noise and Black Dice got dancey, I started hearing this record played around at local experimental shows a bit more, everyone caught up.

Moebius - Tonspuren (1983) - The first actual solo album, and more home recordings; out of all of them, probably the closest to Zuckerzeit in that each track not only has its own synth-patch sound design, but they're playing interlocking riffs and tunes. Super motorik, catchy but still incredibly bizarre, soothing sounds for baby that shouldn't really be soothing at all. Zuckerzeit might have higher highs but I often prefer this one as a complete album, and it'd be an easy one to vote for because it really works as a true solo album, it clearly shows you everything he's adding to every other group project he's ever participated in.

Moebius & Beerbohm - Double Cut (1983) - "Recorded 1982 in Minimalstudio" -- this is another one that might have seemed too rudimentary or easygoing back then, but post-Basic Channel, post-Villalobos, and post-Minimal Techno, the twenty minute long side two of this record seems more like ground-zero. Those monolithic Monoton records are good too, but this track I have just gotten lost in; two note bassline, 2/4 synth drums handplayed by Beerbohm, and bewilderingly lo-fi layered synth solos slowly weaving in and out, absolutely nothing is happening here and yet the second it ends you start it over again. A guy in a Seattle record store dubbed this for me onto a tape with 'Curiosum' and I dubbed side two of this onto a another 90 minute tape four times. Side one is plodding bass & synth tunes which are beyond primitive; I understand why this would not be everyone's cup of tea in that none of this was hard to make and would only leave you asking 'why', but for me this is beyond 'why' they just nailed it to the wall.

Moebius / Plank / Neumeier - Zero Set (1983) - I am just assuming everyone has heard this one. Same cascade of infinitely detailed sound design and bizarre little noises that never repeat, but adding Guru Guru drummer Neumeier to the mix takes the techno over the top, and the live drumming pushes this into man-machine hybrid music that makes its own argument, no one has ever done this better. I'm still curious as to how this record was made -- it's pretty early for them to have clocked the sequencers slaving to Neumeier, but that is what it sounds like Plank did. He is a Liebzeit-level robot engineer of a drummer but Neumeier really sounds like he's leading the mix. Every twenty seconds the sounds change and explode out of the speakers, the drums are always getting louder, and they keep dropping the groove into new pockets, this is everything we've gotten used to living without in the age of Ableton Live and settling for conformed loops and this record still sounds like the future or at least I sure fucking hope so.

Moebius - Blue Moon (Soundtrack) (1986) - Have never seen this film but I'll bet you the music works perfectly for it. Eleven short handplayed tracks, many of which don't change or evolve that much; some of them are mostly motorik rhythmic beds with patented Moebius sound-design, but the last track on each side once again gives you classic-era Moebius tunes, particuarly 'Am See'. I think the main instrument is a Casio CZ-101 (aka the cheezy-101, first MIDI keyboard that went on sale for under a thousand dollars, but as the digital programming architecture was laid out in a way that encouraged a lot of weird atonal seasick analog sounds it shouldn't be a surprise if Moebius did take to it). Kind of a dividing line in the discography; things shift considerably after this one.

slow day at work?

if the 200k sine tone in these headphones glitch even once, the test fails, but otherwise I'm free for twenty minutes at a time with a lot of things to think about

this should have gone in before Blue Moon - made a mistake upthread, it was recorded 1983 after Zero Set, not 1986

Moebius & Plank - En Route (1995, recorded 1983) - The first album that goes full on digital, this is basically Moebius & Plank meet the Emulator digital sampler. There's a good reason why Kraftwerk, Jarre, Schulze pretty much all simultaneously began to release horribly unimaginative music precisely in the mid-80's: the learning curve on programming the 80's machines needed to sufficently evolve the sounds beyond the presets suddenly became very steep, and even if you got there, the interfaces made it a lot more difficult to do so in real time. You couldn't tweak your sounds with multiple faders as you played them on the keyboard; everything was isolated on seperate screens, each submenus deep. You can tell why En Route didn't come out until 1995; these sound like unfinished demos that missed a final trip through Conny's mixer to weird up the sounds, but the digital sequencer has also left all the sounds unusually stiff & hanging on the grid, and a lot of the drum and pad samples are all factory presets. If you can handle the occasional shakuhachi sample, this is still fairly strange music and I'm happy Cluster superfan Russ Curry put this out, but do not expect something on the level of the first three Moebius & Plank records.

Moebius / Plank / Thompson - Ludwig's Law (1998) - Released three years later on Drag City, finally En Route made a bit more sense; they were demos for this album, which had been completed in 1983, and rejected by Sky Records: a collaboration with Mayo Thompson of the Red Crayola, who took the instrumentals and recited spoken / sung poetry over the top of them, as well as adding guitar to one or two tracks. Your mileage is really going to vary with this one; this definitely now seems like a finished album, it's simply left to you to decide if you enjoy what was added. For me I find a few of the tracks are maniacal enough if you hit them as one-offs in iTunes.

Moebius & Renziehausen - Ersatz (1990) & Moebius & Renziehausen - Ersatz II (1992) - These are the first true digital-era Moebius albums, recorded in collaboration with visual artist Renziehausen, whose sonic contribution I am still not entirely clear on; for all the new equipment, this still sounds exactly like Moebius. There are a still lot of typical 80's sample-library sounds and presets, but all warped and deployed in the most unintuitive and ridiculous ways possible, in ways that turn the stiff sequencing into a conceptual advantage. The humor is really turned up to 11 on this record. It also truly understands minimalism; it won't be everyone's cup of tea, but it truly is the case that things that are not interesting for one minute slowly become very interesting over eight. And once again; as with Strange Music, over the last five years a lot of twisted records that return to this era of sound are starting to pop up -- when I try to listen to those records I usually end up taking them off and putting these on.

Moebius / Neumeier / Engler - Other Places (1996) - Expanding the trio with Neumeier to include Jürgen Engler of the industrial / EBM band Die Krupps, these tracks were improvised in real time to stereo over a few days. Neumeier is in a much freer and jazzier mode, and Moebius & Engler lock in on their digital synths in very complimentary ways. The tracks are long and don't sound edited, and some of them perhaps wander a bit; also, if the 80's were a bad time for synth design, the 90's were worse; there are moments where the sound design is not as distinctive as you'd expect it to be. The album starts strong and as they say, the energy is good.

Space Explosion - Space Explosion (1998) On paper, this looks too good to be true: an expansion of the trio of the previous record to include Chris Karrer of Amon Duul II and Zappi & Peron from Faust. All veterans of free-wheeling total improvisation; it is more in the vein of those 70's side-long Amon Duul II freakouts, or the 90's live Faust records, than anything else in Moebius' discography. I listened to it twice when it came out, and once two weeks ago after starting this thread and I've always had trouble engaging with it; I'm a fan of truly freeform music but in some important ways this really is one of those utterly predictable jams where everyone's perfectly competent but it never quite clicks in.

Moebius - Blotch (1999) - Only his second solo album, 16 years after Tonspuren, largely textural sketches that set a drony little mood for a few minutes and then fade -- no melodies on the whole, a very well named album. Underwhelming at first, but towards the end, the 11 minute 'Kohlzug' creeps in and takes over like a modern update of Cluster's 'Rote Riki', and then Tim Story contributes a prepared piano melody to the last track 'Balisong' giving it a lovely ending.

Moebius & Neumeier - Live In Japan (2003) - I would have loved these concerts and they were well recorded. As a record, it wanders a bit.

Moebius & Neumeier - Zero Set 2 (2006) - Like Other Places, sounds like it was recorded live in the studio. Even on the original record, the tracks aren't that structured; they obviously just got into a rhythm and tracked it for five minutes, then began recording and processing the layers. Here, the engine is still present, but calling this a sequel really makes you miss those layers. But this engine still gave the remixers more than enough to work with for the 12" series that followed.

Moebius - Nurton (2006) - This one is actually my favorite of the whole later period, where the technology finally caught back up to what people had to work with in the 70's, but with an extra level of control. The simple tunes are back, and the sounds are all distinctively authored again, and everything's just back to being very strange. There might be a lot more people making oddball electronic home recordings these days, so this is no longer as automatically progressive sounding as it used to be, but it is in some ways one of his more personal-sounding records, and coming this far into his discography, someone who's managed to take the fourth decade of consumer electronic music equipment and make it sound like him ends up being a really valuable example. The last third of this record is the strongest.

Moebius - Kram (2009) - German for 'Stuff' -- definitely a random sounding assortment, piled down with layers that initially don't make very much sense but open up after you listen a few times. Sounds like he is getting much deeper into using software to sequence & structure. The pureed 'library of funk' samples on the last track 'Markt' come off as deeply strange surrealism.

Moebius - Ding (2011) - Going even deeper into computer editing and modern digital sounds; there is even a glitch track. He also dives into self-sampling on this one, building some tracks around samples from the Moebius & Plank records and pushing them to different places. Makes for an even wider variety of sounds this time, and the free-form abstract collages this time are really confusingly lovely. The ten minute track 'Ding' was offered for free on Soundcloud and sounded a little bit too minimal coming over computer speakers, but on headphones or on a good system, the tiny, static changes are reasonably powerful.

Moebius & Tietchens - 20110812 Dockville Festival, Hamburg - Live versions of their forthcoming duo album, already finished, awaiting release, first time they've worked together since Liliental and they are not slacking. Hard to tell who is doing what in this one; I love it when Tietchens does weird rhythmic pop as much as his completely abstract stuff, and some of these rhythmic loops sound like the recent Hematic Sunsets albums he does, sometimes in collaboration with Felix Kubin & Michael Rother; in any case, they are totally thinking as one with this project and I can't wait to hear the studio version

http://redbullmusicacademyradio.com/shows/4308/ (thanks geeta for forwarding this; there are two shows from the last & final Cluster tour up there as well)

OK am I the only one who keeps reading this poll as Doctor Morbius 1978-2011

Good work, Milt! Hope people vote!

thanking you mr parker, gonna use this as a listening guide

\(^o^)/ now do the roedelius discog

I simply don't own all of the Roedelius albums

The tone of these reviews is probably a little presumptuous and annoying for ILM but there isn't another website in the world that would publish this

In honor of Milton's reviews, here's a Spotify playlist featuring everything it has on this list. I was almost inclined to keep off all the post-1983 stuff just bc I'd rather listen to the earlier material. But hey, voting is still open.

http://open.spotify.com/user/124420673/playlist/4a06spCB0v9KzH52VgXtuj

Incredible. Thanks to Milton and NTI in excelsis.

Thank you for those reviews!

The tone of these reviews is probably a little presumptuous and annoying for ILM but there isn't another website in the world that would publish this

― Milton Parker, Thursday, February 9, 2012 1:37 PM

no more than the reviews in this thread: s/d popol vuh and thats one of the best threads on ilm. way more into reading someone's reviews of an artist's discog than "rolling garbage 2kfart"

p.s. this entry looks pretty empty - http://allmusic.com/artist/dieter-moebius-p19379/discography ... maybe ned can get your foot in the door there ; )

also got around to reading that interview, nice one geeta

I almost mentioned that Cubic Yellow album, except it's actually by two other people and moebius is only on two tracks? Allmusic should certainly not be listing that as a solo moebius album.

Amazon has the mp3s for sale, I checked out the samples, my completism only goes so far

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9nQ-PfK4e0&feature=related

haha, yeah those reviews are quite tame and tempered compared to my purple prose fanboy monstrosities in the Circle thread! <3

I almost mentioned that Cubic Yellow album, except it's actually by two other people and moebius is only on two tracks? Allmusic should certainly not be listing that as a solo moebius album.

Yeah, by that reckoning "Highdelberg" and "Mani und Seine Freunde" could be classed as Moebius albums!

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

wow

I am very proud of the person who voted for Space Explosion

My husband gave me the Moebius+Tietchens for an anniversary present! <3<3<3

now there's a great husband! this record is almost too much of a dream team match up for me; i'm afraid to listen to it!

going to light up a bifter and listen to sowieso before bed the night :(

I met him a couple times -- really cool guy

The post doesn't say, but he'd been suffering from cancer for a while.

so sad. RIP

More shitty news. Farewell dieter!

Oh noooo
Deluxe/Sowiesoso double header right the fuck now
Feel honored to have seen one of the Harmonia shows a few years back

;_;
RIP.

This (sowiesoso) may actually be my favorite kraut-kosmische album of all
Vale dieter

Especially sad, this release was just announced July 17:
http://www.harmonia1973.com/

That box looks awesome. Worth buying for the pop-up alone.

listened to sowiesoso & the first eno/cluster this morning in tribute. beautiful, bittersweet, RIP.

Im Ewigkeit

RIP :(

Eno just now tweeted this (if doesn't display, it's Harmonia & Eno 76: Tracks & Traces, full album)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dVvUogQVtM&feature=youtu.be

Writing this on the train, but this is hitting me harder than I'd expected. I probably have had more affection for Roedelius' music over the years – in part because of his gift for melody and in part because of his story.

But Moebius is no less a monumental figure—in Krautrock, electronic music and in electronic sound design more broadly—that this feels like a particularly big loss. He had an exceptional ear for texture (i.e., Double Cut) and a fabulous sense of humor (i.e., his tracks on Zuckerzeit).

He was also an essential member of a loose collective—K/Cluster obv. but also including Conny Plank, Michael Rother, Brian Eno, Mani Neumeier, among others—that proved a certain kind of collaborative, even communal approach to music making was not only still possible in the wake of the 60s but could be quite groundbreaking artistically. Reading Eno's comments on what it was like to record w Harmonia in Forst and the rustic environment he and HJ had created there was eye-opening (for Eno as well) and an amazing contrast in many ways to the decidedly electric nature of the music.

In many ways, the generous, adventurous spirit of his artistry is as important a part of his legacy as the music itself.

RIP.

Well said

RIP

Especially sad, this release was just announced July 17:
http://www.harmonia1973.com/

― in an awkward manor (doo dah), Tuesday, July 21, 2015 6:23 AM (Yesterday)

ilxor geeta is writing the liner notes for it. I think she told me that she had a chance to re-interview Moebius recently about it.

yeah she posted this -- https://twitter.com/geetadayal/status/623551285401227264

ha i'm not on twitter

Well I didn't see Native Teen Idol's spotify list before I did my own - but here's a spotify playlist of every album on the service that Moebius was a part of, including Cluster, Harmonia, and innumerable collaborations over the last 45 years. It's not exhaustive—Spotify just doesn't have everything, including some obvious stuff—but it's still close to 24 hours of music.

http://open.spotify.com/user/scottpgwp/playlist/4DzuDbkDVkgs0tG4tJlec9

So sad here, too. Moebius was my favorite synth player by far because he was so focused on sound color and bringing sounds to life. He loves those weird sounds. Each and every one. I particularly admire the kinda intricate and always-changing miniature aspect to most all his work from Zuckerzeit on. Relentlessly psychedelic stuff, for me much more so then most music labelled as such. I counted 31 cds that I own featuring the man last night. I rate at least a half dozen as life-affirming masterpieces. There is a secret part of me that wishes all music were a little more like the music of Moebius. And there is an equally secret part that is glad no other music actually is like his. Dieter Moebius stands alone, even amongst his very worthy peers.

For the record, I think Moebius + Tietchens from 2012 or so is really good and special, I've been listening to it a lot recently, dude went out at the top of his particular game!! Low key, insidiously abstract, spacious and quirky.

http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2015/jul/22/dieter-moebius-five-classic-recordings

website link to Geeta Dayal piece

(i count six)

the Moebius & Tietchens CD is ridiculously good

Awesome geeta piece
I had no idea he designed the cover for Musik Von Harmonia?!? I'm guessing he did the zuckerzeit art as well then?

Don't think so.

how did I miss this

RIP

thanks for the Moebius/Tietchens recommendation

This is a really nice picture (among many others) of Moebius alongside Roedelius. Also: ;_;

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CK987MAWwAIBnbj.jpg

Would have voted repeatedly for Zero Set. As important as E2-E4 to today's music, even if presaged by later Can and Eno & Byrne in places.

Anyone have opinions on his OST for Blue Moon?

>even if presaged by later Can and Eno & Byrne in places.

Czukay was working on early mixes for 'Movies' at Conny's around the same time he played bass on the two Cluster & Eno records, and they all definitely heard each other's works in progress so all of these records are pretty much all in the family

Ummmm, "Zero Set" is from 1983.

Ignore that, misread Sanpaku's post! Soz. Plank played on "Der Osten ist Rot" of course.

New to Spotify, an album from Moebius Story Leidecker called "Familiar". Is this a reissue, or something new pulled from the vaults?

The latter, it seems: New Album from the Moebius Story Leidecker - sessions. October 6th 2017.

More info on the Bureau B website: http://www.bureau-b.com/msl.php

the album he did with Wobbly/Jon Leidecker right before he died is really fucking good, I just listened to it three times in a row

Sure would be cool to know how that record got made ...

finally listening to Zero Set and here are my first two thoughts

1) this is exactly what I was hoping My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was gonna sound like

2) Mouse on Mars may have taken a lot of ideas from this record