First released in 1984, this album represents Dieter Moebius’ first foray into solo composition after over a decade playing with some of the giants of the German avant garde in the 1970s. There’s always a danger with serial collaborators that they cannot reach the same heights as when they are supported by other artists but Moebius proved that he could hold his own with this gorgeous little album. Although it sounds exactly as expected based on his previous collaborations, it is far from retreading old ground as you can get. Each of the pieces are packed with crystalline melodies set to precise beats and rhythms, all finely crafted and comforting in their familiarity.
Compared to Hans-Joachim Roedelius’ output from around the same time, Tonspuren is not much of a jump from Moebius and Roedelius’ previous work as Cluster. During the '80s, both artists took time out from Cluster to forge solo careers that, although meandering, never strayed too far from the sounds and compositions developed through their collaboration together. The first few pieces on Tonspuren could easily sit on Cluster’s Curiosum without sounding out of place. “Contramio” is one of those sweet, melodic pieces that define the Cluster sound as much as their experiments in ambient electronic drift do. It is evident from listening to this and Roedelius’ own solo work that Moebius was responsible for much of Cluster’s more sugary moments.
However, this is not to say that Tonspuren is just more of the same from Moebius. On “Etwas,” Moebius has incorporated some of the more interesting ideas from his sessions with Mani Neumeier and Conny Plank on Zero Set; skittering noises jump across the beats in a dizzying way. The heavy beat of “B 36” combined with the kind of synth lines that are more air raid siren than anything else evokes the tension of the Cold War with its threat of nuclear war, the B 36 being a prime contender for carrying such a devastating payload. The fear that filters through the piece is palpable even in the absence of any real contextual information (according to the Internet B36 could also be a soccer team).
Even taking the Cluster “template” (if such a thing could be said to exist), Moebius challenges himself to create new textures from familiar arrangements. “Immerhin” clocks in at well under three minutes but contains enough variation to make it seem like a much grander piece of music. On the surface it is a facile and easily digestible piece but the grain in the sounds used make it far more interesting than a superficial listening would suggest. Deep listening is usually associated with the dronier side of minimalism but here Moebius shows that the same approaches should be applied to more “active” forms of music.
While not the pinnacle of his lengthy back catalogue, Tonspuren represents a point in Moebius’ career where he finds himself at a point where he needs breathing space. Not as prolific as his partner in Cluster, he still had been working pretty much constantly for the last decade on a lot of challenging and rewarding music. Therefore it is no surprise that there is not a huge leap between his earlier efforts and the music found here. As I argue above, familiarity does not always imply stagnation and Moebius shows that it is possible to take something that could almost be described as formulaic and reveal details in music that were invisible before.
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