This reissue of the trio’s only album together fills in a gap in my Krautrock collection but unfortunately does not live up to the quality I expect from any of the artists involved. Heavily inspired by African rhythms, this 1983 album has dated badly and sounds and upsettingly reminds me of one of my most hated albums of all time (Paul Simon’s Graceland, a more harrowing record I have never encountered). However, there are still moments of brilliance shining through but overall this is an album that might have been better left in the vaults.
Dieter Moebius and Conny Plank already had two collaborative albums under their belts by the time they got around to Zero Set. Adding Guru Guru’s Mani Neumeier to their party should have been a stroke of genius; if anyone’s drumming should fit with Moebius and Plank’s electronic sounds it would be him. Yet listening to Zero Set it never feels like the trio are actually communicating with each other. The end result for the music was obviously to organically unite the electronics with Neumeier’s human beats but much of the album feels cold and a little contrived. Granted it all sounds perfectly captured and mixed and listening from a more objective standpoint (and assuming one has no idea who the people are behind the music) it is impossible to say that this album was made by artists who did not know what they were doing.
The problem I feel is that of timing. This kind of music reminds me of my childhood (not that I was listening to the likes of Cluster when young) in that it sounds like something from the past that I have completely forgotten about and never really cherished. This is not a nostalgia but a feeling that the world has moved on so much that an album like Zero Set seems very much out of place in 2009. Nevertheless there are merits to the album, the seeds for techno (both straightlaced and the more out there variants practised by the likes of Autechre) are planted in pieces like “All Repro” which sounds as much like background music for an old Nintendo game as it does a studio experiment by some of Germany’s top musicians. The off-kilter rhythms and melodies of “Load” also echo on in the works of artists such as Squarepusher but I feel this is convergent evolution on the part of modern artists rather than any kind of direct influence.
Comparing Zero Set to Kraftwerk’s Computer World (which pre-dates this album by a couple of years) and I cannot help but feel that Moebius, Plank and Neumeier had created something out of date before it even hit the shelves. The baton had already been passed from Germany to the rest of the world in terms of innovative and paradigm-shifting rock and pop music; post-punk taking rock to new places and electronic music expanding in all fields to catch up with rapidly developing technology. Overall, this is an oddity that is good to have and hear after being out of print for so long but is by no means essential listening.
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