Imagine — if you’re old enough — Myst as pure art game. Rather than uncovering the backstory, solving puzzles, and entering into a predetermined history, one — as a Persephone lost somewhere by the banks of the Styx — simply wanders through an eerie but never horrific landscape, one that is both deeply still and peaceful, a ruin of the past, and fecund with latent flowerings that remain, in the present, tendencies only. Hans-Joachim Roedelius is a man of many talents — one of which is the invocation of moods and soundscapes with a complexity far beyond the smarts of the average bear — but his best known period spans the seminal work he did with Cluster and Harmonia in the 1970s. His career has had many other highlights, though, from his 1981 solo album Wenn Der Südwind Weht to Cluster’s extraordinary 2009 Qua. Stunden can be seen as reconciling three tendencies: the darker, more ambient pieces that made up much of Cluster’s collaboration with Eno; the melodic synthesizers that characterize works such as those mentioned above; and the gentle strings and piano that have been apparent on other well-known albums, a case in point being Geschenk des Augenblicks (1984). Stefan Schneider, his collaborator on the present release, is otherwise associated with Kreidler, Mapstation, and To Rococo Rot, whose standout ambient electronica album The Amateur View (1999) also gives a preliminary map to the territory covered by Stunden.
The album opens with a spare piano line, and piano (as well as guitar and strings), treated and otherwise, is prominently woven into the proceedings, along with synthetic beats, glitches, and melodies. While Roedelius has long forsaken the harshness of (some of) Cluster’s earlier output, “Upper Slaugher” does channel the sinister electro-pastoralist liminality of Eno’s Ambient 4: On Land — and the final (and following) title itself, “Land,” again emphasizes this groundedness. Roedelius has an uncanny knack for evoking the natural using the synthetic — if that is even a valid distinction in an age of standing-reserve and of universal cyborgization. For the most part, however, the mood is more peaceful, reflective and at times inquisitive or discursive, as on album standout “Zug,” unexpectedly but charmingly frenetic yet mercurial and eerily discordant. Both Roedelius and Schneider know how to use repetition and rhythm (here, with a distinct, strolling trudge) to build and found, but on Stunden, they never approach the motorik rock of their erstwhile contemporaries; rather, the beat, where it exists, simultaneously harks back to a preindustrial Arcadia, and forward to flowing-yet-differentiated synthesis, ‘liquid modernity’ as it could be rather than as it is.
There is a strong sense not only of flow (and that’s not intended in the New Age sense), but also of space on the album. Each note or glitch feels like it could open fractally into its own world of sonic experience. At the same time, the space that the sound inhabits — cavernous yet imperceptibly full of possibility — makes possible an aesthetic of inexorable transmutation, one that happens according to the subtle rhythms of the seasonal world, not the instant gratification or shock treatment of electronic dance music’s commercial traditions. And in the exploration of change, there is also a sense of the tension between various elements that could be read naïvely as polarities: the natural and the constructed, the musical and the ‘non-musical’ sound element, the acoustic and the synthetic. Indeed, many of the tracks have the ‘found object’ quality so apparent on Qua — not in that they employ found sound, but that the track itself has the affective quality of being a found object. Speaking of the resolution of contradiction, we also experience a quality of deeply unsentimental whimsy reminiscent of the world Tove Jansson created in her Moomin series, a world of hibernation and re-emergence, of the coexistence of the living being and the instrumental construction in a way that is neither violent dystopia, nor utopian techno-fantasy.
Metamorphosis, in other words, involves not only decay, but also new life, or its potentiality. If the face of our own civilization is scarred by industry’s ‘dark satanic mills,’ by apocalyptic climates to come, and by a ‘Smile or Die’ über-affectivity — and if this state of affairs is frequently represented in the pop cultural imagination (and I’m not complaining) in forms more or less sophisticated — Stunden could be seen as a counterpoint, a reflection in a glass both darker and less shadowy. As bodies are changed into new and various forms, this is the way the world begins, not with a bang but a whimper.