A revelation of innovation, and one of the most quietly prescient records in the entire Krautrock lineage. Released in 1981 on Sky Records and recorded at Conny's Studio outside Cologne, Material is the second album from the inspired partnership of Cluster's Dieter Moebius and legendary West German producer Conny Plank, who had worked together since the earliest Kluster sessions of the late 1960s and found in each other a genuine and endlessly generative creative kinship. Where their debut Rastakraut Pasta had been eccentric and dub-inflected, Material arrived with a more defined rhythmic focus and something considerably more strange and forward-looking beneath the surface. The five extended instrumental tracks are permeated by primitive, oddly programmed drum machine rhythms and insectoid synth textures that evoke, as one critic memorably put it, the dread one might feel patrolling a vast post-industrial ruin in the dead of night. Opener "Conditionierer" drives forward with a NEU!-derived incessant groove that could almost pass for New Wave dance music if not for the manic slide guitars, beer-hall horns, and subversive weirdness lurking just behind the beat. "Infiltration" slows to a dubby, echo-drenched crawl, its minimal bass pattern evoking John Carpenter while Indian reed instruments and cryptic bursts of static give it an utterly otherworldly character. "Tollkühn" launches into rapid-fire synthesizer arpeggiation at breathtaking velocity. "Nordöstliches Gefühl" moves with the contemplative patience of something that could only have been made in Germany in 1981 and nowhere else. As Steven and Alan Freeman noted in The Crack In The Cosmic Egg, the early albums by Moebius and Plank were revelations of innovation, bringing unlikely combinations of industrial rock, cosmic music, and dub together in a hybrid of genres that represented a reborn spirit of Krautrock playing recklessly with offbeat forms. Material, the best of those albums, strangely predated the techno culture of Germany by a decade, its driving rhythms and clinical electronics pointing directly toward what Detroit and Frankfurt would discover years later. An essential and unjustly overlooked record, as vital today as it was over forty years ago.
