Two landmark albums from German experimental electronic duo Cluster are getting the vinyl treatment they deserve. Hamburg label Bureau B releases anniversary reissues of ‘Zuckerzeit’ and ‘Sowiesoso’ on June 12, both originally recorded at the band’s self-built home studio in Forst, a small village on the river Weser where Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius retreated from Berlin in the early 1970s to build something entirely their own.
‘Zuckerzeit,’ originally released in 1974, arrives as a special Anniversary Edition on 180g vinyl, hand-numbered and limited to 1,000 copies. Co-produced with Michael Rother and finished at Conny Plank’s studio, the album was a genuine turning point, introducing analogue rhythm machines and triggered synths into Cluster’s sound in a way that felt light and melodic rather than heavy or abstract. It still sounds like nothing else from that era.
‘Sowiesoso’ from 1976 follows in parallel as a vinyl-only reissue, and it’s the more minimal of the two, recorded entirely at home on a four-track tape machine, two Revox A77 stereo decks, and an 8-channel mixer. No guest musicians, no engineers, no outside pressure. The result is one of the most purely realized records in the Krautrock canon, a quiet, transparent, rhythmic document of two musicians who had fully found their own language.