Dieter Moebius is a man that’s been around for a while and presumably has the stories to go with it. Originally cutting his teeth and cultivating his uniquely repetitive, minimal electronic sound in bands like Cluster and Harmonia in the mid seventies, Moebius was at the forefront of the then burgeoning Krautrock movement alongside other such luminaries as Kraftwerk and Neu!
After a while palling about with the likes of Brian Eno Moebius decided to pack in the band lark and go it alone with ‘Kram’ being his fifth solo effort.
The blurb in the sleeve notes assures that Moebius’ music stands for movement and evokes feelings of traveling, vastness and endlessness. Now I guess that’s all dependent on how one travels, if it’s by a mind-controlled, psychedelic, hover craft down an acid rain sleeked autobahn to visit the memory implant office or droid factory then it’s pretty much bang on. If, however, it’s a bus ride to Partick then maybe not.
Moebius’ music is fairly minimal, the beats bordering on techno at times, but generally sticking to a more ambient blueprint, similar to Boards of Canada. At times, the weird electronic blips and noises have a definite Blade Runner vibe and several of the tracks sound just like Vangelis.
The literal definition of Kram is ‘stuff’ and that is pretty representative of what this album is, a collection of disparate beats, electronic blubs and weird synth noises all thrown together and on top of one another to form an electronic soundscape that washes over the listener. Unfortunately the songs are too often too unfocussed and seem to wander about like an elderly, confused, electronic musician in his pyjamas in the street. Not ambient enough to be pleasantly inoffensive BGM, not banging enough to dance to, a bit too weird to critique but hey, no one said that German avant garde electronic noise was supposed to be easy.