Julian Cope once wrote that there was “a raging peace” emanating from the music of Hans-Joachim Roedelius, a study in contrasts. This is true of his most famous work, recorded in the 1970s, but is even more evident in the late-career recordings over the last decade, which have taken the genres he influenced — electronic, trip-hop, new age — and spun them in new and ever-changing directions.“Imagori” is the latest record from Roedelius, a collaboration with Christoph H. Müller (under the name Müller_Roedelius) that will be released on September 4 via Grönland. Today they put out a video for “Origami II,” the first single off the album.A seminal figure of what is now dubbed, for better or worse, “krautrock,” Roedelius founded the Zodiac Free Arts Lab in 1968 in Berlin with Boris Schaak and Conrad Schnitzler, an important performance space that, most notably, provided the launching pad for the group Tangerine Dream. Along with Schnitzler and Dieter Moebius, who passed away last month, Roedelius formed Kluster, and when Schnitzler dropped out to start a solo career, the band changed its name to Cluster. Around the same time, Moebius and Roedelius teamed up with Michael Rother to form a side-group called Harmonia, which gradually became as equally full-time as their main musical projects. (Grönland will release a box set dedicated to Harmonia on October 23.)The video, directed by Alex Gonzalez, takes the theme of origami (the title of the album, “Imagori,” is an anagram), using the Japanese artist Jun Mitani’s software for creating digital origami. The result is tranquil visual accompaniment to Roedelius’s emotional improvised piano and Müller’s scattered electronic beats, showing an array of digital designs folding and unfolding along to the music.
↧