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Yes, this is a collection of Tracks and Traces, meticulously edited in the late-90s, and again more recently, so that none of the musical ideas outstay their welcome--in this respect, it’s not quite an album, and when the less melodically surprising tracks fade out, you feel like you’re moving along to the next case in the exhibit, whereas other albums by Cluster, Harmonia, or Cluster & Eno sustain a mood, and often a weird nervous energy, with their generally more urgent rhythms.
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A synthetic/organic melting pot where experimental electronics meet birdsong and wind, Tracks and Traces is a Krautrock classic with a heavily mediated release history that renders it ultimately mysterious--the more music we hear, the further we get from what actually happened in that room.
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Tracks and Traces is an album that is wildly anodyne and relaxing, yet deeply unsettling and unfamiliar.
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Under The RadarThe entire record coheres nicely into an impressionistic whole. [Fall 2009, p.70]
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Compositions range from the lengthy to just fragments, and while it feels at points more like a collection of sessions than necessarily a complete stand-alone album conceived as such, the end results are still well worth hearing.
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A valuable musical historical document of blissed-out reverie, yet more archival than transcendent, and far from the most welcoming introduction to the more accessible and engaging individual output of these electronic-music pioneers.