Karamika: Karamika

In the mid-'70s, Brian Eno was so taken with the strange sounds emanating from Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius's studio in the rural village of Forst—both the duo music they made as Cluster as well as their trio with Michael Rother as Harmonia—that he traveled from England to Germany to record with them. The results of that meeting only came to light in the past few years (it's fully documented on the forthcoming Harmonia box set) but the meeting sprang to my mind while listening to Karamika.

Karamika is a duo of British musician George Thompson (who does numerous remixes as Black Merlin), and Gordon Pohl, who's one half of Düsseldorf act Musiccargo. At times, their work together evokes the chilly sounds of early-'80s minimal wave and some of John Carpenter's analog synth soundtracks. But the snaking, immersive 12 tracks that comprise their debut often brings to mind the primitive, visceral early electronic music that Cluster themselves made back when they were still known as the woolly, circuit-bending band Kluster.

Karamika's music is reactive in that sense, pulling away from the use of readily available software and computers to revisit an era when these electrical surges weren't so easily tamed and manageable. "Ton 01" begins with a slowly undulating sine wave and throb, and when the metronomic drumming enters it brings to mind Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter's first forays as Kraftwerk. As the track moves along, a noisy guitar appears, reminiscent of the one that worms through Neu!'s "Hallogallo", showing where early electronics grappled with rock instrumentation, each pushing the other into strange new realms.

There's nothing especially novel about emulating the likes of Cluster, Kraftwerk, or Neu! in 2015 (nor would it have been back in 2005), but it's hard to get the parameters right. The exploratory spirit remains intact, but Karamika's resultant tracks feel more focused and they are judicious in adding new layers and noises to the initial framework so that it doesn't all collapse under the weight. More often than not, the deeper you travel into the pieces, the more mesmerizing they become.

A sense of claustrophobia and dread lurks beneath the surface throughout. As "Ton 04" moves through its nine minutes, the throbs gather in density until they feel like a migraine. The cavernous clattering on "Ton 07" begins as an early experimental piece might. Disembodied voices appear on the album highlight "Ton 9", and at the peak of tension a child's laugh comes in, which has a horror-film effect, prickling the skin rather than breaking the tension. In that way, Karamika's homage to their German forefathers forgoes the utopian spirit of some of those albums. Instead, Thompson and Pohl hint at the isolating, disconnected present.