Striking minimalist poster, likely produced for Kluster's final album ERUPTION (a live recording released in a pressing of just 100 or so copies in 1971), but possibly issued in conjunction with an infamous hours-long concert from January 1970 (one of only a handful the band performed in their brief life) that utilized the same title. In either case, an exceptionally ephemeral item from a band whose blink-and-you-miss-it existence has nevertheless gone on to nearly legendary status and enormous influence. Both Moebius and Schnitzler (who was also an early member of Tangerine Dream) had been students of Joseph Beuys in Düsseldorf and later were active in Berlin's incarnation of the Arts Lab movement, but the music they produced with Roedelius — "disorienting urban-industrial and proto-ambient" — was in many ways a reaction against "the utopianism of [...] countercultural idealism." Indeed, Kluster "seemed to be performing the paranoia and violence of the repressive West German political landscape of the early 1970s" (Albiez all). Their only two studio albums (KLOPFZEICHEN, 1970 and ZWEI-OSTEREI, 1971) were issued on Schwann, a small religious label, in tiny pressings. But despite this, they have exerted an outsized impact on not only Krautrock, but just about any industrial, ambient, or electronic music that has followed, and this poster (almost certainly hand-produced by the band itself) — featuring a silkscreened field of solid yet somehow still-evocative color — echoes both the rigor and abstraction of the group's recordings. Moebius and Roedelius carried on after Schnitzler's departure as Cluster, to arguably even greater heights (including a seminal collaboration with Brian Eno), but this document is an elegant and stark remnant of its brief-lived but hugely important predecessor.

Read more: Sean Albiez, "Europe Non-Stop: West Germany, Britain and the Rise of Synthpop, 1975-81," in KRAFTWERK: Music Non-Stop.