{"id":28198,"date":"2024-09-26T05:30:24","date_gmt":"2024-09-26T09:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=28198"},"modified":"2024-09-29T10:08:48","modified_gmt":"2024-09-29T14:08:48","slug":"what-was-old-is-neu-again-part-2-of-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2024\/09\/26\/what-was-old-is-neu-again-part-2-of-3\/","title":{"rendered":"What Was Old is Neu! Again (Part 2 of 3)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One<\/a>\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n

Something Neu! (continued)<\/b>
\nFor his part, Rother played multilayered electric guitar parts that skittered around, over and under a repetitive, often one-chord musical structure. The meter was running during Neu!\u2019s studio sessions, so to speak. So they had to work quickly and efficiently. \u201cWithout having much time to reflect or correct anything,\u201d Rother says, \u201cit was really just \u2018throw it at the wall and move on.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Many retrospective articles about that first Neu! album acknowledge that it was an artistic triumph, but suggest that the LP was a commercial failure. Rother takes issue with that idea. \u201cCompared to the big pop acts,\u201d he admits, Neu!<\/i> wasn\u2019t a major seller in Germany. \u201cBut for me and for people that were interested in our kind of music, it was quite a success.\u201d He says that if one spent time in downtown Dusseldorf in 1972, Neu! album tracks could be heard coming from local bars. Rother estimates that Neu!<\/i> sold somewhere around 40,000 copies: not an insignificant figure for a new band that didn\u2019t \u2013 couldn\u2019t<\/i>, really \u2013 play live.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Neu! photo by Peter Lindbergh<\/p><\/div>\n

Neu! booked two shows, but Rother says that those efforts were a disaster. \u201cKlaus and I wanted to play live, but as a duo, it was just impossible,\u201d he says. \u201cJust one guy hitting the drums and one guy playing either rhythm, or rhythm and melody at the same time? That didn’t work! A complete failure.\u201d He and Dinger even tried a show using backing tapes to round out their sound. While that practice is commonplace today, Rother says that in the early 1970s, \u201cpeople were not ready for that; they thought, \u2018This is not real music!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The first Neu!<\/i> album and its followup (1973\u2019s Neu! 2<\/i>) were in fact released in the UK, Spain and U.S. as well, though in the latter case they came out on small labels with limited distribution. Few American listeners would have heard the music at the time, but intrepid music journalists and forward-thinking musicians certainly did, and they took notice. In England, influential DJ John Peel championed Neu!, playing their music on his radio show.
\nAnd former Roxy Music keyboardist Brian Eno became an ardent fan. Asked how Eno discovered Neu!, Rother is nonplussed. \u201cI didn\u2019t ask him,\u201d he admits. \u201cMaybe he picked it up by listening to John Peel, or from David Bowie. Because these people, they knew our music.\u201d<\/p>\n

Strong echoes of the music on the first two Neu! albums can heard in popular songs like U2\u2019s \u201cBad\u201d and Radiohead\u2019s \u201cEverything in its Right Place.\u201d And while Rother remains modest about his accomplishments, he acknowledges the influence Neu! has had upon music. \u201cThose albums were 20 or 30 years too early,\u201d Rother says today.<\/p>\n

At the time, Rother and Dinger felt they were making comparatively little headway as Neu! They sometimes found themselves at creative odds with one another, yet both remained convinced of the concept\u2019s fundamental value. And when Rother witnessed another of Plank\u2019s clients, Cluster, he found additional inspiration. \u201cWe shared a stage once in Hamburg,\u201d he recalls. \u201cI jammed with [Hans-Joachim] Roedelius, and that rang a bell for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clusters of Sound<\/b>
\nKeyboardist and experimental musician Roedelius formed Kluster with Dieter Moebius and conceptual artist Conrad Schnitzler in 1969. That group made a pair of wildly adventurous, proto-industrial studio albums and a live set. When Schnitzler left for an even more outr\u00e9 solo career, the remaining two continued as the slightly \u2013 but only<\/i> slightly \u2013 more conventional Cluster.<\/p>\n

On a pair of studio releases (Cluster \u201871<\/i> and Cluster II<\/i> from the following year), Roedelius and Moebius pioneered what would come to be known as ambient music. In Germany, the music they made would be called kosmiche musik<\/i> (\u201ccosmic music\u201d). Their atmospheric, placid and wordless electronic soundscapes (with titles like \u201c21:32\u201d denoting their length) would prove highly influential: Cluster\u2019s music was fundamentally different from Neu!, but demonstrated a similar commitment to taking the music places it had yet to travel.<\/p>\n

Cluster\u2019s music rarely made use of conventional melody; mostly improvised washes of sound that (on the surface, at least) might remind some listeners of the more out-there moments on Pink Floyd\u2019s 1968 LP A Saucerful of Secrets<\/i>, it was the product of real-time inspiration and knob-twiddling of electronic devices. \u201cI never thought [we] would change in the direction of written music,\u201d the 89-year-old Roedelius says today. His wife Christine Martha explains what happened next. \u201cRother came and wanted to connect Cluster and Neu!\u201d she says with a chuckle. \u201cThat didn\u2019t work, so they decided to invent a new group.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"

Harmonia<\/p><\/div>\n

In Perfect Harmonia<\/b>
\nYet once again, this new group would not be built upon preconceived notions. \u201cThere was no goal,\u201d Roedelius emphasizes. \u201cThere was just, \u2018Let\u2019s try out of the moment; let\u2019s work together [and see if] it works.\u201d After one successful live collaboration, Moebius, Roedelius and Rother decided to launch a new group. Harmonia was born.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was blown away by the connection between [Roedelius\u2019] repetitive piano playing, these endless repetitions and my guitar work,\u201d says Rother. \u201cAnd when Dieter Moebius joined in, it was pure magic.\u201d
\nRoedelius readily concedes that Harmonia wasn\u2019t created in a vacuum; other German groups were doing important work as well, and while Harmonia charted its own musical path, the group existed as part of a loose, larger West German scene. \u201cWe were contemporaries of Can, Kraan and Ash Ra Tempel,\u201d he points out. \u201cSo somehow Harmonia was in a prepared stream of awareness, of contemporary music in Germany.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a playful sense of humor at work on Harmonia\u2019s first album, displayed even in the song titles: \u201cSehr Kosmich\u201d (\u201cvery cosmic\u201d) and the decidedly non-dance-oriented, hypnotic electronica of \u201cWatussi.\u201d Rather than employing a conventional drummer, the album makes extensive use of electronic percussion, still quite the novelty in the \u201874. Musik von Harmonia<\/i> came in a brightly colored, pop art influenced sleeve. Its Moebius-designed artwork may well have impressed Andy Warhol.<\/p>\n

Rother laughs when asked how Harmonia\u2019s music went over in a concert setting. Recalling an early performance, he says, \u201cWe were a good live team. But the few people who came to our concert, they fell asleep!\u201d<\/p>\n

Click to continue<\/a>\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One\u2026 Something Neu! (continued) For his part, Rother played multilayered electric guitar parts that skittered around, over and under a repetitive, often one-chord musical structure. The meter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28210,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,43,64],"tags":[559,968,5514,5515,4223,5513,4225],"class_list":["post-28198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","category-krautrock","category-reissue","tag-cluster","tag-hans-joachim-roedelius","tag-harmonia","tag-kluster","tag-kraftwerk","tag-michael-rother","tag-neu","cat-41-id","cat-43-id","cat-64-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28198"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28198\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28274,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28198\/revisions\/28274"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}