Marking
it’s golden anniversary today is the sophomore LP from Krautrock
pioneers, NEU! as “2” turns 50 years old, being released on May 7th,
1973. While on the one hand, it furthered the group’s position as the
premier ambassadors of the “Motorik” sound, it also generated
controversy with its unorthodox approach to dealing with a limited
production budget.
For their second LP, Klaus Dinger &
Michael Rother, along with producer, Conny Plank, continued to explore
the hypnotic, driving grooves which had made their debut album a
landmark, creating a sound which would become emblematic of the German
music scene of the decade and inspire countless musicians for
generations yet to come. While the first side of the LP presented a set
of four new finished tracks, the budget for recording had run out by
the time they’d completed those pieces. Desperate to find a solution to
fill out the other side of the album, the group took the previously
released single,“"Neuschnee/Super", and proceeded to create a series of
“variations” using no more than a turntable and cassette deck.
The
song was played at different speeds, manually spun or mangled on the
cassette tape. The result was a set of six “remixes”, as Dinger would
later classify the recordings. At the time of the album’s release,
critics and fans considered the tactic a con or a rip-off, a “cheap
gimmick”, though the band were, in reality, displaying an unprecedented
sense of ingenuity when faced with a difficult circumstance. In fact,
the move was actually quite in keeping with their artistic aesthetic and
approach to “pop art”, presenting an innovative use of a “ready made”
sound object, subverted and reshaped to create an entirely unexpected
result. It was an approach that would be exploited by many other
advocates of experimental music in numerous manifestations over the
ensuing years.
Despite the controversy of some of its content,
the album is still considered one of the foundation recordings of the
German alternative music scene of the early 1970s, presenting a distinct
and revolutionary sound, freed from the influence of American blues
based structures and building on a completely re-imagined musical
scaffolding.
