MUSIK VON HARMONIA @ 50

 

 

Celebrating its golden jubilee this month is the debut release from the super-group formed by fusing NEU!'s Michael Rother with Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius of Cluster, with Musik von Harmonia being released in January of 1974.

It was a magical musical union that began when Rother approached Cluster about the possibility of backing him up for a live version of NEU!. Once the trio began to explore their potential, via jamming at Cluster's rural studio in the German village of Forst, it quickly became apparent that a new entity had been given birth. Rother claimed that "it was sort of a musical love at first sight, really... it was just something I hadn’t experienced before." Abandoning his plans for NEU!, Rother stayed on in Forst with his new collaborators and they began recording the material that would end up on their debut LP.

Though the sound of the album clearly contains the DNA of both NEU! and Cluster, there is also a distinct sense that its totality is indeed more than the sum of those parts. It's no wonder the trio were so keen to pursue their partnership when it resulted in an album that has gone on to be considered one of the quintessential titles in the realm of so-called "Krautrock".

The album so impressed Brian Eno that he proclaimed Harmonia as "the world's most important rock band" at the time. In fact, he would end up coming to Germany to work with them, releasing a number of albums from their collaboration. That influence would extent to Eno's work with David Bowie during his acclaimed "Berlin" era, as well as set him further on the path towards developing his concepts for "ambient" music.

NEU! - 2 @ 50

 

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.

HARMONIA 76 - TRACKS & TRACES @ 25

 

Released 25 years ago today, on November 4th, 1997, the material for Harmonia & Eno’s “Tracks and Traces” album was originally recorded in 1976, but remained shelved for over 20 years before it was salvaged from oblivion and finally published.

After hearing Harmonia in the early 1970s, which was a collaboration between Cluster’s Dieter Moebius & Hans-Joachim Roedelius and NEU! guitarist Michael Rother, Brian Eno proclaimed them the “most important group in the world.” Eno promised to come work with them and finally kept that promise in 1976, though they’d already split up by then. Nonetheless, they agreed to reunite with Eno and began recording together. At the time, those recordings ended up being set aside as Eno moved on to his collaboration with David Bowie for what would become the “Berlin Trilogy” albums: Low, "Heroes" & Lodger.

In the 1990s, Roedelius retrieved the master tapes from Eno and did a bit of work on them to create the 1997 edition of the album. Further to this, Michael Rother contributed additional material from his cassette archives for the 2009 reissue. Those tracks could now be included because the digital restoration process was sophisticated enough that Rother’s tapes could be cleaned up to remove noise and enhance the sound quality. This resulted in three bonus tracks being added to the release.

Stylistically, the collaboration with Eno traded some of the flair of the previous Harmonia albums for a more muted ambience, but it was a fair trade-off and the results were a kind of music that was well ahead of its time, being produced by four creative masters who were in their prime. It's only frustrating that it took two decades for these recordings to finally find the light of day.