Neu! - The engine of kraut-rock

A duo formed in 1971 in Düsseldorf by musicians who had come up through the Kraftwerk circle, multi-instrumentalist Michael Rother and drummer Klaus Dinger, Neu! in just a few years of activity turned bold experiments at the crossroads of psychedelia, progressive, art rock, proto-punk, ambient and electronic music into reality, forming – alongside Kraftwerk themselves, as well as Can, Amon Duul and Faust – the founding core of that German musical renaissance that in the Seventies came to be known as kraut-rock, destined to deeply influence new wave, synth-pop and post-rock.

Politically and socially engaged, the kraut-rock generation blossomed amid the hippie, communal utopia of the post-'68 era, but it was also shaped by the tensions of a Germany split in two by the Cold War and by the alienation typical of post-industrial society. A movement that, building on the legacy of early Pink Floyd and the Velvet Underground, set out to explore a wholly new concept of rock music, deeply tied to the teachings of avant-garde masters such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Joseph Beuys. Neu! in particular were the pioneers of the so-called "motorik beat," a circular rhythm based on repetition, developed in 4/4 time, commonly associated with works from the kraut scene.

The first, self-titled album, Neu! (1972), produced like its successors by Conny Plank, the sound engineer whose name would become inextricably linked to the new German scene, comes across as a chaotic, explosive mass of lo-fi music, minimalist melodies and obsessive rhythms, recorded in just four nights and largely the product of free-form improvisation. The drums' cyclical pulse merges with hypnotic percussion across the ten minutes of "Hallogallo," the band's true manifesto and the album's centerpiece, alongside the placid "Weissensee," which weaves together melodic guitar chords, and the more unsettled "Negativland" – another absolute high point of Neu!'s entire discography – in which the bass-and-drums bed is torn apart by the sound of a distorted guitar.

The noise experiments, worthy of a horror-film score, haunt the development of the bizarre "Sonderangebot," drawing close to the hallucinated psychedelia of early Pink Floyd, the meditative "Im Glück" edges toward ambient territory, while "Lieber Honig," the only track enriched with vocal harmonies, carries the same unhealthy atmosphere found in certain Velvet Underground songs, sinking into elaborations indebted to John Cage. Neu! sold barely thirty thousand copies at the time, but over the years it has come to be regarded as an essential masterpiece, even by many highly acclaimed musicians who have admitted to drawing inspiration from that work.

The duo returned to the studio in 1973 for Neu! 2, but with the budget cut to the bone and time running short, they only managed to complete the first side. To fill out the rest, they padded things out by reworking two tracks released a few weeks earlier that had gone completely unnoticed, "Neueschnee" and "Super", manipulated at varying speeds throughout the whole of side two. Disorienting and revolutionary, the result is considered by many to be the first (unwitting?) experiment in "remixing" ever carried out in a rock context, though some detractors see it as little more than a scam cooked up by Neu! to reach a minutes-count acceptable to the record label.

Side A still finds room for at least one other cornerstone of their sound, "Für Immer", with that relentless motorik beat that makes it the little brother of "Hallogallo". A ceaseless drumbeat also drives "Spitzenqualitat", while "Gedenkminute (Für A + K)", with its anguished isolationist-ambient death bells, explores darker territory. "Lila Engel" is a gorgeous, delirious litany that, for the first time, points the duo toward uncharted proto-punk pathways.

Frustrated by their inability to take the material on the road, and burdened by a not always easy personal relationship, Neu! were already on the verge of splitting up right after the release of their second album. Rother joined forces with Dieter Moebius and Joachim Roedelius of Cluster to form Harmonia, with whom he would record two albums between 1974 and 1975.

The duo reunited to record Neu! 75, a work that essentially takes the shape of two separate solo half-albums. The first side, masterminded by Rother, edges toward the ambient music of Brian Eno, with "Seeland" even anticipating, in some sense, the gentler side of the Balearic Sound.

The second side, Dinger's domain, performed together with his brother Thomas and drummer Hans Lampe, unexpectedly steers the Neu! sound toward proto-punk, especially on "Hero" and "After Eight", which – heavily loaded with distorted guitars – would prove crucial to the nascent British punk-rock scene.

Once the recordings were finished, the duo went their separate ways once again: Rother pursued a solo career, while Dinger found a new home in the project La Düsseldorf, formed together with his brother Thomas and Hans Lampe. With La Düsseldorf, Dinger would record three fairly successful albums: La Düsseldorf (1976), Viva (1978) and Individuellos (1981).

In the mid-Eighties Neu! attempted one last experience together, but the recording sessions for Neu! 4, left unfinished due to irreconcilable disagreements over the final mix, would only be turned into an album in 1996, on Dinger's sole initiative and without Rother's consent. Only after Dinger's death, which occurred in March 2008 from heart failure, did Rother go back to that material to shape what is, in his own way, the definitive version, Neu! '86, released by Grönland in 2010.

It's a minor work, at its sharpest when it tries to revive past glories, as in the motorik rides "Drive", "Wave Mother" and "Euphoria", which never quite reach the same heights as the compositions recorded in the Seventies. It's less convincing when venturing down new paths, adopting danceable, plasticky sounds typical of the era, or even throwing in improbable ethnic references, as happens on "La Bomba".

In September 2022, to celebrate fifty years since the start of Neu!'s artistic journey, 50 was released, a box set containing the duo's complete works, which also includes a tribute album recorded for the occasion, featuring ten tracks involving a number of top-tier contemporary musicians.

The National graft the motorik beat onto "Im Gluck", Mogwai feel perfectly at home within the coils of "Super", Idles go for a revision of "Negativland", Fink reworks the watery "Weissensee", Stephen Morris and Gabe Gurnsay transmute "Hallogallo", taking it into a Berlin club, and Yann Tiersen adds ambient debris to "Lieber Honig". Also involved in the remixing and reworking operations are Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip, Man Man, Guerilla Toss and They Hate Change.

Forever caught between noise and silence, chaos and stillness, unity and fragmentation, Neu!'s work would leave a deep mark on a wide-ranging array of musicians, from David Bowie to Sonic Youth, from Pere Ubu to Julian Cope, from Mouse on Mars to Stereolab, all the way to Wilco's untouchable "Spiders (Kidsmoke)", and beyond, into the new millennium, in successful projects within the independent underground, such as Cavern Of Anti-Matter. Stereolab themselves released "Jenny Ondioline" in 1993, their own personal revisiting of "Hallogallo" from the Düsseldorf duo's first album.

Neu! have shown an impressive capacity to influence the generations that followed. But Rother demurs: "When we were making our records we never thought about the future. I've always lived with my mind fixed only on the present. I don't think it's worth spending too much time worrying about how we'll be treated in the history books." But Neu! have undoubtedly earned their place in those history books, thanks to the revolutionary quality of their music, and the forward-looking vision of two of the greatest German musical personalities of the twentieth century.

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