On tour of North America this spring, Michael Rother presents a night at The Neptune focused on the trailblazing German experimental rock music of the 1970s, and the groundbreaking territories explored by his bands Neu! and Harmonia. Among the most notable figures to originate from the explosion of Krautrock's propulsive minimalism of the decade, a wave of experimentalism that birthed Can, Amon Düül II, and Ash Ra Tempel, Rother's various outfits and collaborations were at the very locus of this era. In interview, The Wire explored how the German guitarist helped develop a new vocabulary for rock in the 1970s and beyond. The decade saw a concurrent generation of German electric invention in minimal and synthesizer explorations from the likes of Popol Vuh, Asmus Tietchens, Conrad Schnitzler, Harald Grosskopf, and members of Cluster working both in and out of solo modes. Both of these facets of the burgeoning German experimental music scene are detailed by Jon Savage, in the pages of The Guardian's, "Elektronische Musik: A Guide to Krautrock". Recent overviews like Soul Jazz' "Deutsche Elektronische Musik" series, Light in the Attic's, "The Microcosm: Visionary Music of Continental Europe", and Bureau B's "Silberland: The Psychedelic Side of Kosmische Musik", and "Krautrock Eruption: An Introduction to German Electronic Music", have brought new attention to their explorations. Further timely unearthing of these Kosmische explorer's work, the early music of Asmus Tietchens saw a handsome series of reissues from Bureau B, and Harmonium received a lavish box set repress of their central albums on Grönland Records, the first official release of it's kind in decades.
Likewise, there have been official reissues of the music composed by the trio of Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Dieter Moebius, and Conrad Schnitzler as the Cluster 1971 - 1981 box set. In an interview for for Perfect Sound Forever Roedelius chronicled the intersection of this most notable outfit within the Krautrock and Kosmische scenes as an outcome of his and Schnitzler's founding of the Zodiak Free Arts Club. The venue acting as an attractor and confluence of the existing minimalist strain of psychedelic rock, performance art and theater and what Roedelius calls "free jazz meets electronics". A regular of the venue, Dieter Moebius became the third element in their improvised music theater trio, then named Kluster. It was through these intersections in the art, theater, and performance world that brought Moebius and Roedelius into the influential sphere of producer Conny Plank. This fortuitous meeting would be a catalyst in further cementing the disparate aspects of the existing Krautrock and Kosmische sounds into shared culture, producing notable cross-pollinations like that of Harmonia. Intersecting in the space between the repetitive motoric vocabulary of Michael Rother's work in Neu! with Moebius and Roedelius' freeform synthesizer explorations, Harmonia could be considered the genre's sole supergroup of a style. Documented in Alex Abramovich's "The Invention of Ambient Music" for the New Yorker, their open-ended freeform performances in gallery and theater spaces following the release of 1975's "Deluxe", attracted the attention of British producer extraordinaire Brian Eno. The shared solidarity in musical exploration and synthesis would culminate in September 1976 in an 11 day stayover in Forst Germany where Eno lived and recorded with Harmonia, producing the material that would become "Tracks and Traces".
