October 4–11, 2001

music

Neu! and Improved

Neu

Neu!/Neu! 2/Neu! ’75

(Astralwerks)

Neu — percussionist Klaus Dinger and guitarist Michael Rother — seemed to me, in the mid-’70s, the dryest of all Kraut acts. Their primal beat and hypno-trance Muzak matched their Day-Glo graffiti-only LP sleeves: crinkly and grotesquely lit from within. Like their sonic countrymen, Rother and Dinger (who started Neu after their joint tenure in Kraftwerk) eschewed Anglo rock’s predilection for blues/soul idioms, replacing it with a yen for Stockhausen and an ironic distance that eventually wouldn’t sound so incongruous at all. Rather than the bahn-bahn-bahn of Kraftwerk, the sputter of Cluster, the chaos of Amon Duul, the cut-up clutter of Faust or the Velvet-skronk of Can, they were something the others weren’t: dangerous.

With producer Conny Plank to guide them (sorta), 1972’s Neu!, their best record, bursts basslessly and blindly through your speakers. On "Hallogallo," Rother plays guitar layered in dry clicks, backward drones and seared wah-wahs, a pulse that moves bloodlessly through the body before Plank distorts it. "Negitivland" does the same, only much slower. Rother’s strings become cello’d, and he utilizes his scabby whisper for the same halted-but-frightened rhythmic effect. The rest of Neu!— including the jarring galactic whirr of "Sonderangerbot" and the holding-pattern punch of "Im Glück" — defines Neu’s sound forever.

The stop-start/fast-slow growl of 1973’s Neu!2 is planned accidental muzik at its funniest and most brilliant. One of trance-house’s most influential— and legendary — LPs, it contains remixes of previous songs because of a lack of recording funds. (Even the inside sleeve seems an appliqué of sorts, a pasted collage of images matching the slice ’n’ dicey-ness of the record.) Rother, Plank and Dinger reworked old and new tracks, applied sinister dub echo, frantic hyper guitars, white noise, changing tape speed, studio chatter and sound effects and came up with a mistaken masterpiece. By ’75 the psychic splitting of the duo turned their muzik selfishly individualistic and magnetically charged with a sense of escape. They robbed the first record’s guitar motifs and made them soft and supple, occasionally replacing them with hollowed-out pianos and shimmering reed-synths that wash over Dinger’s crusty pulse on "Isi"; slow to an ominous crawl on "Seeland"; get Satie-esque and still on "Leb’wohl"; and go for broke on the hypnotic shuffling/ flanged/ wild finale of "E-Musik" and "After Eight." Those last two trancey tracks presciently, in word and deed, lent themselves to rave-electronica’s languorous moment of repetition and Ecstasy.

—A.D. Amorosi