Cherchez la femme Yesterday Neu!'s first self-titled disc from 1972 arrived in the post with some other CDs which I couldn't listen to properly as I was too much immersed into the six tracks on the Neu! album. How could I miss out on that album before? It is absolutely stunning and didn't age at all after thirty years. A propos 1972, I just saw that cos from monkey puzzle is currently listening to Giant Sand's 62 seconds guitar freakout 1972 from their last real disc Chore of Enchantment. A song I didn't get neither but probably like because of that. When checking the database with my albums I found out that I had 36 (!) records from that year. 1972 was an amazing year for music: there was the first Big Star, Nick Drake's Pink Moon, Neil Young's Harvest, Lou Reed's first self-titled and Transformer, Genesis Foxtrot, Little Feat's Sailin' Shoes, Curtis Mayfield's Superfly, Joni Mitchell's For the Roses, Oregon's Music of Another Present Era, the first Modern Lovers, which was released three years later, the first Roxy Music, Exile on Main Street, Paul Simon's self-titled, Sun Ra's Space Is the Place and Velvet Underground's Live at Max's Kansas City was released.

Back to Neu!. What I said about Autechre's version of Weissensee a couple of days ago still holds nevertheless. The original which may well be the weakest track on the album doesn't grip me as much as the cover. It is extremely slow and sounds like dark ambient. Additionally there is the beginning of a sugar-sweet melody at around 1:20 which kind of destroys the track for me. It comes back later as well. That alluded to tune reminds me of Pink Floyd but I wouldn't know which album (maybe from Dark Side of the Moon? which came out two years later). I am pretty sure that this melody comes from Michael Rother, who became quite popular in Germany later with the romantic instrumental guitar/synth album Flammende Herzen and who didn't really fit into Klaus Dinger's Neu! with his rather conventional guitar playing. What actually is missing on that track is Klaus Dinger's endless constant drumming which became Neu!'s trademark and can be heard in all its trancelike glory on the 10 minute opener Hallogallo. It has been referred to as motorik but Dinger sees it not as machine-like at all but rather as a human beat. He talks about it in the extremely enlightening interview he gave to the Swedish magazine Pop in 1998:

Instead I called it "lange Gerade" or "endlose Gerade". It's a feeling, like a picture, like driving down a long road or lane. it is essentially about life, how you have to keep moving, get on and stay in motion. (lange, endlose Gerade = long, infinite straight line)

It wasn't by chance that Dinger gave one of his rare interviews to a Swedish magazine. Apparently Neu! and the Neu! beat were inspired a lot by a love story (actually the love of his life) Klaus Dinger had with a Swedish girl called Anita which started in the summer of 1971, to whom he also sang the last song on the album Lieber Honig (dear honey, but in German we don't usually use Honig as a term of endearment). It is one of the strangest vocal deliveries in music history. I couldn't find out what he sings (impossible to understand the words by listening only, they sound like children's gibberish). There is a later version on La Düsseldorf's last album Individuellos where the words are different. Dinger's voice on the Neu! version is hoarse and extremely high at the same time. It reminds me a little of Chet Baker singing but much less accomplished, more crude if you want. I found it hardly bearable at first listen as it is rather disembodied and false in places but I am getting used to it. At the end of Lieber Honig there is the sound of a rowing boat which can also be heard on Im Glück (In Happiness) including some people talking. One of them is Anita and the song tries to retain the moment of perfect harmony and bliss Dinger experienced in that Swedish summer in 1971. The long road trips in Sweden are probably also responsible for the Neu! beat in Hallogallo and Negativland. The second piece Sonderangebot is a sound collage with gong sounds and features the most avantgarde noises on the record. The outstanding track of the album for me is Negativland which later gave the name to the ironic experimental media music collective and foreshadows Einstürzende Neubauten with its drill sounds and probably the whole genre of industrial music. It is the hardest rocking song on the record.

What I like about Neu! is that they were not the typical Krautrock outfit like Amon Düül with their long stoned collective jams à la Grateful Dead or Tangerine Dream with their purely electronic soundscapes. Both these bands haven't aged well whereas Neu! as the name implies did something new. Their music is the missing link between Krautrock and what was later to come. The bridge between the then and now. They integrated an almost tribal but still modern repetitive rhythm into their music which is as fascinating now than it was then. And all songs on the first Neu! album are distinctly different and each one almost spawned a new genre of pop music. Further reading: Junkmedia on Neu! and Neu! 2. Michael Rother interview and Music for Mind & Pants ("The Shock of the Neu!") from Perfect Sound Forever. An interesting list with Julian Cope commenting on his 50 krautrock favourites and the feature The Guitarists of Krautrock.

Meta: By the way the Google search often leading to this site finally dropped to #27, Google seems quite unstable in its results after the dance, so though I intend to move away from blogger one day this probably won't happen too soon as I am much too lazy to do a new page somewhere else. Phil Ringnalda with a round-up of Blogging Ecosystems, i.e. programs which analyse the link structures in between blogs. In the ILM thread Plug your Blog you can find enough music blogs to read for the rest of the summer.