RE-ENERGISED, NEU!’S MICHAEL ROTHER HEADS SOUTH WITH A NEW PARTNER
“The music comes from places we don’t know about.” MICHAEL ROTHER
“ITOTALLY ENJOY playing live,” says Michael Rother, spry guitar druid of Neu!, Harmonia and, for a while in 1971, Kraftwerk. “I’ve been to Japan, China, Russia, all around Europe and America. That sort of pushed me to present music to the audience and get the feedback immediately, instead of working alone and getting an echo months later. Somehow quite a few years went by doing that, before I returned to recording.”
He’s explaining his slender output since the noughties (last year’s Dreaming finished off recordings begun in the mid-’90s with vocalist Sophie Joiner). Then lockdown and a halt to live activity prompted new creation. In early June 2020, he loaded his car with his black Fender with Humbucker pickups and other audio gear and left his long-time base in Forst, eastern Germany. After two days’ drive he “moved his life” to Pisa and set up his studio in the home of musician Vittoria Maccabruni, his partner of three years. The domestic situation was conducive, he says. “Moving to music-making straight from the coffee or whatever, or the dining table and just having it as part of my daily life,” he says. “I always enjoy that.”
In August they started to collaborate, and by the year’s end knew “a wonderful album” they would entitle As Long As The Light was in process. “It was not initially a plan, but it grew and started making total sense,” says Rother. “It’s an artistic contribution of 50 per cent each. Vittoria had so many sketches ready, I could add my ideas for production, of the structure of the songs and of course add my melodies, the guitars mostly. It was very relaxed, with no time pressure.”
Does working with a romantic partner have a different dynamic than, say, late Neu! drummer Klaus Dinger, a famously truculent paranoiac who boasted of taking 1,000 LSD trips? “Yeah, that is a very different situation working on music with a romantic partner as opposed to my former bandmates in Harmonia and Neu!, and maybe at times even dangerous,” he says. “There are always artistic struggles. Both have a clear idea, a vision of the music, and those tensions, those struggles probably helped.”
He describes the album as eight individual pieces without a theme, all instrumental apart from one sung by Maccabruni and another which contains elements of her manipulated voice. “There are very different characters in the songs, some rather friendly, but also some dark clouds, which I found from Vittoria,” he says. “The combination works very well.”
They finished in summer, and he’s reluctant to credit his changed location with affecting the music. “The music comes from places we don’t know about, from deep inside your system,” he says. “If I had the chance to know where, I think I wouldn’t even want to know. This is the adventure, the magic of not being able to calculate it.”
He and Maccabruni, who earlier this year were heard on Thorsten Drücker’s Joseph Beuys tribute Aktion Beuys (Music for Theatre
No. 7), are planning to play the album live. And after that? “I don’t have a clear concept for how to proceed,” says Rother. “I just like walking along the beach collecting shells or looking at the sky… I leave much to chance, and react to how things happen.”