MICHAEL ROTHER

Former Neu! guitarist’s vintage six-CD round-up, plus new/neu work.

As a teenage guitarist in late 60s Dusseldorf, Michael Rother was particularly influenced by Jimi Hendrix, but he also lived in a time when German youth were criticising the old order who had taken them into the war and still held important positions within society. So out went elements of traditional German culture with its unsavoury connotations, along with Anglo-American rock and jazz. His idea was to strip right down before building up a completely new music with a “European feeling about harmony and melody”. After a brief spell in Kraftwerk, Rother explored these ideas more fully in Neu!, who forever metaphorically travelled towards a “vanishing point on the horizon”, and in a more mantric, meditative way with Harmonia.

THAT CHARACTERISTIC PULSE IS ALWAYS THERE.

After Neu! split in 1975, that momentum continued through Rother’s instrumental solo albums, but it was a smoother ride. On Flammende Herzen (1977) his preference is for repetitive drum grooves – played here by Can’s Jaki Liebezeit – and a guitar style of pared down rhythm work and simple but deftly arranged melodic elements, with keyboards drifting through space before blossoming into ‘chorus’ melody lines. On Feuerland the bubbling synths, eerie slide guitar sighs and phased drumming are also reminiscent of Harmonia. The following year brought Sterntaler, a companion album, with simple guitar lines, lush synths and Liebezeit’s functional 4/4 patterns combined with some slower, near-ambient sections.

Katzenmusik, from 1979, is leaner with a little more grip to it, and like all of Rother’s music, it pivots around a few very effective chord changes in a way that is richly melodic, and also imbued with a feeling of yearning.

Big, primary-coloured synth lines loom large on Fernwärme from 1982. Rother employs his smooth sustain harmony guitar on the syncopated Hohe Luft, but it is mixed so high that it sounds a tad cloying and rather overbalances the track. By contrast, on Fortuna, his keyboard figures run along similar lines to Kraftwerk. The Soundtracks CD comprises two recent film scores, for Die Raeuber and Houston with typically propulsive material alongside brooding and dancing electronic lines. And although these moods may be stranger and more crepuscular, that characteristic pulse is always there.

Getting up-to-date, the irresistible momentum of Groove 139, recorded at London’s Jazz Café in 2016 on the Live & Remixes disc, nods right back to 1971, to Neu!’s best known track, Hallogallo. And although one could say that the background scenery to Rother’s ongoing journey has never changed dramatically, his aesthetic is so finely tuned that it would be rather disappointing if it had.