tajmall ([info]tajmall) wrote,
@ 2008-04-09 20:10:00
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Klaus Dinger - *24.03.1946 - †21.03.2008

Viva viva NEU! man, Klaus Dinger
And wow now
to find out that he
the Motorik drummer
was also the singer!


I only just found out (via an online posting by Franz Ferdinand's guitarist) that the drummer of the amazing German duo called NEU! is dead. Naive me thought they might stop the clocks on this one. You mean it wasn't on the news? Not matter he was in the original line-up of Kraftwerk, Dinger was the architect of the Motorikbeat and therefore someone to whom so much is owed much by -to name a few- Bowie, Thom Yorke, Orbital, Sonic Youth, PiL, The Fall, Wilco and probably/inevitably, Julian Cope. Who knows how far his beat goes? Oh, *I* do. It goes: Für immer

Für immer: a) a NEU! songtitle; b) German for: "forever"

And now, not only do I hear Dinger's gone, but I discover that HE was also NEU!'s unique vocalist. It wasn't the other guy. Obviously I never checked the text on the sleeves of my prized NEU! CDs. The music was enough... So that means there's an even stronger connection between him and the Sex Pistols on that strange thread that still unfurls down city high streets, fashion catwalks and in the haircuts of millionaire sportsmen.

It's no coincidence I haven't listened to any of my Stereolab records since I heard NEU! They just seem cheat money in comparison. And NEU! are amazing in the way that they manage to make their sort-of-contemporaries sound florid - even CAN when they're at their most minimal don't quite match up with such spookily *pure* music.

I think NEU! must be the band I waited longest to hear, as in: I knew the name but didn't get to hear them for the longest period. It was all the more of a thrill when I did hear them and I was not disappointed. In fact, they managed to exceed expectations. These were records I suspected must exist somewhere - and at last I was hearing them. And to make it bittersweet: it was the last record played on the last ever Peel show broadcast on the World Service. Forgive me while I get misty-eyed about this... like I might have been as I tuned in on a fading Walkman at that Queensway bus-stop, on route to a new job at the moment when I first heard NEU! on Peel for what I also knew was to be the last time.

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[info]tajmall
2008-04-10 07:27 am UTC (link)

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hero live
[info]tajmall
2008-04-10 07:31 am UTC (link)
different singer?

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Hallogallo
[info]tajmall
2008-04-10 07:32 am UTC (link)

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Super (but w/ politic stuff added)
[info]tajmall
2008-04-10 07:35 am UTC (link)

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Negativland
[info]tajmall
2008-04-10 07:41 am UTC (link)
the 1st NEU! i heard - playing in the background of a track on Ciccone Youth's Whitey Albums. it was my favourite track. you can see why Sonic Youth were into it.


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[info]tajmall
2008-04-10 09:54 am UTC (link)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/saturday_review/story/0,,534816,00.html

Neu! That's what I call music

Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger recorded some of the 1970s' most influential albums - and then made it almost impossible for anyone to get hold of them. Tim Cumming on the Krautrockers who couldn't get on

Tim Cumming
Saturday August 11, 2001
Guardian

"The problems Klaus and I have with one another cannot be separated from our music. We have such completely different personalities. The actual mystery is how we were able to do the three albums together at all. Our opposing characters sometimes led to great friction, crazy struggles and contradictions in our music. This is what made Neu! so special."
That is Michael Rother, one half of the legendary Neu!, discussing the first authorised CD releases of the group's three classic albums: Neu!, Neu! 2 and Neu! 75. Along with Can, Kraftwerk and Faust, Neu! are the most iconic of that new wave of German rock groups from the late 1960s and early 1970s that goes under the disparaging but affectionate banner of Krautrock.

Neu! consisted of multi-talented musicians Klaus Dinger on drums and Rother on guitar; they first played together in a 1971 Kraftwerk line-up. In Europe in the depths of the cold war, West Germany's economic miracle was set against the social radicalism of the post-1968 counter-culture and the avant-garde of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Joseph Beuys. Bands such as Neu!, Faust, Amon Duul II, Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream explored the gap between these two polar opposites, expressing in their post-rock music the fractured ethos of the times.

At a crucial remove from the mainstream - and, largely, from each other - they were connected only by their disconnection from dominant political and musical currents, influenced as much by Stockhausen as by the Stones, the Kinks or Jimi Hendrix. Krautrock began where the early Pink Floyd and the Velvets left off, playing into an unexplored wilderness. Where they went, others - Bowie, Eno, John Lydon, the Fall, whole genres such as electronica and trance - would follow.

A recently released Japanese DVD of Kraftwerk performing on Beat Club in 1971 features the future Neu! with Florian Schneider improvising the 10-minute, trance-like Rueckstossgondoliero. This, if anything, marks the birth of the Neu! sound and ethos. But personal and musical tensions between Dinger and Schneider meant a split was inevitable. Soon afterwards, Dinger and Rother launched Neu! with the help of renowned producer Conny Plank, the Lee Perry of Krautrock.

Unlike many other groups in the "kosmische" genre, Neu! left only a tiny recorded legacy, and through the height of the Krautrock revival in the 1990s the only available copies of Neu! CDs were bootlegs, with overtures from record companies such as Mute stalled by the band members' conflicting demands. It wasn't until last year that tensions between the two were resolved to a point where they could finally agree on an official release of Neu!'s albums.

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[info]tajmall
2008-04-10 09:55 am UTC (link)


Both oversaw the remastering of the music, and there has even been talk of a boxed set with remixes, a book and a DVD of interviews and Neu! documents. This, however, has been delayed, perhaps indefinitely, by continuing disagreements.

The first Neu! album was recorded more or less spontaneously, from the roughest of musical sketches, over four nights at Conny Plank's Hamburg studio in December 1971. "It was chaos," remembers Rother, while Dinger says: "After two days we hadn't recorded anything we could use." Then on the third day they played the basic track of Negativland, which became the template for future operations. With Plank at the helm, Neu! turned the basics of their sound - Dinger's insistent "motorik" drumming, Rother's stripped-down riffing - into kosmische classics, with the mixing desk as essential a musical instrument as Dinger's kit or Rother's guitar.

The album's first track, Hallogallo, is classic Neu!, championed early on by John Peel who played it regularly on his radio show. Trance-like, yet too barbed and unsettling a sound to become sweet, the song is a 10-minute sound sculpture that barely wavers from Dinger's pulsing beat, and somehow seems to hold a whole world of mystery, beauty and emotion within its highly defined minimalist structure. Dinger refers to his drumming as "a feeling, like a picture, like driving down a long road or lane. It is essentially about life, how you have to keep moving, to go on and stay in motion. To be driven by the drive." It may well be the greatest road music ever made.

During the recording of their second album in 1972, the pair ran out of money and filled the second side of Neu! 2 with scratch versions of their only single, Nueschnee/ Super, played at different speeds on a cassette player that "howled and chewed tape" and on a hand-driven turntable with a jumpy needle. Typically, Dinger called such emergency operations a "pop art solution to a pop problem", and in retrospect the trick does have the dumb beauty of many a great conceptual idea. What was once seen as a cop-out is now hailed as an innovation, and Dinger claims it as his own. "I was very well informed about Warhol, pop art, contemporary art," he says. "I had always been very visual in my thinking."

Even the band's name had a pop art dimension - it was and is the most common slogan in German advertising. And Neu!'s music comes across as a very sculptural, kinetic sound. The album covers - Neu! hand-painted in big, bold strokes, the semi-legible credits handwritten, crossed out, taped to a brilliant white background - give the whole enterprise an inscrutably gnomic, handmade quality that is an integral part of the band's aura and legacy.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

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[info]tajmall
2008-04-10 09:58 am UTC (link)
True to the spirit of Neu! integrity, the covers have been remastered for the CD release. They are a clear agitpop statement that the group's parameters were radically different from those of other German groups, let alone those of mighty Anglo-American rock, then at its 1970s stadium apogee.

For Neu! 75, their final official release, the two musicians reconvened at Plank's studio after working independently on solo projects. For the first, more ambient side of the album, they worked, as they had three years previously, as a duo. On side two's abrasive proto-punk songs After Eight and Hero (a Bowie favourite and the inspiration for his own career-defining Heroes), they drafted in members of Dinger's new group, La Düsseldorf, and Neu's final incarnation was as a stripped-down, sand-blasted four-piece that anticipated virtually all the pathways opened up by punk a year later.

Neu!'s music is spiky, oppositional, beautiful and utterly uncompromising. Its chemistry mirrors the volatility of its makers. Every Neu! song contains the basic warring elements that made Dinger and Rother's creative rela tionship so productive: a struggle between noise and silence, aggression and calm, pattern and disruption. Each would pursue his own path of extremes in subsequent ventures, but on their three classic albums the finely balanced magic of the Neu! sound manifests itself to perfection.

"Neu is what happens whenever Michael and I are together," Klaus Dinger has said, and though Neu! may be their finest achievement, it is only part of their legacy. La Düsseldorf, which Dinger led until 1981, explored the glam-pop industrial wing of Neu!'s innovations, while Rother teamed up with kosmische duo Cluster to produce the two shimmering, lovely Harmonia albums.

Both projects caught the ears of Bowie and Eno during the Heroes era in Berlin. Rother was asked to play on the sessions, but he declined. "I think [Bowie's management] wanted to see Bowie change to a rock music sound for commercial reasons," he comments. Rother did collaborate with Eno, however. Four years ago Rykodisc released Harmonia 76's album Tracks and Traces, recorded 20 years before in the countryside of Weserbergland, where Rother still lives. There are beautiful ambient collaborations, too, between Eno and Cluster from the same period.

Krautrock is the music of a generation at one remove from rock's American source, as self-conscious and home-grown as the 1960s British Beat boom. On classic tracks such as Lilac Angel from Neu! 2, Dinger and Rother distil the core elements of garage rock to a pounding heart pulse, forging a hypnotic, interior sound that builds up to and even sur passes the rock'n'roll intensities of the Stooges or the Velvet Underground. The group's industrial ambience has no match.

There is a curious timelessness and internationality about Neu!, a common beat that spans east and west. They and the other great Krautrock groups were social, political and musical trailblazers, defining their contexts at one extreme in the utopianism of the commune and at the other in the Baader-Meinhof mindset of confrontation and action. Both represent the idealism and terror of the times, the deep heat of the cold war at the heart of a divided Europe. Neu! and their Krautrock peers simply planted their own suspect devices, throwing their noise bombs into music's country without borders.

• Neu!, Neu! 2 and Neu! 75 were out on Groenland/EMI Electrola.

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