.”) The Germans invented electronic dance music, just as surely as German engineers, working between the wars, had invented magnetic tape. And, at the same time, groups like Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, Cluster, and Neu! were playing songs that seeped much more softly into the atmosphere.
A few months ago, the Berlin label Grönland Records released “Harmonia Box,” which collects the recordings of a group Eno adored and, eventually, worked with. Compared with its sound, which is crystalline, the group’s history seems convoluted, but in the briefest of outlines: Harmonia was a sort of supergroup, composed of Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Dieter Moebius, and Michael Rother, a guitarist who had played in Neu! and an early incarnation of Kraftwerk.
The trio made two albums: “Musik von Harmonia,” in 1974, and “Deluxe,” in 1975. They played to audiences that were indifferent or hostile. “Harmonia was completely ignored or hated,” Rother told me, over Skype, recently. “Ignored would have been the better thing. People did not understand it, did not want our music.” The group broke up in the summer of 1976, only to reform later that year, when Eno spent a little over a week recording with it in Forst.
There’s a reason the music has aged so well. In Germany in the late sixties and seventies, forward-looking musicians were working with sequencers, analog synthesizers, drum machines, tape loops, and exotic instruments. The idea, Rother told me, was to scrape clean the musical palate. “By that time,” he said, in lightly accented English, “I had left behind the idea of being a guitar hero, of trying to impress people by playing fast melodies. I’d erased all that from my repertoire.
What this meant, in practice, is that Rother—who’d grown up covering Cream, the Stones, and the Beatles—had subtracted the blues from his playing. Eventually, he’d simplified chord progressions, or removed them entirely, playing single-note runs against a tight matrix set up by his partner in Neu! and Kraftwerk, the drummer Klaus Dinger.
Source: Entertainment Trends (entertainmenttrends.net)
obscure supergroup?
lacy_mark
an obscure supergroup? 🤔
One of my favorite bands.
Turns out, 'obscure' is very relative
Dylan_marx
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