Junkmedia recently had the pleasure to interview a true innovator – German multi-instrumentalist Michael Rother. An indispensable figure in what has come to be known as "Krautrock," he is perhaps best known for his early 70's work with the late drummer Klaus Dinger in their seminal band Neu!. Rother helped form the band Harmonia in the mid '70's, a band that Brian Eno once called "the most important band in the world." Rother's solo career consisted of sporadically released solo albums from the late 70's through the mid 90's. Currently, he is back working with his old band mates from Harmonia. The band is now touring and recently played their first-ever U.S. show at last month's All Tomorrow's Parties festival in upstate New York. Our interview started briefly over the phone while Rother was in Manhattan and ended in Germany via email.

Junkmedia: How was the ATP festival? I heard it was so loud that they were giving out earplugs to people at the gate. Anyone really blow you away?

Michael Rother: I really enjoyed my stay at ATP NY. The nostalgic Kutchers resort in the middle of the beautiful countryside of the Catskills is quite a surreal location for a rock festival but it was a good choice by the festival organizers. The wonderful weather helped, of course. Our Harmonia concert went well and the audience seemed to enjoy our music a lot. We got a great reception by the crowd. Whenever I see other bands perform I always take earplugs along. My Bloody Valentine is famous for being very loud and the organizers were giving out earplugs, which I think is quite an unusual and responsible action. I went to see the MBV concert after having met Kevin Shields the day before. My friend Benjamin Curtis (ex-Secret Machines now School of Seven Bells) introduced us and I was interested in hearing them live for the first time. Unfortunately, they went on stage very late and because I was still jet-lagged and tired I had to leave the concert half-way through. I´ll check out their music. Apart from MBV, especially Thurston Moore and Steve Shelley impressed me at ATP.

After ATP, Harmonia played a gig in NYC. How did that go?

Two days after ATP we played in NYC at a club called (Le) Poisson Rouge. White Williams opened for us. The concert was very well received but I would have expected more people to show up. Maybe most of our fans decided to come to ATP. Anyway, it seems that Harmonia's concert at LPR had been kept secret by the promoters. I didn´t see any flyers or posters announcing our concert. That was a pity.

You mentioned on the phone this morning that you were at a jam session at a studio yesterday. Who were you playing with? Was there an express purpose behind the session?

Aaron Mullan who works as soundman for Sonic Youth and who did the FOH (front of house) sound for Harmonia at ATP NY introduced me to Steve Shelley, the drummer of SY. The three of us met in Hoboken on the day after the LPR concert and recorded a jam in their studio. Steve is a great drummer. When I saw him play with Thurston Moore at ATP I was amazed by his precise and economical drumming. Aaron joined us on bass while sitting at the mixing desk and doing the recording. He´ll send me the individual tracks later this month when he´s back from a tour to Europe with his band Tall Firs and some SY concerts. The idea is to take the recordings as a basis, to extract parts, chop them up, process them and to develop songs that way. That´s how I always work and I look forward to doing that with the material of our jam. We´ll exchange mixes and I´m sure the three of us will be in touch on this and other projects in the future.

What prompted Harmonia to get back together?

Ever since we stopped working together as Harmonia in 1976, I had a tape recording of maybe our best live appearance from 1974 in my archives. We all agreed that this was a very special document and so the tape was left untouched. Already for quite some time I had the idea to transform the recording to digital media to prevent it from being damaged by decay. But somehow always some project was more urgent until autumn 2006. When I then finally concentrated on the tape I was so happy to find it in an absolute perfect condition and when my memory of that concert being special was confirmed I proposed to my colleagues Roedelius and Moebius that we should release it as a document of the way Harmonia sounded like on stage in 1974. They agreed and so I approached Gronland (the NEU! label) and Water Records from San Francisco. Both labels were very enthusiastic and wanted to release the album which we simply called "Live 1974" and when the reviews, especially in UK, were so overwhelmingly positive Gronland asked us whether we could do some live appearances. I was quite surprised by all this because I never expected our music to receive so much attention, but there we were. Harmonia met in Forst and we decided to give it a try even though all three of us were really busy with our own projects. I enjoyed my preparations for the concert and got a lot of inspiration combining old and new elements. We made our first Harmonia live appearance since 1976 in Berlin in November last year when we played at the Worldtronics Festival. The reception by the crowd was amazing. More offers for concerts came in and so this year we played at several festivals like Ether in London, Supersonic in Birmingham, ATP at Camber Sands (all in UK), and Numusic in Norway before coming to the USA for the first time ever to appear at ATP New York.

Your mid-70's work with Harmonia and Neu! has influenced many prominent, respected artists today. Brian Eno, back in the 70's, called Harmonia the "world's most important rock group." When you were creating new music back then did you realize you were on the cutting edge? Did you know you were up to something special?

When I started creating my own music in the early 70s I never gave any thought to the possibility of historic dimensions. I simply took step by step and the idea behind everything was to be unique. It was my desire to create a new music that was my own and not a copy of some other artist's ideas. Of course it was quite an ambitious approach and many people hated us for what we were doing back then. You had to accept that rejection although it was really hard for Harmonia in those days. Money was very short. Anyway, there was no other option and it wouldn´t have made sense for me to be a musician if I hadn´t gone that way. Kraftwerk and NEU! had quite some commercial success but Harmonia was neglected completely. The project was a commercial disaster. We knew from Brian Eno that he and David Bowie were fans of our music. Brian once sat in the first row of a Harmonia concert in Hamburg in 1974. He joined us on stage for a jam and we invited him to visit us in Forst. This led to the project "Harmonia 76" and the album "Tracks & Traces." It seems our music of the 70s is more popular these days than it has ever been.

You and your Neu! counterpart Klaus Dinger were on the first Kraftwerk album. Why did you quit the band? Did you like the musical directions that they eventually went on to?

I met and joined Kraftwerk in early 1971 shortly after they had released the first album. Hutter left the band and Schneider wanted to do concerts because the album was quite a big success. The three of us (Schneider, Dinger and myself) toured in Germany for several months, did two TV appearances (which have both been released legally on DVD in recent years) and we met Conny Plank to record the second Kraftwerk album in that line up. Our live concept was very rough and primitive. We did abstract, improvisational versions of some of the songs on the first album but in a more radical way. On good nights this led to exciting music, on less good nights to crazy fightings and frustration on stage. We didn´t succeed in transferring this excitement onto tape in the sterile atmosphere of the studio and so we quit halfway through. It was clear to us that we wouldn't continue working together after this experience. Klaus Dinger and I both felt we had more in common in our vision of the music we wanted to create so we started the project NEU!. You can hear the different directions of our music if you compare the first NEU! album with the second Kraftwerk album. Both were recorded in the second half of 1971. Kraftwerk was heading towards a gentle, living-room style music (Kling-Klang) while NEU! explored a different horizon with more rhythmical and sometimes darker soundscapes, from Hallogallo to Negativland.

You and Klaus were major contributors to what is referred to as Krautrock. Writer and musician Julian Cope wrote a book called "Krautrocksampler." In it he says that Krautrock is a "subjective British phenomenon." His conjecture is that the term is based on the way the music was received in the UK rather than the actual West German music scene that is grew out of. People like Jonathan Peel were responsible for getting "Krautrock" out there in the UK at the time. Do you feel that the music that had sprung out of that West German scene has been misinterpreted in any way? Did giving your music and the music of bands like CAN and Faust a generic label take away from what you were trying to do? What was the scene really all about? What was it like playing this kind of free form music in 1970's West Germany?

Julian Cope did a great job in promoting our music in the 90s, at a time when nobody paid us any attention in Germany. Unfortunately, his book contains many errors. When Julian and I finally met last year he apologized for the factual errors, rightly pointing out that he wrote his book as a fan and didn't have much chance to check facts back then, in a time before the Internet arrived providing possibilities for research. I never felt close to other German bands and musicians apart from those few musicians with whom I collaborated in the 70s (of the Kraftwerk, Harmonia, NEU!, Can camp) and I never listened to other German bands. It may sound big-headed but a sort of reclusion was necessary for me to be able to concentrate on creating my own music. This wasn´t even a big sacrifice because I was quite happy. It was my intention to be as unique as possible and this by definition excludes being in a box with others. These days I´ve more or less accepted the fact that people call Harmonia´s and NEU!´s music "krautrock." I just hope they are aware of the differences between my projects and the other bands in that box.

There was also a music scene that was somewhat similiar in the mid 70's going on in East Germany. Was there ever any way of communicating with musicians on that side of the wall? Did you ever play there?

The wall between East and West Germany nearly totally kept the people apart and isolated the eastern part from the western world. There was a music scene in East Germany which was completely unknown to me and I only knew that fans paid enormous sums for our albums which were smuggled into their country. I pitied the people and hated the suppression by the communist state which was documented for the Western citizens by the situation at the border on the way to West-Berlin. It was the time of the Cold War, with paranoid fear on both sides. The eastern soldiers at the border tried their best to make your life hard. They behaved like Nazis and their rude behavior made me furious. It was a crazy and unhappy situation. I never visited Eastern Germany and I was filled with joy for the people when the wall came down in ´89.

Who are your musical influences?

If you go back to childhood days my first influences were the European composers of classical music of the 18th and 19th century. My mother was a classically trained piano player and her favorite composer was Chopin. She played piano at home and the classical European music certainly was the first of different layers in my musical education. When my family lived in Pakistan in the early 60s I came in touch with Arabian and Indian music and this had a great impact on my feelings too. I was 12 when we left Pakistan and I still feel a strong connection to that music. When we moved back to Germany in 1963 it was the time of the beat and pop bands from England. I listened to all of that music and started to learn to play guitar by imitating my heroes. I loved the Beatles, Kinks, later Cream (Eric Clapton) and then Jimi Hendrix. I did my best to copy their technique and to gradually do new interpretations but at a certain point I understood that this wasn't my music at all and I had to find a completely new start. This meant going back to zero and this was the situation around 1970… when I stumbled into Kraftwerk.

What newer bands do you like listening to?

I do not listen to music that much. If I do put on music it comes from very different fields, depending mostly on mood and situation. It can be classical or ethnic music, electronic experimental or rock music. (Just now Jehudi Menuhin is in the player, maybe Little Richard later) Mostly I discover music by chance, not by really searching for it. Recently I've been listening to the first album of School of Seven Bells (Alpinisms) which is amazing. My friend Benjamin Curtis and his partners Alejandra and Claudia Deheza have made a wonderful record.

What are your current musical plans? Future plans?

Harmonia has kept me really busy in the past year or so, partly because most of the work in the project was done by myself but I´m not complaining, the rewards are great. I enjoy playing live in countries where Harmonia has never been – which is actually nearly the whole world. In January 2009 we will come to Australia for the first time ever and join the ATP Australia tour. That edition of ATP is curated by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and I´m looking forward to the experience. In the coming weeks I´m back in the studio and will develop some new ideas, both musically and technically. Apart from the Harmonia project in the next months/year I look forward to doing more collaborations with my musical friends in the US and Germany and to record a new solo album.

I was truly sorry to hear about the passing of Klaus Dinger earlier this year. Is there something that you can say about his influence and impression on the world of music?

Klaus Dinger will always be part of my thinking about music. Our collaboration and his inspirations have forever left a mark on my music. I learned a lot from Klaus. It remains true that we didn´t get along outside the studio because of our completely different personalities but most people fully understand that it was exactly this discrepancy which – together with the great contributions of our co-producer Conny Plank – made NEU! so special. Klaus was a big challenge for me, he was full of energy, ambition and desire to be acknowledged as the unique artist he indeed was. Many musicians and artists make no secret of the fact that they feel influenced by Klaus Dinger, of how much respect and admiration they feel for his work, but unfortunately Klaus was never satisfied with the recognition and attention he received. He always wanted more. This and his general distrust of people (and my rejection of his sometimes egomaniacal demands) prevented some good things from happening, i.e. a new NEU! album which we had been talking about since 2001. I didn´t know that he was ill and was surprised by his death. His spirit and music will be around for a while, I´m sure, and will continue to inspire listeners and musicians in the future.

By Brandon Ginsburg.
October 10, 2008