MICHAEL ROTHER & FRIENDS CELEBRATE NEU! AT MONA FOMA, 25/2/2024

Michael Rother performs this celebration of Neu! with Hans Lampe, Franz Bargmann, and Vittoria Maccabruni. Lampe is the only other original member being one of two drummers on Neu! ’75, the krautrock group’s final official release. Bargmann is rhythm guitarist to Rother’s lead, and Maccabruni joins in the second half of the set to contribute keyboards and vocals. The late Klaus Dinger, Rother’s original Neu partner and inventor of the duo’s influential motorik beat, is present in image; his hawkish features float in granular spectrality from photos projected behind the band. The setlist is taken from the original trilogy of Neu releases – Neu!, Neu! ‘2 and Neu! ’75 – Deluxe, the second of the two albums released by Harmonia (Rother’s short-lived mid-70s supergroup with Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius of Cluster) and Rother’s solo discography.

The songs performed tonight are adequate demonstrations of Rother’s melodic gifts, proceeding in a sedate electro-glide comparable to Neu! disciples Stereolab. It’s a polite invocation of the duo’s legendary sound, lacking the anarchic energy that Dinger brought to the table. Rother's solo work, it must be said, ranges from the sublime to the soporific. It’s tempting to imagine what this concert would be like if Dinger had not died in 2008 and joined the guitarist on stage. Perhaps a fractious, chaotic affair given Dinger’s notoriously disputatious nature or maybe that magnificent fusion of disparate aesthetics that drew them together in the first place. There’s a Beat Club television performance from 1971 on YouTube of Rother and Dinger performing ‘Rückstoss Gondoliere’ with Florian Schneider in an early version of Kraftwerk. It’s a good encapsulation of the magic they could generate together in the studio but rarely in a live environment.

Like Can and Kraftwerk, Neu! took inspiration from minimalism to reinvent rock, stripping it back to raw fundamentals and reimagining the genre through their own counterculturally galvanized Germanic sensibilities. The set opens with ‘Neuschnee’ from Neu!’s second album, it’s air of emergent glory summoning 1973’s abundant musical possibilities. ‘Isi’ from Neu! 75 brings another blast of the decade’s ripe preconditions of promise. Then two unknown pieces featuring lots of strange and swirling sounds that speak to the influence of Rother’s Harmonia companion Dieter Moebius. Crucial to these pieces is that other predominant feature of the Neu! sound in addition to Dinger’s Apache or endlos gerade beat (his preferred terminology to motorik): Rother’s distinctive fuzz-laden, sustained tone that can suggest Robert Fripp at his most minimal. Given this stylistic similarity it’s easy to understand how when Rother wasn’t available, David Bowie and Brian Eno went with Fripp to provide the soaring guitar on ‘Heroes’. Even when they weren’t present at the creation, Neu!’s aesthetic example was crucial to some of the seventies essential musical landmarks.

A solo work (circa Sterntaler?) is followed by a version of ‘Deluxe (Immer Wieder)’ from Harmonia’s 1975 album Deluxe that's missing the original’s charmingly off-key male chorus. Surely Rother could have convinced Lampe and Bargmann to fill in for Roedelius and Moebius; they couldn’t be worse singers. Then ‘Sonderangebot’ (mostly sampled wholesale from the proto-industrial cymbal experiment on the original recording) leading into the stately ‘Weissensee’ from Neu!’s self-titled debut album. A version of ‘Hallogallo’, the resplendent opening statement from Neu! incorporates some guitar elements out of its companion piece ‘Für Immer’ from Neu! 2 and is followed by ‘Negativland’, its emotionally inverse counter statement from side two of the debut. This features the vocal contributions of Maccabruni, her monotonal darkwave dramaticism summoning post-punk offshoots inspired by Neu!’s edgy austerity. The next two indistinguishable pieces again borrow heavily from the ‘Hallogallo’ motorik template. The set finishes with a shortened ‘E-Musik’ from Neu ’75, Lampe faithfully reproducing the distinctive snare pattern that Stephen Morris lifted for Joy Division’s ‘Transmission’.

Rather than the endless highway commonly invoked as a visual and spatial trope for motorik propulsion, these ears detect a shape closer to the Möbius strip: a form that gathers equal amounts of returning feedback from the information it unspools forward. The mood mechanics of this form are deeply ambiguous in contrast with the liberatory, future-progressive paradigm of the road. The sensation of freedom is relevant to the backwards guitar motifs of 'Hallogallo', the skyblown exultation, but not so much to the historical/present reverberations of 'Negativland', the oppressive sense of eternal return. Möbius moves continuously forward, but always in a loop. It’s a waveform genius producer Conny Plank gives both metaphorical and literal sonic shape in the blissful dissolution of ‘Für Immer’: an interweaving of seaside field recording with extreme EQ/compression manipulation of the duo’s performance; swirling backwards and forwards and finally breaking down into foam before the listener’s ears. Such effects are no doubt impossible to recreate onstage, and it’s churlish to expect exact recreations of productions made decades ago. What’s more importantly missing is the schizoid duality – the contrasting characters of its creators finding musical expression in the blending of spiky future rock and atmospheric, proto-ambient drift – that made the canonical trilogy of Neu! albums such thrilling propositions when first released, and no doubt so inspirational for the curious and forward hearing natures of the teenaged John Lydon, Mark E. Smith and Ian Curtis. It was/is a sound capable of reflecting both the promise and the conflict contained in the now, captured with eternal power on record thanks to a producer who was essentially a third member. Rother and friends give us a show that’s certainly serviceable as entertainment and tribute – and this Tasmanian audience signals its appreciation warmly throughout – but, with all rough edges smoothed out and the motorik fully bedded in like a stress-tested travelator, there’s too much of one side of the group’s unique equation for it to deliver total satisfaction.