Neu!:"Neu! 75" (1975)

After a three-year break, Neu! members Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother buried their differences temporarily, and reunited for another go at the "motorik" sound they had developed with their debut in 1971. The strange tension and presentation of Neu! 2 and the emergence of their former band Kraftwerk may have precipitated the reunion, but, whatever the reason, the end result proved worth the time, effort, and bickering it took to crank this one out. One thing that is noticeably different on 75 is the presence of synthesizers and the preference of them, it seems, over Rother's guitar. "Isi," which opens the album, features Dinger's metronymic percussion holding down the 2/4 rhythm and a trademark one-note bassline provided by a piano, but the gorgeous sonic washes and flourishes normally handled by Rother's guitar-slinging hands are now painted with a synth. "Seeland" offers a return to the six strings with what would in subsequent years become Rother's ornate "singing" style of playing. Dinger's rhythmic patterns here are deceptively simple. They create a long, trudging 4/4, syncopated every other line, and punctuated by a small ride cymbal at the end of each phrase as Rother's guitar provides both cascading single string notes and a shifting, pulsing bassline. It's a beautiful wasteland, this track; sparse yet full of melodic interplay and layered guitars and keyboards. The last track on side one is "Leb Wohl," an exercise in white noise, industrial textures, and natural or, "found" sounds, a piano and gorgeous, spare and intricate guitar chords. For side two, Neu! adds Dinger's brother, Thomas, and Hans Lampe on various percussions to allow Dinger to play guitar, piano, and organ, and to add some bottom end to the band's sound. The funny thing is they come off sounding more like a melodic punk band on "Hero," with Dinger's growling vocals being reminiscent of a young Mick Jagger on steroids. His Keith Richards-style chords stand in stark contrast to Rother's more lyrical approach. Perhaps this isn't such a surprise when we consider the Damned's first album was recorded in 1975. The ten-minute "E-Musick" becomes Neu!'s signature track for this disc, however. With distorted percussion -- courtesy of a synth and sequencer, as well as a drum kit put through a phase shifter, Rother's melodic synth lines are free to roam, wide and far, carrying within them a foreshadowing of his guitar solos a few minutes later. These long screaming lines, reminiscent of Steve Hillage at his best, with Dinger's wonderful rhythm backing and treatments of the instruments, provides a definitive statement on the Neu! "motorik" sound. This is music not only for traveling, from one place to the next, but also for disappearance into the ether at a steady pace. This may have been Neu!'s final statement -- at least in the studio; Dinger issued (without Rother's permission) an inferior live '72 album -- but at least they went out on a much higher note than Neu! 2, and in a place where their innovations are still being not only recognized, but utilized.

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CULT RECORD: CAN: " TAGO MAGO " (1971)

In creating a unique sound-world of wanderlust and wonderment, Can is up there with Hendrix and Miles Davis. Each phase of Can's meandering career has opened up vast vistas of fertile terrain for subsequent bands to colonize and cultivate: avant-funk( Talking Heads, PiL, Cabaret Voltaire), trance-rock (Loop, f/i, Cul de Sac), lo-fi (Pavement, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282) and post-rock (Bark Psychosis, Laika). Can also uncannily anticipated many moves made by entire genres of contemporary "sampladelic" music, such as ethno-techno, jungle, and ambient hip hop. Basically, when it comes to psychedelic, dance music, those crafty Krauts wrote the goddamn book.
Can's core members-- bassist Holger Czukay, keyboardist Irmin Schmidt, drummer Jaki Liebezeit and guitarist Michael Karoli-- came from avant-garde and improv-jazz backgrounds; Czukay and Schmidt had both studied with Stockhausen. But instead of exploring aleatory noise or jerky time signatures, Can discovered-- through the Velvet Underground, and later via James Brown-- the Zen power of repetition and restriction. Minimalism and mantra-ism were hallmarks of the Krautrock aesthetic, but what set Can apart from its peers was a fervent embrace of groove. Like Miles Davis's early-'70s albums ( On The Corner, Dark Magus, etc.), Can's best work fuses "black" funk with "white" neo-psych freakitude. Recording in its own studio in a Cologne castle, the band adopted a jam-and-chop methodology similar to that used by Davis and his producer Teo Macero: improvise for hours, then edit the best bits into coherent tracks. As then band's Macero figure, Czukay worked miracles with a handful of mikes and two-track recording. Can's proto-ambient spatiality actually diminished when they went to 16-track in the mid '70s.
Named after a sorcerer, Tago Mago contains Can's most disorienting, shamanistic work. Torn between two impulses-- James Brownian motion and post-Floyd chromatic flux-- the double album spans the polyrhythmic roil of "Mushroom" and "Oh Yeah,"Aumgn'"s dub-reverberant catacombs, and the fractal sound-daubings and scat-gibberish of "Peking O"-- a meisterwerk.

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