Say what you will about the insistent intertwining of experimental musicians behind the 1960s and ’70s krautrock movement, but no one spun their way through its web of motorik rhythm, bad-dream electronics, and scrawling guitars like multi-instrumentalist/composer/producer Michael Rother. Whether working as part of the earliest incarnation of Kraftwerk, forming NEU!, co-creating Harmonia, collaborating with uber-producer Conny Plank, teaming with members of Can and Cluster, or launching an electrifying solo career that continues into the present, Rother is the loudly buzzing throughline that binds krautrock’s tentacles, and continues to surpass the genre’s innovations with his own raw, rousingly hypnotic invention.
Only right now—readying himself for two nights at LA’s Intuition Festival at The Broad and its In Defense of Nature exhibition dedicated to environmental activist and artist Joseph Beuys—the ever-inventive Rother has a bad cold. “Excuse me if my brain isn’t as bright as it might be normally,” says a youthful-looking 74-year-old Rother from his wooded studio space during our Zoom interview before launching into a history lesson on how he made (then unmade) experimental Germanika in his own image amid an early adulthood spent looking for “a more peaceful creative environment.”
Willingly going back to his childhood with a classical pianist mother and their travels from Munich to Karachi to London, Rother says that much of his worldview was developed by his studies in psychology, his love of nature, and his yen for testing the boundaries of music. “I don’t think I was the typical German boy,” he says, thinking back to early student mentorships that required him to feed animals around the classroom and learn various languages. “I think all of that figured into how I saw music, and fell into a love affair with hypnotic melody and rhythm—sonic structures that I had no idea where they were going.”
It’s not impossible to believe that the more naturalistic ambience of atmospheric electronics and guitar behind early Rother solo albums such as 1979’s chilly Katzenmusik and the warmer, rounder Fernwärme three years later were inspired by his bucolic surroundings as a kid. Mentioning his arrival in the cosmopolitan city of Dusseldorf in time for the British Explosion and Germany’s youthquake of “everybody joining bands,” Rother bought his first guitar (one cheap enough “to make a plink-plonk sound”), discovered Cream and Jeff Beck, and never looked back. For all of his love of “guitar heroes,” nothing in his own work displays the wonk of his first six-string affection. “I wasn’t a second Jimi Hendrix, and needed to find my own identity.”
He found a hint of direction in “Yoo Doo Right,” the 20-plus-minute composition that filled side two of Can’s first album, Monster Movie, and its naggingly hypnotic pulse driven by Jaki Liebezeit, a drummer who’d eventually play on Rother’s first four solo albums starting in 1976. “I shied away from listening to other music after that, and there was an element of fate to where I was going, too, at the time,” he says, referring to his refusal of military service in his late teens. “I was a pacifist at a time when military service was required,” he adds, considering how, at the time, his early musical work was influenced by the Cold War tensions around him and the constant threat of immediate conflict.
Around this time, Rother came into contact with percussionist Wolfgang Flür, drummer Klaus Dinger, and Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider when the latter duo sought session players for a film score recording session. “I thought Kraftwerk was a funny name,” he laughs. “I wasn’t impressed at first, but it wound up as a magical moment in my life. It was the first time that I felt connection to other musicians, like-minded people with a similar aesthetic and ideas about melody and harmony. No discussion was necessary—we just threw around musical fragments. And I can remember Florian asking me if I would join his band.” It’s fuzzy as to what did and didn’t happen between Rother and Kraftwerk without turning a conversation about the former into a treatise on the latter. “Needless to say, this is not part of the official Kraftwerk biography, as they don’t even acknowledge their first three albums before Autobahn—which is a shame, as they contain some really beautiful music.”
“I was always conscious of never getting trapped by cliché, by maintaining a high bar for adventure.”
Kraftwerk’s loss, however, was wild experimental music’s gain as Rother and “the most powerful drummer ever” in Dinger went on to form the rapturously atmospheric and repetitiously pulsating NEU! for three eponymous albums starting in 1972. “It was as if Klaus was running through a wall without stopping,” says Rother of Dinger’s rhythmic force and steady propulsion. “He beat the life out of the drums and pushed NEU! into new directions. I didn’t know music like that was possible—so primitive.” Reduced as everything was to minimal structuralism and naïve barbarism, the rawness of NEU! was but one more aspect of the naturalism that Rother loved going back to his days feeding animals outside of school. And yet, there isn’t the scent of patchouli-hippie organicism about NEU!, either, which is how we get into the modernist heft of that band and the whole of the krautrock movement—and even into Rother’s most recent solo albums such as 2020’s Dreaming.
Hypnosis, economy, beauty, and primitivism have forever driven Rother’s sound. “I think there’s a red line through all of my work starting with NEU!’s ‘Hallo Gallo’ and up through Dreaming, and even the work I’m doing now,” he says. “Technology has changed. I don’t know how much I, as a person, have changed. But I was always conscious of never getting trapped by cliché, by maintaining a high bar for adventure. The ambitious truth was that I was constantly trying to create music with personality that wasn’t a copy of other musicians—never just, ‘Oh, let’s have fun.’” Thinking of “Hallo Gallo” and staying on “one track, one note” with “little melodies” around it, Rother’s aesthetic was developed as a “straight line through to the horizon” with “skies changing overhead” and “melody clouds appearing and disappearing.”
From here, Rother moves seamlessly into Harmonia—his mid-’70s magnetic union with Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius—and their not-so-mannered melding of nascent electronic rhythms together with spaced-out explorations reminiscent of the duo's work as Cluster. Joining forces around the same time that NEU! was beginning to splinter, the new trio’s two albums, Musik von Harmonia and Deluxe, spin Rother’s primitive sounds into something more layered, mysterious, and riveting. “I was cheeky enough to risk using great harmony changes,” says Rother. “That was all my struggle then, nothing that I discussed or put on Klaus. The drone, the tension—I wanted to build these things up now.” Rother also reveals that he originally turned to the Cluster guys not for collaboration, but rather as a backing band for NEU!’s live shows. “We could never do the things we did on NEU! albums on stage—too much. I had an immediate love affair with Roedelius and his playing. We even wound up living together at the same kitchen table.”
As he discusses the brief line that leads NEU! into Harmonia, then blurs into his first solo album, 1977’s Flammende Herzen, Rother says his feeling for melody never changed—it just wrapped itself in varying degrees of freshly layered atmospheres, instrumentation, and pulsating rhythm with help from one producer who provided the glue that stuck together the whole of German music from 1970 through to the 1990s. “The only other person I knew who was as ambitious as I was about new sound and new structures was Conny Plank,” he says, referring to the one-time soundman for Marlene Dietrich turned producer and studio owner who made history with Can, Cluster, NEU!, Kraftwerk, Harmonia, Ash Ra Temple, and Rother before turning his attention toward D.A.F. and Ultravox during the new wave era. “With Conny, it was win-win, never pushing him to experiment, as he was always all in—always with careful thinking, basic structures, and creativity as opposed to studio tricks or flicking switches.”
“Without seeming complacent, I’m not making new music every day or burning the bridges to the past. I’m just trying to make beautiful melodies my way.”
There’s an openness to Rother’s work—from his glossy, Fairlight-driven Lust solo album of 1980 to his mossy Remember (The Great Adventure) record of 2004—that speaks to the beauty of his home environment with its nearby body of water (Rother collaborator Brian Eno wrote “By This River” in dedication to Michael’s home) that also leads us into the discussion of German social sculptor, visual artist, and environmental activist Joseph Beuys clinging to the justice of nature in works such as 1981’s Rhine Water Polluted, which will be exhibited at The Broad. “Beuys was a big deal in Dusseldorf in the 1960s—he held exhibitions there and made himself an even bigger deal as a member of the Green Party, and the whole Lennon-Ono ‘Give Peace a Chance’ thing,” recalls Rother. “To be honest, I thought he was radical, but my ideas, too, were radical. Maybe that’s was connected us. I was a conscientious objector dedicated to peace, so I understand what drove Beuys—especially now, in consideration of all that’s going on with Ukraine and these lunatics Putin and Trump.”
Rother’s music for Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature will find the musician and his ensemble “creating an engaging live experience that resonates with audiences,” as well as with its composer, in its mix of tracks from NEU!, Harmonia, and his solo albums, “along with some slow, beautiful newer songs.” “I think I’ll react to the situation and change the set list if the audiences wish me to,” Rother says politely. “Without seeming complacent, I’m not making new music every day or burning the bridges to the past. I’m just trying to make beautiful melodies my way. I still feel very close to the elements that I loved from the early 1970s. Everything I do now, and did then, is connected. Maybe [Beuys] left a mark on me, but so did Little Richard, a gay Black man being mistreated for who he was in the South singing rock and roll in the 1950s and 60s. He was up like a rocket—bang. And that, too, is connected.” FL
