My favorite of the so-called German “krautrock” groups from the 1970s has always been NEU!. The band was formed by Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger after they left an early version of Kraftwerk, and Rother’s magical, rhythmic guitar work is a big part of their appeal. During the mid ‘70s, he hooked up with the members of Cluster to form Harmonia, another exceptional ‘70s German outfit; Brian Eno was a big Harmonia fan, and ended up collaborating with them for a period. In 1977, Michael Rother’s debut solo album, Flammende Herzen, was released. The record’s atmospheric music is like a soundtrack for a film that didn’t exist—yet. The following year, a movie, inspired by and including music from the album, appeared in West German theaters.
 

 
Michael Rother’s first four solo records, Flammende Herzen, Sterntaler (1978), Katzenmusik (1979), and Fernwärme (1982)—all solid efforts—will be included on his forthcoming box set, Solo. The collection also includes a disc of previously unreleased film scores by Rother, entitled Soundtracks, plus an LP, only available with the vinyl edition of the box, Remixes & Live.
 

A ‘Katzenmusik’ era image.

The scores on Soundtracks were composed for the films Houston (2013) and The Robbers (2015). Dangerous Minds is happy to have for you the premiere of our favorite piece from The Robbers.
 

 
We asked Michael a few questions via email.

How did you get involved with The Robbers project?:

Michael Rother: In 2013, I was approached by an agent working for the film company that produced The Robbers. They asked me whether I would be interested in contributing a score to the film. I don´t know why the company decided to reach out to me but I was definitely interested. Just a few months earlier I attended the Sundance Film Festival where the film Houston was premiered, for which I had created the score a year before. The world of film has always inspired me. One of the two directors of The Robbers, Pol Cruchten, sent me a rough cut. I liked the drama and so I felt thrilled by the challenge of creating music for The Robbers.

How did you go about composing the score?:

Michael Rother: Reflecting on the film as a whole and on specific scenes, some music sketches/memos in my archives came to my mind, and I thought they would work well with the atmosphere of the story. I chose a selection of basic ideas for four different scenes and presented my ideas to the director and his editor who came to visit me in Hamburg. They were happy with my general approach to the film, and things moved forward very quickly. I then spent about 6 months working on the score, adding new recordings and shaping the themes for the individual scenes. It was an inspiring process right until the final stage when I joined the director and his team in Brussels for the audio mixing sessions.

For the LP Soundtracks, which is included in my new box set Solo, I enjoyed reworking the main themes of the score to The Robbers extensively so that they made musical sense on their own and when disconnected from the visuals/story of the film.
 

 
What’s next for you?:

Michael Rother: At my concert at Under the Bridge in London on 05 April 2019, I will perform my complete second solo album Sterntaler live for the very first time ever. Transferring the individual tracks from my 24-track recording machine to the computer a few weeks ago, I was yet once again overwhelmed by the amazing work Conny Plank contributed mixing the album and by Jaki Liebezeit´s incredible drumming. 


                                                                *****

Solo will be released on February 22nd by Groenland Records. Pre-order the box via Groenland’s site, or get it on Amazon (the LP version is here, and the CD set is here).
 

Michael Rother, 1976.
 

Kraftwerk days, c. 1971.
 

NEU!, 1972.
 

Harmonia with Brian Eno, 1976.

We’ll leave you with video of Michael Rother’s 2015 appearance at artFREQ in Copenhagen. For this performance, he was joined by Hans Lampe, who played drums on NEU ‘75, and Franz Bargmann.

Fantastic audio quality on this one.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Krautrock legend Michael Rother talks about the new Harmonia box set, plus exclusive footage!

 
Anyone who is looking to celebrate Halloween but insists on being totally “Kosmisch” (cosmic) about it, there’s a curious release that you’ve got to hear about. Holger Czukay of Can and Conny Plank, a respected Krautrock producer who also played frequently with Cluster‘s Dieter Moebius, teamed up in 1980 for a bizarre (and awesome) one-off project called Les Vampyrettes. Why they chose a French name is beyond me but it might have to do with Louis Feuillade’s silent Les vampires serials? 

In any case, Les Vampyrettes are totally krautrock’s salute to the spooky, scary creepy-crawlies commonly associated with Hallow’s Eve. They even put a cute little image of a bat on the cover of the maxi-single, for Can’s sake.
 

Holger Czukay and Conny Plank, 1983
 
The opening lyrics to “Biomutanten”—probably don’t have to tell you what that word means—are creepy in a fun Halloween-y way. “Pass auf wo du stehst, pass auf wo du gehst, am tag und in der nacht, überall wirst du bewacht….” means “Watch out where you stand, watch out where you go, in the day and in the night, you are being watched everywhere….” The other song is called “Menetekel” and some will recognize that as a reference to the Belshazzar’s Feast episode from the Old Testament, in which Daniel literally reads the words “Mene, Mene, Tekel, and Parsin” on the wall, the origin for the saying “the writing on the wall.” What I didn’t know until today is that Menetekel is a German word that actually means “early warning” or “foreboding.”

Continues after the jump…

 
“Mother Sky” from Can’s Soundtracks album was used to great effect in Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End (AKA “La Ragazza Del Bagno Pubblico”) the tale of a teenage stalker obsessed with a beautiful young woman (model Jane Asher, Paul McCartney’s pre-Linda 60s girlfriend) who is his coworker at a pool and bathhouse. 
 

 
Deep End was thought to be “lost” but a new film print was released in British cinemas in 2011, with a deluxe BFI produced Blu-ray DVD coming soon after. You can occasionally catch it on Turner Classic Movies. In a 1982 interview with Kristine McKenna for the NME, director David Lynch described Deep End as the only film he ever liked that was shot in color.

Below, the frantic “Mother Sky” as the number was used in the film:
 

 
Blistering live version of “Mother Sky” on German television after the jump…

 
Seemingly searching for a new musical identity, Can—Irmin Schmidt, Jaki Liebezeit, Michael Karoli, Holger Czukay—performed their jaunty, jittery disco-fied “I Want More”—their only hit single in the UK, it got to #26—on Top of the Pops in 1976.

Smarmy TOTP presenter Noel Edmonds makes a terrible pun when he introduces them: “I wonder if Can will get into the top tin!” Ouch.

Then afterwards he “jokes”:

“We wanted to have them on at the beginning of the show, but then realized we couldn’t have a Can opener.”

Har har har. It’s tempting to put this into the same category as the Rolling Stones’ “Hot Stuff” from the same year. It’s brilliant and embarrassingly catchy, defying you not to dance, a testament to the talents of one of the greatest drummers who ever lived, Jaki Liebezeit.

“I Want More” is the opening number from their Flow Motion album.
 

 
In 2004 Scott Stuckey, of the Stuckey restaurant family, started a cable access show in the Washington, DC, area to answer the question, “What would Sesame Street look like if most of the guests were indie rockers?” The show is called Pancake Mountain. This year the Sesame Street connection became stronger when it was announced that PBS would start licensing new episodes of the show.

In this clip, Shirley Manson of 1990s Wisconsin rock heroes Garbage appears in a segment called “Around the World with Shirley Manson” in which she explains the German music scene to an obstreperous canine puppet. Wearing a rather fetching flight attendant-style getup, Manson does a more than creditable job of presenting the breadth of German music, from the masterpieces of Beethoven and Bach to Volkslieder (which means folk songs; here it’s yodeling) to the groundbreaking 20th-century music of Can, Neu!, Kraftwerk, and well, Scorpions.
 

 
This was evidently supposed to be a series—Manson filmed five of the segments—but Stuckey and producer J.J. Abrams canceled the show in 2011 before they could be aired. However, as already mentioned, PBS has agreed to license some new episodes. The Germany segment is the only one of Manson’s “Around the World” series to trickle out to the public as yet. You can get Pancake Mountain DVDs on Amazon; on Disc 1 you can see bands like Thievery Corporation, Steel Pulse, Vic Chesnutt, and The Evens. Disc 2 seems decidedly more promising, featuring Arcade Fire, Henry Rollins, The Fiery Furnaces, George Clinton, and the Scissor Sisters. A few months ago my estimable colleague Ron Kretsch posted some marvelous footage of David Yow of the Jesus Lizard on Pancake Mountain discoursing on the culinary arts.
 
The video of the skit is “autostart” which means we can’t embed it here, but you can see it on this page. Here’s an associated clip in which Manson sings an original song in a kind of groovy go-go style that covers much of the same material as the skit with the puppet.
 

 
A krautrock mix prepared by Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd of Flaming Lips. Their Electric Würms side project Musik, Die Schwer Zu Twerk (“Music that’s Hard to Twerk to”) comes out on CD, vinyl and iTunes via Warner Bros. Records tomorrow, August 19th.

“Krautrock” - Faust
“Mushroom Head” - Can
“After Eight” - NEU!
“Aquirre” - Popul Vuh
“Spoon” - Can
“Zum Wohl” - Cluster
“I’m Goin’ Mad” - Scorpions
“Dino” - Harmonia
“Neon Lights” - Kraftwerk
“Jennifer” - Faust

Electric Würms will be playing in the UK at the End Of The Road festival in Dorset on August 31 followed by a headlining show at the Village Underground in London on September 1.
 

 
“Deadly Doris,” a tantalizing taste from the forthcoming Can box set from Spoon Records and Mute:

The Lost Tapes is a 3 CD set of unreleased tracks, they are an opportunity to hear unreleased material, brand new tracks as if you were there, from the halcyon days, not outtakes.

The tracks cover the period from 1968 through to 1977 and were compiled by Irmin Schmidt and Daniel Miller.

The album features studio material recorded at Schloss Nörvenich and Can Studio, Weilerswist with the Can line up of Holger Czukay on bass, Michael Karoli on guitars, Jaki Liebezeit on drums and Irmin Schmidt on keyboards, and on most tracks, vocals from Malcolm Mooney or Damo Suzuki.

Irmin Schmidt explains “Obviously the tapes weren’t really lost, but were left in the cupboards of the studio archives for so long everybody just forgot about them. Everybody except Hildegard, who watches over Can and its work like the dragon over the gold of the Nibelungen and doesn’t allow forgetting.”

The album will be released in a numbered limited edition 3CD 10” old style tape box with a 28 page booklet on June 18th in Europe and June 19th in America.

“Deadly Doris”:
 

 
Here’s a second taster from The Lost Tapes, an edited version of the set’s opening number, “Millionenspiel”:
 

 
Thanks, Ken Frey!

 
Rüdiger Nüchtern’s short film Amon Düül II Spielt Phallus Dei dates from 1968 and is a single camera documentation of the Krautrock legends performing the title track from their soon to be released first album. This is the earliest known footage of the band, who perform in a studio in Munich against a wall with psychedelic projections, with shots of a sunrise, sunset, clouds, trees and the German countryside added in.

The personnel here are Christian ‘Shrat’ Thiele (bongos, vocals) Peter Leopold (drums), Dieter Serfas (drums), John Weinzierl (guitar), Falk Rogner (organ), Chris Karrer (violin, guitar) Renate Knaup (vocals) and Dave Anderson (bass).

Although the film, which apparently was shown at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1972, is in crappy condition, it’s worth watching (once) if you’re a fan of the band.
 

 
British garage act The Horrors are set to release their new album Skying through XL Recordings on August the 9th (US) and July 11th (UK), but you can hear the album, in full, via the widget below. In fact, it’s not really fair to describe the Horrors as “garage rock” anymore - that may have been their initial template when they burst onto the scene five years ago, but their sound has evolved and mutated quite a bit since then.

I admit I was put off the band when they first started getting press attention, consigning them to the hype bin based on their highly coiffured hair and dandy dress sense. But all that changed as soon as I actually heard them - here was a band that was keeping alive the swamp rock / dirt blues flame of acts like The Birthday Party and the awesome Gallon Drunk. Their second album Primary Colours, produced by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, marked a shift in tone towards something deeper and a bit more pastoral, while retaining the all important dirt and grit. With nods to krautrock, kosmiche and shoegaze, it won the band some high praise, even becoming the NME’s album of the year for 2009.

Skying continues where Primary Colours left off, though taking us further away from the 70s and 80s influences. The ghost of shoegaze still haunts The Horrors’ sound, but now, rather than the woozy, noxious and slightly nauseous tones of pioneers My Bloody Valentine, the layered guitar and synth noise is more akin to the lush soundscapes of bands like Slowdive and The Telescopes. The early Nineties seem to be what the band are tapping into for inspiration just now, and some of the tracks even feature, surprisingly, a shuffly, Madchester-style beat. “Monica Gems” is like Suede dragged backwards through a thorny hedge and there are shades of The Doors here, but as refracted through the prism of Echo and The Bunnymen (in particular the excellent track “Still Life”) . For me the album highlight is “Moving Further Away”, which starts as gorgeous, driving Germanica before before being engulfed in layers of blissful synths and ending as a dirty rock dirge. Listen for yourselves:
 

 
For more info on The Horrors, visit their website, or their record label XL Recordings.

 
Nice Kosmische playlist for a Friday the 13th courtesy of KCRW’s Chuck P. Chuck P is the host of the weekly “What’s Next” show, on Tuesdays between midnight and 3a.m.

Some Can, Popol Vuh, Neu!, Faust, Cluster, Amon Düül II, Kraftwerk and more!
 

  Sauerkrautrock by chuckp8

 
Here are two posts in a row featuring mixes by Manchester acts to brighten up your Monday morning. The first is by the city’s long running Chips With Everything club night, whose music policy is as Catholic as their choice of side dish is conventional. This covers psyche-rock, bliss-pop, rays of West Coast sunshine, and various different shades of the kosmiche spectrum. It’s lurrrvley.
 

 
10cc - Worst Band in the World
Giorgio - Tears
David Earle Johnson / Jan Hammer - Juice Harp
Top Drawer - Song of a Sinner
Emperor Machine - Bodilizer Bodilizer
Pearl Harbor - Luv Goon
Eternity’s Children - Mr Bluebird
Dusty Springfield - I Just Can’t Wait to See my baby’s face
ELO - Showdown
The Time and Space Machine - River Theme
Rotary Connection - Amen
The Trees Community - Psalm 46
Von Spar - Collecting Natural Antimatter
Delphine - La Fermeture éclair
Rita Monico - Thrilling (Main Theme)