Neu!, "Neuschnee"

New snow is perfect. This is especially true on those mornings when it takes you by surprise, when you wake up and look out the window to find it there, settled and beautiful, blanketing the ground, topping every fencepost, coating every branch and twig of every tree. As yet there are no footprints or tire tracks: no signs of life, no markers of movement or even the passage of time, except for the few scattered tracks of rabbits and squirrels. The snow is bleached white. It imposes a stillness, a very particular kind of peace on the landscape, like swaddling does for a baby. It’s as if you closed your eyes on one version of the world—grit and shouting and car exhaust—and opened your eyes to find that Reality’s operating software has updated overnight. The broad contours of this place are the same, but the sharp edges are gone, rounded off by trillions of crystals that fell from the sky. 

This perfection is ephemeral. Melt and decay will come, and in a day or two most of these crystals will be gone: liquefied, evaporated, sublimated. Others will have been rolled and scraped by trucks into piles of dirt and ash and ice slammed into the corners of parking lots. These grim remainders might hold on for weeks on end, but ultimately they, too, will leave us. For that one morning, though, we had new snow, and it was magical.

This is what Neu! feels like to me. When I play their records, I am transported into an alien space carrying traces of the world I know, but with the larger patterns obscured from view. Distractions fall away, and everything around me is crystalline and shimmering. There is no history to this place, and no future. I feel like I’ve fallen partly out of place, and entirely out of time. 

At an elemental level, Neu!’s music is familiar. It is guitar, drums, and tape. But what Neu! does with guitar, drums, and tape is new(!) and extraordinary, fully disconnected from everything that came before it and (most) everything that came after it. In a minute I’ll say more about who Neu! were and where they came from.  But first I’ll ask you to listen to a handful of their tracks—“Hallogallo” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Weissensee” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Für Immer” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Leb’ Wohl” (Apple Music, Spotify)—and see if you can tell me first, when they were recorded and second, what this band’s influences were. Go ahead and answer, if you can, in the comments.

Consider “Hallogallo.”  Side A, Track 1, of the first record, Neu! self-titled. This is a manifesto: wah-wah as rhythm guitar, the signature motorik drumbeat, the washes of guitar layered over top, played backward and forward, swerving in and out over ten minutes. Never goes stale, never gets old. Side A, Track 1 of Neu! 2, “Für Immer,” is “Hallogallo” taken to the next level. It throws you down a road toward the sea, sixty seventy eighty miles per hour through atmospheric bursts of static and radiation that shatter and smother the guitar and drums. And yet the music soldiers on, pushing forward, fighting back and fighting through … für immer.

This is Neu!—arriving from nowhere and driving ever forward, into the future.

Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger recorded Neu!, Neu! 2, and Neu! ’75 over a four-year period in the early 1970s in Hamburg, Hamburg, and Cologne, Germany, with the considerable assistance of genius producer Conny Plank. Rother and Dinger were previously in an early Kraftwerk lineup with Florian Schneider, during a period of time when Ralf Hutter was on sabbatical from the band. Florian played flute and electronics—often at the same time—while Rother played guitar and Dinger played drums. This was pre-Kraftwerk Kraftwerk: i.e., before they released Autobahn and Trans-Europe Express and essentially invented (or domesticated, depending on how you feel about them) electronic music. Kraftwerk with Schneider, Hutter, and Dinger sounded like this. Kraftwerk with Schneider, Rother, and Dinger, sounded like this. Given these documents, you could argue that Neu! sounds like early Kraftwerk, but that is essentially saying that Neu! sounds like Neu!

Rother and Dinger were very different people with very different instincts and very different inspirations. Dinger was a city kid, edgy and aggressive and a bit of a showboat: in those early days with Kraftwerk, he thrashed around his kit, battering broken cymbals until his hands bled, shocking Rother—and to some extent inspiring him. Schooled as a graphic designer, Dinger pulled Neu!’s striking logo from signs he saw in shop windows around town. Subtlety and understatement were anathema to Klaus Dinger, and in many respects he would model his post-Neu! career after John Lennon’s, toggling wildly between expressions of bitter cynicism and naïve appeals to peace and love. Dinger’s last stand with Neu! is memorable for the litany of F-bombs he served up on the way out the door: it would be obvious enough that “Hero” (Apple Music, Spotify) was the last domino to fall before punk rock landed, even if Johnny Rotten hadn’t said so. Dinger was forever in litigation over band names and publishing rights and royalties. After his death in 2008, Dinger’s significant other Miki Yui published a book of his art and photos titled Ihr Könnt Mich Mal Am Arsch Lecken—effectively, “you all can kiss my ass.” The book’s cover displays this message just as Klaus Dinger wrote it: in hot-pink magic marker on white paper.

Rother was at heart a country boy, drawn to nature and particularly rivers. Asked to describe what inspired him musically, Rother points to running water. When Iggy Pop describes Neu!’s music as “a kind of pastoral psychedelicism,” the pastoral is Michael Rother’s contribution. It’s no surprise that after Neu!’s breakup—and for some period of time before it—Rother decamped to Forst, along the Weser River, where he still resides, 35 years later. Rother is gentle, pleasant, and unassuming: an ambassador for Krautrock who gives regular interviews extolling the virtues of Florian Schneider, Conny Plank, Jaki Liebezeit (of Can), and Rödelius and Möbius (of Cluster, and his bandmates in Harmonia), among others. He counts Dinger as his favorite drummer and looks fondly on his days in Neu!; last November I went to see him play at the Clapham Grand in London, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Neu! S/T’s release. Paul Weller joined him on-stage, along with Stephen Morris from Joy Division and New Order. Rother’s recordings with Harmonia, and his solo projects thereafter, serve up gorgeous electronic soundscapes to the listener. When he picks up the guitar, as he did in London, the air sparkles. Michael Rother is adorable.

That these two personalities could have worked together as successfully as they did is a testament to the power of complementarity, and for that matter, of Conny Plank. The Neu! records—and particularly the first two—endorse order and chaos in equal parts, swirling them together into a product that is both enjoyable and challenging, and therefore complete. At their best, Lennon and McCartney made each other better. Short of that, they checked one another’s worst instincts. The same is true here: Rother’s steadfast commitment to melody kept Dinger’s blood and spray-paint from filling too much of the picture. For his part, Dinger ensured that whatever by-roads Neu! traveled, they never strayed too far from rock ‘n’ roll.

Today’s song is “Neuschnee” (Apple Music, Spotify), from Neu! 2. My computer tells me that of the 16,968 digital audio files loaded in my Apple Music library, “Neuschnee” is the song I have played the second-most. Add in the number of times I’ve played it on vinyl—I bought the record two years ago, promptly after Kate bought me my turntable—and it is most certainly in the lead. Neuschnee is, literally and figuratively, new snow.