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An exclusive, sprawling conversation with the legendary German guitarist in which he discusses Kraftwerk, NEU!, Harmonia & Eno, and more

BY WILSON NEATE

It's hard to overstate the importance of the '70s generation of experimentally minded German musicians like NEU!, Kraftwerk, Harmonia, Can and Faust, usually grouped under the dodgy term, Krautrock. Having come of age in the postwar period, many of these diverse artists shared a common bond of refusal, rejecting not only their country's troubled political and cultural past, but also the global hegemony of Anglo-American pop and rock. Ironically, despite distancing themselves from the musical mainstream, these bands would exert considerable sway over those traditions they'd rejected. The line of influence stretches from punk's smarter manifestations through the post-punk generation and Bowie's vital late-'70s work, to more recent rock of all stripes -- Sonic Youth, Tortoise, Stereolab, Radiohead, Primal Scream, Secret Machines, the list goes on and on. And beyond rock, the likes of Cluster, NEU!, Kraftwerk and Harmonia have also been perennial reference points on the continuum of electronic music from the late '70s to the present, from synth-pop to techno, as well as its more abstract, experimental variants.

Michael Rother's guitar minimalism is a connecting thread weaving through and between several of the most innovative of the '70s German bands. When Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider briefly separated in 1971, Rother joined Schneider in Kraftwerk. Also present, on drums, was the late Klaus Dinger, with whom Rother formed NEU! later the same year. Between NEU!'s second and third records, in 1973, Rother teamed up with Cluster's Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius as Harmonia, a project spawning two studio albums, Muzik von Harmonia and Deluxe, plus two posthumous releases: Live 1974 and a collaboration with Brian Eno, Tracks & Traces. By 1977, Rother had hooked up with Can's drummer Jaki Liebezeit and embarked on a solo career that continues today.

Despite solo success, particularly with his first three records, Rother is still most widely known for his work with Dinger in NEU! Immensely creative as an artistic unit, Rother and Dinger were never friends, and by the mid-'90s, with the band long dead and its three original albums out of print, the pair's relationship had been reduced to an exchange of fraught faxes after Dinger -- without Rother's approval -- began putting out unreleased NEU! material on a Japanese label. Thanks to Dinger's intransigence, the original NEU! albums remained legally unavailable until 2001, when Herbert Grönemeyer stepped in and brokered their release on his Grönland label, which later also issued Harmonia's archival Live 1974. The latter prompted renewed interest in Rother's recordings with Roedelius and Moebius, which in turn led to the reactivation of Harmonia for live performances from 2007 through early 2009.

Now, on the occasion of Grönland's expanded reissue of Harmonia and Eno's Tracks & Traces, Michael Rother looks back over a career of sometimes vexed but always groundbreaking creative partnerships.

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