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Neu! | Neu! / Neu 2 / Neu '75

CD, Groenland/EMI

Tekst: Omar Muñoz-Cremers

Publicatiedatum: 07 juli 2001

West Germany 1971, functional cities fade into grey, a culture of ghosts, citizens trying to forget spectral appearances of history and the unconscious. The killings are on their way. Listening to these re-issues one starts to form an understanding about the idea behind Neu!: the New not as a clarion call of modernity-for-modernity's sake, but a compulsive New to make sure that what lies behind never catches up with you, a perpetual state of obliteration, forgetting, seeing anew, becoming child. When the first Neu! album (1972) gets under way it sets this goal immediately with Hallo Gallo, a track which might as well have been called Theme from Neu! Klaus Dinger lays down the mechanical rhythm that for years to come would be associated with motorik, the friendlier term for krautrock. It is of course an impressively simple rhythm that speaks of trance, getting lost in motion. Hallo Gallo is a study in effective simplicity: over the beat four guitar parts are dubbed, some accentuate the rhythm, others wave in and out in breezy arcs. It could go on for hours without boring you. Neu! are ready to take the autobahn out of the city into wide open spaces where nature murmurs through the open car window. Much of Neu! isn't exactly the motorik one would expect. Instead much of the album represents something of a pastoral dream world: Im Glückâ is an amazing sound world, quiet, lovely but somehow pregnant with tension, a remembering of summer loves lost (as a matter of fact one of the members was in an unhappy relationship with a Norwegian girl, you can hear the lovers rowing on a lake throughout the second half of the album, moments of longing frozen in sound).
Getting to hear Neu! 2 after all these years is a strange experience. The album in most parts still sounds fresh but it is hard not to listen with future ears into the past, back into the future again, mapping the routes Stereolab, Spacemen 3, Boredoms, Basic Channel, The Orb, Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine took from this album. It can sound that overwhelmingly influential. On the other hand much claims have been made on behalf of Neu 2 (1973) being something of a precursor of studio-wizardry and dub manipulation. The story is well known: Neu! running out of studio time only have finished a couple of tracks and decide at the last moment to re-record the finished tracks on different speeds (the slowed down tracks are a better listen than the ones that sound like Speedy Gonzalez rocking out). Undoubtedly a nice solution, interesting and controversial but it doesn't make Neu 2 a good record (although Für Immerâ and Neuschnee are excellent updates of the motorik aesthetic). Nice to complete your collection with but youâre better off investigating Rother's work with Harmonia.
After a couple of years of working apart Rother and Dinger returned to work on the third Neu! album that had to be made due to contractual obligations. What sounds like a recipe for disaster actually turned Neu 75 into a masterpiece of new German music, it's their Future Days, Rubycon, Trans Europe Express or Musik von Harmonia. The first half of Neu 75 is pure daydreaming bliss: Isiâ is the usual motorik opener, a short relative of Kraftwerk's Autobahn. Seeland is a fine down-tempo guitar-led tune but the centrepiece of the album is Lebâ Wohl, a sublime sun-kissed piece of ambient consisting of nothing more than slow Satiesque piano notes, a humming voice and some breaking waves as background noise. It's the point where Neu! enter nirvana, they finally find the peace they searched for, they dissolve into eternal newness to be born again. The contrast with the final three songs on Neu 75 could not be greater. Heroâ is Neu! speeding back towards the city, night-time approaching, disillusion setting in. To a driving rhythm accompanied by harsh guitars they lament the fate of the typical German romantic, "you're just another hero!". A brilliant claustrophobia enters these tracks of the speeding romantic going nowhere, running out of options, imprisonment of the mind dawning. They still manage to trance out on E-musik, but already earlier themes begin to haunt our heroes in their waking nightmares. What to do next? We go out blazing, we explode! After Eight is the final gearshift of motorik, the rhythm bangs with demonic intensity, the singing is out of control, the guitars surge skywards. It is also in the end a happy song, it shines with nihilistic joy, it accepts fate and surrenders to the headlong rush into the vanishing point. I beg you then: don't archive Neu! Live Neu!

http://www.kindamuzik.net/recensie/neu/neu-neu-2-neu-75/1048/
Meer Neu! op KindaMuzik: http://www.kindamuzik.net/artiest/neu