Harmonia's five LP box set, Complete Works, contains all the released material of this fascinating German band from 1973 to 1976, including their 1976 collaboration with Brian Eno and four unreleased tracks (Documents 1975). Harmonia was Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius, of the sublime electronic-ish combo Cluster, as well as Michael Rother (of the propulsive combo NEU! and later solo adventures). The box set includes a lush 36-page booklet, a live poster, and pop-up artwork presenting the Harmonia headquarters in Forst, Germany. I chatted with Michael Rother about his days in Harmonia and more.
How did Harmonia end up forming?
Neu! was more like a project with Klaus Dinger and I. We didn't even consider ourselves a band. Being a duo, with Klaus on drums and me on guitar or bass, we couldn't play live at all. We tried two concerts as a duo, and I used a cassette player to add some backings, like water or bowed bass. People were furious. They said, "That's a lie. It's not live." We were both quite unhappy with the situation, and we looked for other musicians but we were not successful. Nobody really fit into our idea of music — this fast forward, running kind of music. Then we had this offer from United Artists UK; they released our first album, and it was a sort of an underground success. So they sent someone over to Dusseldorf, and the guy invited us to do a tour. The problem was how to put the Neu! music on stage. That's when I remembered the Cluster guys. I knew Cluster from 1971, from when I was with Kraftwerk and we did a concert together in Hamburg. We'd stayed in touch, loosely. I had this one track from their album, Cluster II, a track called "Im Süden," which appealed to me because I noticed some similarities I could relate to in the harmonic, melodic approach on that track. It was four open strings on a guitar, repeated over and over with interesting processing. I contacted them and they said, "Come on over." I took my guitar and drove to Forst, a three-hour drive, and I jammed with [Hans-Joachim] Roedelius. I immediately recognized the possibilities. I fell in love with the combination of the fuzzy sounds he did on his piano, with all kinds of treatments, and delay, and distortion. Amazing. That was the first harmonic, melodic instrument I connected with. Klaus was a fantastic drummer. But being able to move around in space with the piano and the guitar — that was so beautiful. I decided to leave Dusseldorf and Neu! behind. That was when Dieter Moebius joined in, and six weeks later I moved to Forst. It was really love at first sight; a musical love, and also a love of the landscape.
I've seen some of the photos.
Looking out of the window, over the river, over the fields, and the soft hills in the back. No human structure in sight. This is so special. The music was first, the most important factor by far, but the lifestyle — coming from a city like Dusseldorf — all my life I'd lived in houses, normal flats, and then I arrived in this open space. I did not join Cluster; it was the two individuals. They, of course, were very different in character, as well as in their musical visions and what they contributed to the sound.
Were you all living in the same building?
Yes, we shared one kitchen, one bathroom, and each had our own private space, like a room or two. But the only room that was really heated was the kitchen. Money was also an issue. The Cluster musicians were extremely poor; they made very little money. Neu! was a bit successful — it helped solve some problems for Harmonia. We went into the forest to collect wood.
What went into putting this new Harmonia box set together?
It was a lot of work. I invested many weeks of work in the spring, but I was absolutely determined because Harmonia was always so close to my heart. It was a very important phase in my life. I learned a lot in the exchange with Roedelius and Moebius. If you draw a line from Neu!, to Harmonia, to my solo work, and on, I think it's obvious that Harmonia was a very important step. I was able to work further on the idea of this music in the exchange with them.
The first Harmonia album, Musik von Harmonia, was self-recorded at the house where you all lived. What were you recording on?
We were so poor! Together we had three ReVox A 77 — these nice stereo tape machines — and a very simple, and not great sounding, mixing desk by Echolette. The great thing was that we had time. The working space was downstairs. We set up our gear in the middle — in a circle, sort of — so that we could look at each other. In the winter it was cold; there was only one small stove with not much heating power. So we were sitting in the winter, shoulders pressed together and playing with cold fingers. But when it was not cold, it was pure heaven. Nobody complained about noise; we could work whenever we wanted to and spend hours and hours, weeks and weeks, playing around, recording. We developed some ideas on one of the ReVox machines. And then when we wanted to do overdubs, we had to play back through this awkward mixing desk. While we played it, we added some new instruments and recorded it to the second machine, and then back again. Of course, I don't have to explain that the sound doesn't improve.
When that's all you have, that's what you do.
That's right. I was totally happy. It was exploration and freedom. Something that just drove me on. We got the album together after collecting ideas for four or five months.
When you recorded the second album, Deluxe, you had Conny Plank come down to record you. He brought a multitrack recorder?
His mobile 16-track MCI. We were very happy to have Conny in our space. I'm not exactly sure how long he stayed. Maybe two weeks? Mani Neumeier also came to visit and to play drums on a few tracks. Of course the sound quality was by far better than on the first album. Then we met in his [Conny's] studio a few weeks later to do the mixing and also to record the vocals. That was something that we did spontaneously. Roedelius, Moebius, and I were all rather shy on stage. We played with our backs to the audience because we couldn't even look at the people. Not even speak to them. So this was worrying me. I thought, "We have to overcome this shyness; this fear of the audience." One step would be to open your mouth. So, in the studio, "Deluxe," the title track, was originally conceived as an instrumental. We came to the decision, "Let's open our mouths and stand around the microphone." We sat down for 5 or 10 minutes, scribbled some lyrics, and jumbled them together. That was very refreshing and liberating. Then we did the "crazy" version, the track "Monza," the very dynamic stuff, and that was pure fun!
Conny Plank seemed like such a sympathetic engineer and producer.
Definitely. He was very, very talented. He had this ability to understand what we were going for and to pick up our ideas very early. He had a very modest way in helping us create these sounds. His idea of his role was not that he was pushing us into some direction. He was very modest and very careful. Later he did an interview, and he compared his role to that of a midwife. Helping the musician give birth to their ideas. That's really how it felt. He had this brilliant mind. If you look at a track like [Neu!'s] "Hallogallo," there was no way of knowing where these good parts of the guitar [takes] were. But he remembered them. When the tape ran, he was like a conductor. He remembered the parts; he'd be featuring them in the right moment and then moving the fader down again because the next guitar part would be rubbish. Of course he was equally interested in creating new sounds and being unique. He was a big fan and had a lot of respect for many kinds of music. I feel similar to Conny, in that respect; there's so much good music in different cultures and different ages to be found. He shared in the risk. We recorded the first two Neu! albums in a rental studio in Hamburg before he had his own studio,. Because we wanted to avoid anyone from the outside talking to us about their ideas, we recorded the albums and then presented them to the companies. To do that, we had to take the risk and pay for the production. The same was true with Harmonia. He shared in the risks, and he shared in the results.
What kind of devices did you use to create spatial effects?
When we recorded Neu!'s "Hallogallo," for instance, there was nothing! Conny used one tape machine as a delay, and there was a plate reverb in a separate room. That was it. With Harmonia it was even worse! [laughs] We had this very silly spring reverb in the mixing desk, and we had some nice delay machines, which were important for the sound. My old Dynacord Echocord Mini [tape delay] is still downstairs in my room. Every musician who comes to visit is like, "Ahh! You have this. You must use it again." You could change the delay by moving a slider. I bought that in 1971 when I played with Kraftwerk. That was my first big investment.
It was so hard to find devices that did that back then.
It improved in the '70s. I have a Roland Space Echo. Now there are digital versions of this. But it had this nice oscillation...
Yeah, regenerating.
These were very important, because of the technique of playing with your shadow, sort of. You can create musical patterns by adding the next note while the first one is being repeated. Suddenly you have two notes sounding. Or you can create patterns that always pick up the notes in the middle. This became very important, especially when I played with Harmonia. When I played in Dusseldorf with Neu!, between the first two albums, we recorded a single at Giorgio Morodor's studio in Munich. Conny Plank wanted to "test" Giorgio's studio. The studio, at that time, was in a huge building two floors below ground level. You felt like you were in some power plant. There was no fresh air and no daylight. When we recorded the track "Super" — Klaus was a powerful drummer. He could not survive three minutes down there because there was not enough air. After a minute he just fell off the stool and needed a break. At that time I tried to make my guitar sound like an oboe. If you listen to "Neuschnee" there is no sound, it sort of flows into the music with two volume pedals. I love the sound of oboe.
Did you end up using an eBow for effects like that?
In 1979, and you can also hear a lot of eBow on Katzenmusik. I discovered the eBow in London. It was still an adventure to go to London because you found musical gear that was not available in Germany back then. "Endless sustain!" That was great. I always had the desire to have an endless tone on the guitar. It adds elements of surprise when playing live. I can never really control it. Sometimes the string is perfect and it has a sweet sound, and sometimes nothing happens even though the battery is fully charged. That's always an adventure, but that's part of the fun of playing live. You never know what result will come up!
Documents 1975 in the Harmonia box set has some previously unreleased tracks. What is the origin of those?
Because we were poor, we had to erase recordings whenever we thought, "Oh, this is not the reinvention of the wheel." The blank tapes were so expensive. Only a few tapes survived. One of the tapes was what became Harmonia Live 1974. The three of us were sure from the very beginning that that was a very special concert and that we would not touch this tape. It was in my archive. When Grönland Records offered to release it in 2007, that tape was in mint condition. The Documents 1975 is a different story. Two of the tracks were on a tape that our friend, Asmus Tietchens, kept in his archive for 40 years. He was at the two concerts in Hamburg, and before we had the chance to erase the tape, he asked Dieter Moebius to make a copy for him. He put that tape in his archive. The original is gone, because we used that for some other recording. It was amazing, the clarity and the sound. I only had to do minor editing, otherwise it's a really good document of Harmonia with Mani. "Proto- Deluxe" is an early, instrumental, unsophisticated, energetic version of "Deluxe." The most startling track, I think, is "Tika-Taka," which is an example of how we worked in the studio in 1975; it's this track we recorded for the only German radio journalist who played our music occasionally. We were really totally ignored by nearly everyone. But he offered us air-time. He said, "If you record something for me, I will play it on my show." We recorded this piece of music, and you may recognize some elements that appear on Deluxe as "Walky-Talky." You can hear a very good example of how we processed the electronic drums, which was by sending the stupid, silly sounding, original drum sound through some machines, such as the Tremolo [stompbox] by Schaller. Because everything was "pre-sync," you could rotate the tempo switch of the Tremolo and, in combination with delay, wah, and all the stuff that was used in that chain, sometimes the beat was suppressed. I'm still excited when I hear that piece of music, because it's a great example. [It was created] with very simple means; it was nothing sophisticated, no big synth towers. It was just rock 'n' roll and dance instruments used in a different way.
