KRAUT

In the early 1970s a revolution in sound occurred that was as influential in its own way as the birth of rock’n’roll or reggae. John Doran talks to members of Kraftwerk, Neu!, Can, Faust, Cluster and Harmonia about the era that helped shape modern music.

There is a term that always crops up during discussion of the bewildering variety of music from Germany in the 70s that gets lumped under the name of Krautrock, and that is ‘motorik’. The word which translates literally as ‘motor skill’ was coined by journalists to describe the minimal yet propulsive four-four beat that underpins a lot of the music from this time and place, especially by the groups Neu! and Kraftwerk. This beat is the war drum of modernity Neu!’s drummer Klaus Dinger rejected the term motorik, preferring the term Apache beat pushing the listener forwards into the future.

It is often associated with the great transport networks of Germany, the railway lines and the autobahns. In fact, the rhythm even mimics that of a car speeding along the open road or a train clattering along the rails: fast, measured, never ending. But despite all of this evidence, Neu!’s guitarist Michael Rother laughs and says the rhythm was inspired by something altogether less mechanistic and more fluid: a game of football. Rother joined an early incarnation of Kraftwerk between the release of their first and second album. “Ralf Hutter was the first musician I had met who was on the same harmonic and melodic wavelength as me. We really understood each other without talking”. …

by John Doran
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