Michael Rother from Neu! at the Puch Open Air – Munich

The beat can’t be stopped by anything or anyone. Wildly determined, he strives forward repetitively circulating in four-four time, without goal or end, just further, ever further. One encounters the archetype of this perfectly fitting circling called “Hallogallo”, driven by an eager bass line and quicksilver guitar sounds, right at the beginning of an album that saw the light of day around fifty years ago, largely unnoticed by German music journalism.

Simply “New!” That’s what guitarist Michael Rother and drummer Klaus Dinger called their debut, which they unceremoniously gave their band’s name. Because this sound was also supposed to be new, trying to counteract the mustiness of the German music landscape of the time between wartime trauma-displacing Schlager bliss and an all too obvious orientation towards blues-soaked rock from England and the USA.

Of course, the young and long-haired duo from Düsseldorf were not entirely alone with this endeavor. They had been shooting in Cologne since the late sixties (Can), Munich (Amon Düül) or Berlin (clusters) Bands and projects with similar intentions as asparagus from the bed, which the delighted English music press soon put in the same little genre basket under the somewhat indelicate collective term “Krautrock”.

The commercial success, however, remained secondary for the time being, artistic independence and the desire to break up musical forms were more important. “We were something like the underground of the underground,” says the 71-year-old Michael Rother in a zoom conversation about the New!-beginnings. So their music, which Rother still plays live today as part of his solo program, fits perfectly as the main attraction at the “Puch Open Air”, which has been attracting not only Munich music connoisseurs by the thousands for 31 years with a mixture of scene heroes and attracts pop experimenters to Jetzendorf in the Dachau region (this year also taking part: Gilla bandAnika, What are people forInga and Ralf Köster).

He and Klaus Dinger first came together through a band that could hardly be more famous today. As members of an early pre-electropop line-up of power plant they let it rip live in such a way that “on a good evening the roof flew off”, as Michael Rother remembers. And yet it shouldn’t be. Rother tells of endless “tensions and squabbles” between Klaus Dinger and Kraftwerk co-founder Florian Schneider as well as an attempt to record an album together that failed with a bang.

So New! Start. In pairs and without annoying wrangling over competence. Together with producer legend Conny Plank, Rother and Dinger scraped together the money for four nights in a Hamburg studio, which they would rather put up with than let some label person dance on their noses there. “The plan was to hold a finished production in our hands once the work was done,” says Michael Rother. “We just wanted to go to a record company and be able to say: This is our album. There are no discussions about it.”

And indeed the plan worked. Without any preparation, without demos or even songs, but with a good portion of optimism and “nebulous visions”, as Rother says, the two recorded a largely instrumental record in four nights, which tells of the magic of the moment and today is generally regarded as a masterpiece of the Krautrock era. “Everything happened in direct musical reaction to each other’s contributions,” says Michael Rother, and tells of happy coincidences and moments of inspiration like the one in which Conny Plank simply let the tape run backwards while recording his guitar tracks for “Hallogallo”. Simple trick, grandiose effect.

It was the brilliant start of a team that, in its increasing inequality, from then on spurred on each other as much as they rubbed against each other. Here the well-balanced Rother, who has a penchant for melodic to ambient sounds. There the intoxicated eccentric Dinger, who was increasingly driven towards a rougher sound, and who the band also understood as a vehicle for coming to terms with a lovesickness that had lasted for years, which he unleashed on the third album “Neu! 75” as a bickering singer in proto-punk -Song “Hero” circled.

David Bowie and Iggy Pop came out as big fans

The two parted ways soon after, apart from an unsuccessful reunion in 1986. Rother, who previously played in parallel as part of the trio harmony together with Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius von clusters with electronic means into the cosmic, started a successful solo career. And Dinger founded the refreshingly crazy trio with his brother Thomas and the drummer Hans Lampe (who in turn drums for Rother today). La Dusseldorf.

However, the influence they have, especially with Neu! took on countless bands and artists, it grew and grew and grew. In the beginning it was connoisseurs like David Bowie and Iggy Pop, who came to Berlin by choice, who came out as big fans, but each decade that followed brought more Neu! fans with them. Of Joy Division above SonicYouth to the art rock maestros radiohead, to name a few particularly prominent ones. And yet there is also one fan who stands out from this squad. Because if a certain Herbert Grönemeyer hadn’t been so inflamed by this music at the end of the nineties that he founded the label Grönland Records especially for its re-release, and thus ended a dispute that had been simmering for years between Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger, who died in 2008 – who knows whether it would even be available today.

Puch Open Air, Saturday, July 16, 3 p.m., Lueg 1, Jetzendorf, program at www.puch-openair.de