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JANUARY 20, 2016

The Invention of Ambient Music

BY ALEX ABRAMOVICH

In the nineteen-seventies, the German supergroup

Harmonia made music that sounds as though it could have
been made this morning.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF GRÖNLAND RECORDS

O
n YouTube, there is a clip of David
Bowie (https://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=tRb3HOkuuYQ&
feature=youtu.be) submitting to an
interview on German television, apparently in 1997. The sound quality’s a bit
sketchy. Bowie has a translator, speaking to him through an earpiece. I do not,
and can’t quite tell you what’s going on. But two minutes in, a few familiar
names break through the static: “Bands like Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Harmonia,”
Bowie says. “Does anyone remember Harmonia?”

The woman sitting next to Bowie stares blankly. The show’s host turns to his
audience and says, “Kraftwerk fans?”

“No, not them,” Bowie says. “Harmonia?”

No one there knows what he’s talking about.

I
n the sixties, pop music in West Germany was in a peculiar state. Popular
singers still sang “Schlager music”—pointedly apolitical schmaltz, of the
sort that had once been championed by Joseph Goebbels—while
Germany’s rock musicians covered English bands, playing, essentially,
American music at an extra remove. But, as with the New German Cinema that
emerged in that decade, new German sounds had begun to take shape. British
journalists called the music Krautrock, an unfortunate term, despised by
German musicians themselves, which has stuck, nonetheless. The German press
(and, for the most part, German audiences) ignored the Krautrock bands
entirely. But in advertisements and airports, on film soundtracks, and in concert
halls, high and low, the music is still in the air, all around us.

Take Can, which formed in Cologne, in 1968. (Fast-forward to the two-minute

mark of “Don’t Turn the Light On, Leave Me Alone (https://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=7nMODpwq2Cs)” to hear a jam that sounds remarkably like
latter-day Radiohead.) Or Kraftwerk, which formed in Düsseldorf, in 1970, and
scratched out the templates for disco, New Wave, techno, and any number of
micro-genres beloved by readers of Pitchfork and Brooklyn Vegan. (Compare
Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express (https://www.youtube.com
1 de 3 /watch?v=XMVokT5e0zs)” with Afrika Bambaataa’s hip-hop touchstone 22/01/16 09:48

“Planet Rock (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h6pcqC6wrI).”) The

 Germans
The Invention of Ambient Musicinvented
- The Newelectronic
Yorkerdance music, justhttp://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-invention...
as surely as German engineers,
working between the wars, had invented magnetic tape. And, at the same time,
groups like Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, Cluster, and Neu! were playing songs
that seeped much more softly into the atmosphere. It took Brian Eno to coin
the phrase “ambient music,” but it’s worth remembering that he did so after
playing with German musicians, and after collaborating with David Bowie on
“Low”—an album (the first in Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy) that might be heard as an
homage to Krautrock and, at its worst, becomes Krautrock pastiche.

A few months ago, the Berlin label Grönland Records released “Harmonia
Box,” which collects the recordings of a group Eno adored and, eventually,
worked with. Compared with its sound, which is crystalline, the group’s history
seems convoluted, but in the briefest of outlines: Harmonia was a sort of
supergroup, composed of Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Dieter Moebius, and
Michael Rother, a guitarist who had played in Neu! and an early incarnation of
Kraftwerk. Roedelius, the group’s oldest member, had been a child star in Nazi
propaganda films, a conscript in the Pimpfe (the Cub Scouts of the Hitler
Youth), and, in the late nineteen-sixties, a founder of the Zodiak Free Arts Lab
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0UnoKtaZOg), in Berlin. Moebius, who
died last year, had studied with Joseph Beuys in Düsseldorf. Moebius had had a
bit of musical training. Roedelius had had no training at all (though he did have
a gift for melody). But together with Conrad Schnitzler, Roedelius and Moebius
had formed Kluster, at the Zodiak, in 1969, changing the spelling to “Cluster,”
after Schnitzler’s departure, in 1971. That year, Moebius and Roedelius moved
to a large, ruined farmhouse in Forst, in Lower Saxony. And, in 1973, Rother
took a hiatus from Neu! and joined them.

The trio made two albums: “Musik von Harmonia,” in 1974, and “Deluxe,” in
1975. They played to audiences that were indifferent or hostile. “Harmonia was
completely ignored or hated,” Rother told me, over Skype, recently. “Ignored
would have been the better thing. People did not understand it, did not want
our music.” The group broke up in the summer of 1976, only to reform later
that year, when Eno spent a little over a week recording with it in Forst. But
Eno took the tapes with him; aside from Bowie’s “Low,” which is shot through
with the group’s influence, nothing came of the recordings for decades. In the
interim, Harmonia remained unknown and unheralded. Still, Eno wasn’t
kidding when he called it the “greatest rock band in the world.” Listen to the
recordings today and you’ll hear music that could have been made this morning
in Vienna, or Williamsburg.

T
here’s a reason the music has aged so well. In Germany in the late
sixties and seventies, forward-looking musicians were working with
sequencers, analog synthesizers, drum machines, tape loops, and exotic
instruments. The idea, Rother told me, was to scrape clean the musical
palate. “By that time,” he said, in lightly accented English, “I had left behind the
idea of being a guitar hero, of trying to impress people by playing fast melodies.
I’d erased all that from my repertoire. I kept my respect for the Beatles, for Jimi
2 de 3 Hendrix, and the blues. I loved that culture. But I knew that it was not my 22/01/16 09:48
music, not my culture. I had to leave it behind. In Germany, Anglo-American
 musicMusic
The Invention of Ambient was everywhere. Then
- The New Yorkerwe had Schlager.http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-invention...
Then we had nothing. So I went
back to one note. One guitar string. It was quite a primitive music, really.”

What this meant, in practice, is that Rother—who’d grown up covering Cream,

the Stones, and the Beatles—had subtracted the blues (if not the funk) from his
playing. Eventually, he’d simplified chord progressions, or removed them
entirely, playing single-note runs against a tight matrix set up by his partner in
Neu! and Kraftwerk, the drummer Klaus Dinger. The resulting songs, most of
them instrumental, could sound like a stream (https://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=awNiwKoyoR8) or a flood (https://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=qYeVvp8sdmg); either way, the effect was one of constant, cleansing
forward motion. And with Harmonia, most of the drumming and
singing disappeared as well (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVVJj-
J9QCM). Filtered through Eno and Eno’s work as a producer, the results helped
to lay the foundation not only for ambient music but for a few generations of
blues-less rock bands, from Wire and New Order to My Bloody Valentine, and
all the way up to LCD Soundsystem (http://www.newyorker.com/culture
/cultural-comment/hello-again-the-weirdness-of-the-lcd-soundsystem-
reunion).

“I started as a copycat,” Rother told me. “Trying to imitate my heroes. After a

few years, I noticed that this was not enough to express my personality. Now I
wonder why this does not happen more often. I mean, I’m glad when young
musicians say, ‘We are your fans, we love your music, and we try to sound like
you.’ In a way, this is flattering. But sometimes I think it would be better, and
they would understand me better, if they understood that what they liked about
this music has to do with finding your own song. Your own identity. With trying
to move forward. To move on.”

Alex Abramovich is the author of “Bullies: A Friendship,” which will be published in March,
2016.

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