From Neu! To Kraftwerk: Football, Motorik And The Pulse Of Modernity

When we started The Quietus we made the fairly arbitrary decision that modern popular music started with Kraftwerk’s Autobahn in 1974. John Doran talks to Michael Rother, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Karl Bartos about the build up to this flash point in musical history.

There are many terms that always crop up during discussion of the bewildering variety of leftfield rock and electronic music that came out of Germany in the late 60s and 70s. The most commonly occurring nomenclature is the only partially useful and slightly disagreeable umbrella name of Krautrock.

Probably the second most popular term is the much more useful motorik. The word, which literally means ‘motor skill’ in German, was originally coined by journalists to describe the minimal yet propulsive four four beat that underpins just a small amount of the music from this time and place. However, if this non-existent genre has anything approaching a definable quality, then this beat is it. It was a hallmark of Klaus Dinger’s drumming for Neu!, although he rejected the term, preferring to call the rhythm the ‘Apache beat’. This metronome was first used in this context by Kraftwerk on tracks such as ‘Ruckzuck’, and Can on the blistering ‘Mother Sky’.

Continue Reading: The Quietus – From Neu! To Kraftwerk: Football, Motorik And The Pulse Of Modernity

Tags: Can, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, John Doran, Karl Bartos, Klaus Dinger, Kraftwerk, Krautrock, Michael Rother, Motorik, Neu!, The Quietus

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at 12:18 pm and is filed under 2010, Interviews, Roadburn Recommended . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.