Hero - NEU!

La Düsseldorf - Time

NEU! Box Set Review: 50!

(Grönland)

BY JORDAN MAINZER

There’s an inherent stubbornness in krautrock, perhaps a hopefulness. Propulsive, repetitive beats keep on, even as wrenches are thrown into the routine, in the form of drum fills and guitar effects. Dusseldorf band NEU!, formed by drummer Klaus Dinger and guitarist Michael Rother after they left Kraftwerk, certainly added some sunny timbres to songs like “Neuschnee”, “Für Immer (Forever)”, “Isi”, and “Wave Mother”, but they also included some darkness. 50!, a new box set celebrating 50 years since the band released their self-titled debut, wonderfully illustrates the complexity of the band who would go on to inspire the likes of Stereolab and Tortoise. Consisting of their four studio albums and a tribute disk of bands that actually successfully adopt their own aesthetic to NEU!’s material, 50! truly show’s NEU!’s greatness and influence.

Listening to NEU! with contemporary ears, you have you constantly remind yourself that the music was made in the early 70′s. While it’s a bit hard to place yourself in the shoes of someone hearing “Hallogallo” for the first time and finding the motorik beat revolutionary, many of their songs shine for their effortless embrace of seemingly disparate sounds. Rother’s guitars on “Weissensee” are slow-burning and slinky, fuzzy and twangy at the same time. “Negativland” juxtaposes sharp, wincing noise with a plodding, bass-heavy beat that repeatedly drops and comes back. “Sonderangebot” is a spooky, gong-filled swamp of ambient noise, a daring 2nd track following “Hallogallo”’s legendary album 1, track 1 status. (Dinger’s painfully throaty singing on “Lieber Honig” closing out the album is equally risky and anti-climactic.) And the song that most traverses time and space is “Im Glück”, containing the first of many recordings of water NEU! would include throughout their discography. You can hear Dinger speaking with his girlfriend on a rowing boat, but his voice is below brooding fuzz. You feel like Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul in The Conversation, surveilling and trying to make sense of the haze; at the same time, the combination of field recording and instrumentation recalls contemporary masters like Grouper, Karima Walker, and Claire Rousay.

As much as NEU!’s first album is their most beloved and influential, certain aspects of their other three eerily predicted trends in the decades to come. You could say NEU! accidentally invented remix culture on their second album, whose second side is the infamous result of a lack of funds more than ingenuity: The band simply presented their already released single "Neuschnee/Super" manipulated at different playback speeds. Amazingly, the songs still sound intentional. “Neuschnee 78″ ends up a punk bop, while “Super 16″ could pass for doom metal. Their third album, Neu! ‘75, whose second side was bolstered by additional drummers (and future La Düsseldorf members) Thomas Dinger and Hans Lampe, sports bits of shimmery, heartland rock on the trilling pianos of “Isi” and “Leb’ Wohl”, Gang of Four and Public Image Ltd-esque power punk on “Hero”, and proto punk on “After Eight”, looking back and forward. Their fourth album Neu! 4, recorded in 1985 and 1986 but not released until 1995, is actually presented in its Neu ‘86 re-released/revised format from 2010. It’s the band’s aesthetic outlier, ranging from a muted instrumental of the German National Anthem to the chirpy, panning, extremely 80′s sounding “ Dänzing” and dance masterpiece “La Bomba (Stop Apartheid World-Wide)”. The last of the three is almost vaporwave thirty years too early, chopped and screwed samples, “Twist & Shout” vocal harmonies, and huge drum machines bordering on pastiche. 

It’s the tribute disc that truly impresses, simply because it could have been curatorially obvious, like choosing, say, Cut Copy to tackle the cascading synths of “Euphoria”. Instead, the choices are inspired and divergent. “Super” gets two more variations, the skyward, slow build of Mogwai and the controlled chaos of Man Man. IDLES leans into the churn and guttural nature of some of their best songs when taking on “Negativland”, the ultimate reminder that post-punk is as much “Shadowplay” as it is “Damaged Goods”. Yann Tiersen turns “Lieber Honig” into an abyss of flickering electronics and atonal glitches; when the song does find a beat, it’s crawling with warped bass and synaptic synths. The National add their trademark piano-and-horns brood to “ Im Glück”’s washy ambiance. English singer-songwriter Fink treats “Weissensee” with bluesy acoustic picking and breathy hums, the song distilled to its most powerful elements. Rounding out 50!, the tribute disc makes you wish the late Dinger was still here to hear it, and perhaps that the band would set aside their differences and record a 5th record, maybe even in collaboration with some of these artists. Ultimately, though, their legacy remains as wide-ranging as ever.

THE PASSENGER [spotify] - 1h 42min

"I knew I was alone in a way that no earthling has ever been before" - michael collins

"apollo 8 excerpt 4" - nasa // "synthesist" - harald grasskopf // "marzipan" - cluster // "silver cloud" - la düsseldorf // "ballgeflüster" - thomas dinger // "wanderer" - günter schickert // "back to where we come from" - dzyan // "to another universe" - brainticket // "fata morgana" - conrad schnitzler // "osmose ii" - annexus quam // "planet earth" - xhol caravan // "südwind" - thirsty moon // "atlantis" - deuter // "träume" - emtidi // "in the silence of the morning sunrise" - agitation free // "77 slightly delayed" - ashra // "foreign affairs" - brian eno, moebius, roedelius // "sumpfige wasser" - cosmic couriers // "bicentennial presentation" - peter baumann // "you're aware of a deeper existence..." - david bowie

[gapless playback on - crossfade 10s]

𝐋𝐔𝐕𝐑𝐆𝐈𝐑𝐋𝐅𝐀𝐍𝐅𝐈𝐂𝐒’𝐒 𝐌𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓

𝐈𝐍𝐅𝐎! — hello and welcome to my tumblr page! i'm happy you chose to come to this account. under this info you will find my request status ( always feel free to request when open) , and the things i write, plus everyone/everything i write for. and feel free to stay here and read if you want to learn a bit about me!

𝐀𝐁𝐎𝐔𝐓 𝐌𝐄 — hello my name is jillian, i am bisexual, my pronouns are she/they. my favorite colors are green and purple. my favorite shows are viva la bam, hellavator, puppet history, and wildboyz. my favorite movies are empire records, stand by me, peter pan ( 2003 ) , scream, any jackass movie, and the lost boys. my favorite books are maybe someday – colleen hoover, woman, eating – claire khoda, percy jackson, and harry potter. my favorite streamers/youtubers are billzo, ranboo, catibugzz, sneeg, garret watts, and coreyxkenshin. ( i’m also open to making some new friends maybe make some mutuals )

— if you ever need to talk to some and don't want to go to someone you know, feel free to send a message! we will send nothing but support, unles it's something homophobic, racist, political, and just all around rude.

𝐑𝐄𝐐𝐔𝐄𝐒𝐓 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐓𝐔𝐒 — open

prompt list

𝐅𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐎𝐌𝐒 𝐈 𝐖𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐅𝐎𝐑 — The Lost Boys: Sam, Micheal, Star, Marko, Dwayne I Weird Science: Wyatt | Harry Potter : Dean, Seamus, Neville, Hermione, George, Regulus, Sirius, James | Dream a Little Dream: Dinger | Dazed and Confused : Mitch | The Black Phone: Vance, Finney, Robin, Bruce | The Last of Us : Joel, Ellie | Criminal Minds : Spencer, Derek, Penelope | Skins : Cook, Maxxie ( plantonic only!) | Ghost Files/Buzzfeed Unsolved: Shane, Ryan | Magic Mike: Mike | Heathers: Jason, Veronica | Brainscan : Micheal | Stand By Me : Chris, Gordie | Scream: Sydney, Stu, Tara, Sam | Halloween Ends : Corey | Tokio Hotel : Bill, Tom, Gustav, Georg | Teen Wolf : Issac, Stiles, Liam, Lydia

𝐌𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓

james potter — ( sacrifices pt.1 )

ellie williams — ( i’m sorry ellie… )

regulus black — ( smile! )

vance hopper — ( insecurities )

mitch kramer — ( cheap beer and weed )

dinger holfield — ( the first i love you ) , ( polar opposites ), ( astrology dates )

george weasley — ( just a bet pt.1 )

dean thomas — ( teases and kisses ) , ( why do you hate me? ) , ( smiles and dimples )

carl gallagher — ( cornrows and curls pt.1 )

jack harlow — ( never heard of him )

bam margera — ( quiet night )

https://archive.org/details/krautrock_kompendium/mode/2up

This is a compilation of all written reviews of Krautrock records that have appeared in the pages of The Sound Projector Music Magazine to date. It includes music that has been variously labelled as Krautrock, Kosmische, German electronic music, or German progressive rock. Two caveats to the reader. Firstly, the selection of music is not at all comprehensive and this is not a definitive guide to the genre. For that, I point you in the direction of the many books and studies that have been already been published. Secondly, we have included many records that some scholars would not even call 'krautrock'. For some, the genre is strictly bound by dates; anything issued later than the end of the 1970s, for example, simply doesn't count. For others, there are particular musical characteristics and stylistic qualities that define the genre. I mention this in case any reader's purist tendencies are upset by references in these pages to the music of Limpe Fuchs, the Klaus and Thomas Dinger solo CDs from the 1990s, or the later incarnations of Faust. Similarly, I am aware that the authenticity of the records on the Pyramid label (see pp) remain a matter of dispute among Krautrock aficionados.

Für Dich by Thomas Dinger

Klaus n Thomas Dinger

Ok, so, I have been playing Axiom Verge 2, and I promise I am enjoying it, but it is taking me time to adjust to the fact that everything is so different- the gameplay, the setting, the music setting. It's all very different, but I do like it.

But what's confusing me is that I have no clue where in the world (ha! which world???) we are. I would presume we're on Sudra, but I haven't had to translate any texts, and I haven't recognized a lot of the non-English words... except one that I've found so far: udug. I remembered the name "Udug Hul" from the "Transcription" note in the first game, so I looked it up:

Well, that's... an interesting development, to say the least.

ANYWAY, it led me into a rabbit hole where I found some reddit posts translating Sudran and even Rusalki words into English:

This one talks about the dinger-gisbar.

This one talks about pretty much all the other words and names.

Thomas Happ is clearly a huge fan of Ancient Mesopotamia, and I applaud him for it. Egypt, Mesoamerica, China, those all get incorporated into media very frequently, even in video games (as well as medieval Europe, of course). But AV must be the first high-quality story in any media type to get so in-depth into Mesopotamian history and mythology.

Tom Smith/Robert Turman! RRR Band! Alf Danielson! Oneida! Stereolab! Frank Marchi! Osees! Thinking Fellers Union Local 282! TwinArt! Julia Heyward! Jill Kroesen! The Cool Greenhouse! Carl Stone! Waxfactor! EEL! Dan Friel! Thomas Dinger! Holy Tongue! Les Rallizes Dénudés! Sam Rivers!

Fragmento en directo del original de NEU! “Hero”, uno de esos temas que anunciaron no ya el punk sino el after punk en el tercer LP del grupo de Klaus Dinger, “NEU! ‘75″, su mejor elepé. 

Para entonces, el dúo original de Dinger y Michael Rother, se había convertido en cuarteto con los bateristas Hans Lampe y Thomas Dinger.

Sleep well, because this night is for you.

Great albums #6

Music genre: synthpop, synthwave, electronic, new wave

1. Fehler Im System- Peter Schilling (1982)

2. Für mich- Thomas Dinger (1982)

3. Psychotropia- Nick Nicely (2003)

4. The Colour of Spring- Talk Talk (1986)

5. Linea Aspera LP II- Linea Aspera (2020)

6. Kim Wilde- Kim Wilde (1981)

Alb. “Neu! ‘75“ (1975)

* Memories on the Dinger brothers:

Klaus Dinger (March 24, 1946 - March 21, 2008) Thomas Dinger (October 28, 1952 - April 9, 2002)

Every Record I Own - Day 322: Thomas Dinger Für Mich

I’m out in Chicago working on writing a new album, so I’m keeping this one short.

A couple of years ago I was on a krautrock binge where I’d buy pretty much anything that had an affiliation with Neu! or Can. Thomas Dinger is the brother of Neu! drummer Klaus Dinger. He played on side B of Neu! ‘75 when Klaus took over guitar and vocal duties and was a full-time member of Klaus’s anthemic ‘80s band, La Düsseldorf. 

Für Mich came highly recommended to me by a record store clerk at Rough Trade in Brooklyn. And sure enough, the steady motorik pulse and layered atmospheres of Neu! must have been in the Dinger bloodline, because they’re on full display here. It’s like taking a bong rip with your morning cup of black coffee while watching the sun rise.