Michael Rother - 2010 Out of Door Festival, NY

• published: 01 Jul 2015
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Michael Rother's 'HALLOGALLO' Lincoln Center Out Of Doors Festival, New York City August 10, 2010. Very good soundboard, sourced from audio stream. From Kraftwerk to Neu! and now Hallogallo 2010. German experimental musician and composer Michael Rother recruited Steve Shelley, of Sonic Youth, and Aaron Mullan, of Tall Firs, to form Hallogallo 2010, a group which is playing Neu!'s electronic rock music live for the first time in 35 years. Rother and friends recently performed at the Lincoln Center Out of Doors festival. This concert was mixed by Bill Bowen. 00:00 Hallogallo 2010 12:30 (Unreleased) 12:30 Neutronics 98 10:27 (A Tribute to Conny Plank) 22:57 Aroma Club B3 7:54 30:52 Deluxe (Immer wieder) 9:08 40:01 Veteranissimo 9:12 49:13 Band Intro 1:10 50:23 Dino 10:23 Michael Rother - guitars Steve Shelley - drums Aaron Mullan - bass The Sound: Neu!’s sound is built around a relentless driving 4/4 beat known as the motorik (the literal translation is "motor skill"), the aural equivalent of euphorically speeding down the Autobahn. Atop this hypnotic and eminently danceable beat floats Rother’s heavily processed guitar and ambient electronics that sound like a rocket ship bound for the astral plane, a water drip or tape loops backward. The hour-long Lincoln Center set opened with the never-before-released “Hallogallo 2010,” its warm swirling engine sounds twisting around Rother’s soaring prog rock guitar lines. The random samples on the intro to “Neutronics 98” and “Veteranissimo” wouldn’t sound out of place on an Aphex Twin album, or perhaps his music wouldn’t sound out of place on a Neu! record. Michael Rother thanks the wildly appreciative Lincoln Center audience (49:13) only to be answered by a mysterious spectral electronic sound (Dinger perhaps?) just before launching into one of the set’s highlights--the ecstatic “Dino”, which prompted throngs of rapturous dancers to rush past the guards and boogie away the rest of the set in the bandshell’s orchestra pit. He Said, She Said: Neu!’s music channeled the improvisations of psychedelia through rigorous Minimalistic constraints: an unswerving beat, limited harmonies and determinedly terse melodies. The music was repetitive but never mechanical, ramming itself against its own rules, and the human muscle of Hallogallo’s rhythm section made “Hallogallo” and “Dino” more triumphant, “Veteranissimo” more heated and hypnotic. The music’s confines only made it more concentrated. -- Jon Pareles, New York Times, August 9, 2010 "Krautrock was a rather derogatory term or at best ambivalent at first," Rother says from Brooklyn in an interview via Skype. "But now around the world, I see it used to describe all the music that came out of Germany in the late '60s and early '70s, and it's not used in a derogatory sense at all. But all those bands were very, very different. It's a label more about a time and a place, whereas motorik is one specific type of sound, like the fast-forward sound." -- Steve Klinge, The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 6, 2010 - soundcheck.wnyc.org -