Neu!

Neu! (trademarked NEU! in block capitals, German: New!, pronounced [ˈnɔʏ]) was a German krautrock band formed by Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother after their split from Kraftwerk in the early 1970s. Though Neu! had minimal commercial success during its existence, the band is retrospectively considered one of the founding fathers of krautrock and a significant influence on artists including David Bowie, Sonic Youth, Camera, Brian Eno, Iggy Pop, Siouxsie and the Banshees, PiL, Joy Division, Gary Numan, Porcupine Tree, Ultravox, Simple Minds, Negativland, Stereolab, Manic Street Preachers, Boredoms, Radiohead, the Horrors, Electrelane, Kasabian, DIIV and much of the current electronic music scene.

History

(1971–1975) Main career

Neu! was formed in 1971 in Düsseldorf as an offshoot from an early line-up of another seminal krautrock band, Kraftwerk, whose early works were also produced by Conny Plank. The name ("new!") was inspired by the prevalence of the advertising business in Düsseldorf at the time, according to Dinger, who described it as "the strongest word in advertising" and even owned a pro forma advertising agency himself for the purpose of booking studios.

Klaus Dinger

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Klaus Dinger (24 March 1946 – 21 March 2008) was a German musician and songwriter most famous for his contributions to the seminal krautrock outfit, Neu!. He was also the guitarist and chief songwriter of new wave group La Düsseldorf and briefly the percussionist of Kraftwerk.

1946–1971: The No, The Smash and Kraftwerk

Klaus Dinger was born in Scherfede, Westphalia, Germany, to Heinz and Renate on 24 March 1946. He was their first child.

Before he was a year old, his parents moved from the town, which had been badly damaged by an Allied siege at the end of World War II, to the economic centre of the region, Düsseldorf.

In 1956 he attended Görres Gymnasium School for the first time. During his time there he was part of an a cappella choir, which he had to leave when his voice broke. He was part of the school swing band (as a drummer) despite having no prior musical experience. He left the school with a Mittlere Reife (German equivalent of leaving school at 16), later accusing the school of misinterpreting his "free mindedness" as misbehaviour.

Michael Rother

Michael Rother (born 2 September 1950 in Hamburg) is a German experimental krautrock musician and composer.

Early life and education

Born in 1950, Rother went to school in Munich, Wilmslow (England), Karachi, and Düsseldorf. He also lived in Pakistan in the early 1960s where he was exposed to Pakistani music that would influence his own music in the late 1960s and early 1970s. From 1965 Rother played in the band Spirits of Sound, from which other members would later go on to join Kraftwerk (Wolfgang Flür) and Wunderbar.

Music career

Rother is a multi-instrumentalist (primarily guitar and keyboards) who, along with a catalog of several solo albums starting in 1977, is best known for having co-founded the German group Neu! with drummer Klaus Dinger (five albums between 1971 and 1996), and his collaborative efforts with Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius (aka Cluster) under the name Harmonia (two albums, one in 1974 and 1975, with later 1976 sessions recorded with Brian Eno; the studio tapes for the latter disappeared but were found by Roedelius two decades later; he remixed the tapes and released the results as Tracks and Traces in 1997; Rother was the main producer for the version re-released in 2009). Rother and Dinger were also in a short-lived version of Kraftwerk in 1971, with Florian Schneider, during a time when founding member Ralf Hütter had temporarily left the band. (This version of the group was filmed during an appearance on the German music show Beat Club, which has been available sporadically on VHS and DVD.)

Les Légions Noires

Les Légions Noires (also known as The Black Legions in English, or simply abbreviated to LLN) was a group of French underground black metal musicians and their bands, centered mostly around the city of Brest, in Britanny. The bands involved limited their releases to very small numbers (often just enough to get to the other circle members), and distributed them among friends and close workers.

History

Possibly the circle was formed in the late 1980s, early 1990s, in response to the supposed Norwegian "Black Metal Inner Circle". According to a 2005 series in Terrorizer magazine on the history of black metal, "A bunch of corpsepainted characters, rumoured to be drawn from such acts as Mütiilation, Torgeist and Vlad Tepes named themselves the 'Black Legions' as a tribute to the so-called 'Black Mafia' Norwegian BM heroes Darkthrone and Burzum, who were supposedly ready to terrorize Christians a couple of years before." The first recordings of LLN members came about in the early 1990s, and their influence was acknowledged in the same issue of Terrorizer: "One should never count out France, primarily as the home of the inscrutably influential Black Legions of ridiculous rawness during the mid-90s."

Conny Plank

Konrad "Conny" Plank (May 3, 1940 – December 18, 1987) was a German record producer and musician. He was born in Hütschenhausen. His creativity as a sound engineer and producer helped to shape many innovative recordings of postwar European popular music, covering a wide range of genres including progressive, avant-garde, electronic music and krautrock. His immense catalog of work has greatly influenced modern studio production and engineering techniques.

As a musician, Plank is credited on albums by Guru Guru, Kraan, Cluster, Liliental and Os Mundi. He collaborated with Dieter Moebius on five Moebius & Plank studio albums recorded between 1979 and 1986. The Moebius & Plank sound foreshadowed techno and electronica and influenced many later musicians.

Style and influence

Plank and the bands he worked with in Germany had a strong influence on mainstream rock artists, some of whom were able to popularise aspects of his production technique and his highly distinctive sonic approach. In the 1980s the new generation of electronic pop bands were able to realise his ideas in performance as computerised electronic instruments became readily available.