“I don’t feel old,” the guitarist Michael Rother says from his home in Germany. “Maybe because you’re young you’re unable to understand, but there’s like a gap. The time has elapsed, it’s been 40 years or something, but my memories are still fresh.”This isn’t surprising from a musician who describes his career and sound as one of “fast-forward movement.” Musically, there has been little time to look back for Rother, a former member of seminal bands such as Kraftwerk and Neu! These groups were arranged together under the banner of Krautrock — a name most associated with despise — that emerged out of Germany in the early 1970s and rejected then prominent modes of rock music being made in the United States. There is no single sound to Krautrock, as the music historian David Grubbs describes in his essential book “Future Days,” but what these groups had in common was music that sounded “both futuristic and as old as the very forests and hills.”No group came closer to realizing that description in both sound and practice than Harmonia. What began as a side project between Rother, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, and Dieter Möbius (the former two recorded before and after under the name Cluster), Harmonia represents, in hindsight, a perfect melding of the different sounds coming out of Krautrock: the clash and clang of the city streets and the peaceful ambience of the countryside. They only lasted for four years, but all the material they recorded during that time — two proper albums, a collaboration with Brian Eno and a live album released decades later, and a new collection of previously unreleased material — is available in a new box set, which was released Grönland Records on October 23. Rother met Roedelius and Möbius at a concert in Hamburg in 1971, when he was playing with Kraftwerk. It was a double-bill, and Kraftwerk let Cluster play first. “People hated their music,” Rother remembered with a laugh. “When Cluster started with the very soft, abstract music, people rushed the stage. I was afraid that they would get a beating. People unplugged the speakers.”But Rother was impressed by their defiant stance, and later, after hearing some of their first albums, noticed a similar approach to harmonics and melodies. He initially thought of bringing them in to play in a live version of Neu!, and in 1973 went out to visit them at their home in the small village of Forst. He was immediately intrigued by what he calls the “exchange” between his guitar of the distorted and delayed piano of Roedelius. “It was a special sound. I returned to Dusseldorf, and six weeks later I moved to Forst. That’s where I still am.”Forst plays a special role in the formation of Harmonia. Rother talked about the exceptional acoustics — “you hear birds 100 meters away, you hear very soft sounds in the distance” — but said, more importantly, that it represented a freedom they could never have found in a city. “One of the first things I remember I could do [in Forst] was I took a sledgehammer and removed a wall between two parts of a room, to have a larger space,” he said. “That was an act of freedom, it was possible to create your own living space, to take liberties you would have never been able to in the a rented city flat.” The three members took this freedom to the stage. “It was improvised music, which did not have a real structure,” he said. “After 10 or 15 minutes, we would start to think we can’t go anywhere else with this thing, this has to come to an end. That’s how these songs developed.”I returned to what Rother had told me about his memoires of their period of his life, and how it still feels present in his mind. “After many years or not listening to these recordings, and I’m not boasting, I know every note, every sound,” he said proudly. “Maybe painters have the same kind of memory for colors and architects have the same kind of memory all the elements of a building. But emotionally it’s also very close.”The entire history of Harmonia doesn’t exist in the past. The three got back together briefly in 2007 for a few reunion shows, and Rother played with Möbius, who passed away this past summer, off and on over the years as a duo. The three all recorded large bodies of work following their work in Harmonia. “If you look at the direction we all took, we’re still sort of connected,” he said. But the reason for this release, he said, is to achieve something he always hoped for the band. “I was very, very frustrated that Harmonia did not get any recognition at the time. It has taken so many years for people, for audiences, to catch up with that kind of sound.”
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