The German pioneers’ complete catalogue gets reissued later this month – but its members’ work extended far behind the Harmonia name. Here are 10 classics from across their careers
In 1969, Conny Plank, a young West German producer with a decent pedigree in the industry but a deep sympathy for a new generation of experimental musicians, managed to persuade a church-run studio to record an album he was making with Dieter Moebius, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Conrad Schnitzler, a musically untutored fellow extremist from the Zodiak Free Arts Lab in Berlin. In February 1970, they recorded a follow-up album entitled Zwei-Osterei (Two Easter Eggs). Its lengthy opener, Electric Music & Text, is a stabbing, pre-post-industrial, brutalist broadside of abrasive sound effects; these are not achieved on synthesisers, then prohibitively expensive, but the result of Plank electronically modifying the trio’s piano, guitar, cello, flute, percussion and organ playing, with fearsomely compelling results. Strangest of all about this track is the “Texts”, a religious tract read out by one Manfred Paethe as a condition of the band recording on church premises. Conrad Schnitzler later advised listeners not to try to decipher the text, not merely to attend to its Teutonic textures. “If you find out what it means, it sounds terrible.”
Related: Dieter Moebius, Krautrock pioneer with bands Cluster and Harmonia, dies at 71
Continue reading...by David Stubbs via Electronic music | The Guardian
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