- It was a crowd of hip music makers blended with the grey, male, Sydney rock elite of the 1970s that found its way to the Oxford Art Factory for Michael Rother's most recent appearance in the city. Rother is perhaps best known as the guitarist of Düsseldorf's Neu! and an early member of Kraftwerk, a band he thought wasn't really going anywhere in the early '70s and which he left as a result. Rother played in Sydney with another German musical genius: Dieter Moebius, an electronic wizard and a former member of avant garde outfits Kluster and Harmonia. The second guy to accompany Rother on stage was Hans Lampe, Neu!'s occasional touring drummer from back in the day.
First up was Melbourne's Baptism of Uzi, a band whose influences appeared to be a little too obvious. Call them a wedding band of the krautrock era and you're not too far off: Ashra Tempel-like guitar solos, accompanied by a wonderful moog synth and Tortoise-like bass structures. Not all that bad, but a little too decent for a crowd who came to see innovators, not copycats.
Photo credit: Ashley Mar
When the curtains finally opened for Rother, it was easy to see this was going to be krautrock, not rock & roll. No more than a sentence or five were spent on communication with the audience and drummer Hans Lampe must have been one of the most remarkable looking instrumentalists I've ever seen in my life. With reading glasses bungling off his beige-striped shirt, you would have never been able to guess his profession out of this stage context.
The best sounds of the night came from Moebius' machines, high paced proto acid leaving the speakers in a beautiful, warm manner followed by contemporary sounding analogue ambience. Minutes later, it suddenly became very easy to see where Holland's Unit Moebius got its name from. The original Moebius showed a room full of confused krautrock aficionados how adventurous, industrial, layered and dark techno can be. Unfortunately, Moebius appeared to be the only adventurous, forward thinking old chap of the gang.
Photo credit: Ashley Mar
Admittedly, being 25 years too young to have seen krautrock's geniuses play when they mattered, it was worthwhile to witness Rother perform classic songs like Neu!'s "Hallo Gallo." The Düsseldorfer proved still capable of creating a psychedelic mess on his guitar. And while Rother neither impressed nor disappointed, the big question for me was the drummer. He wasted quite a few songs with his trance-like, über-monotonous style, turning some tracks into proto psy-trance ready for the rubbish bin. Where the late Neu! drummer Klaus Dinger might not have been as adventurous as Tony Allen or Billy Cobham, he definitely had a certain touch that helped define the revolutionary sound of the band. The only thing Hans Lampe seemed to be capable of was hitting his kit hard at short intervals. Two things are possible: either Neu!'s original rhythm section featuring Klaus Dinger on stage was way more innovative, or this robotic, soulless drumming was considered revolutionary in the '70s simply because it hadn't been done by anybody else at that stage. In any case, Lampe's drumming shouldn't have happened on a public stage this far into the 21st century.
The majority of the audience wanted sound for their money, which resulted in an encore that lasted two songs too long—Lampe destroyed it with his rhythm stick. It marked the end of a bizarre night.