Michael Rother

Hanna Bächer

A very warm welcome to Michael Rother.

[applause]

Michael Rother

Hello.

Hanna Bächer

What we just saw was that Kraftwerk minus Ralf, or was it Neu! plus Florian?

Michael Rother

That was a hipster band. Last year, we performed. [laughs]

Hanna Bächer

Williamsburg. Michael Rother Trio.

Michael Rother

That was the lineup of Kraftwerk for six months in 1971. Ralf Hütter had decided to go back to university, and that’s why I was invited to join the band and to perform live. Actually, this wasn’t one of the best concerts, quite the opposite.

Hanna Bächer

I thought it was quite good.

Michael Rother

Yeah, yeah, I know. Many people think they like it, but that was a huge TV studio with only four technicians, so we were playing, like, in sort of outer space. There was no feedback, nothing from the audience, and at the time, we were really dependent on communication with the audience. Anyway, if you like it, it’s fun.

Hanna Bächer

One of the reasons that you were dependent on interaction with an audience is that you’ve actually never recorded anything with Kraftwerk, at least not anything that got released. Why was that?

Michael Rother

The distinction is right. We did record, I think, about 25 minutes with Conny Plank as co-producer in 1971, but halfway through, that was already near the end of our collaboration, and we realized that in the studio it didn’t work. This was very wild, improvised music, and in the studio, we had the same clinical situation, and we didn’t really get far, so we decided to stop, and the tapes are probably in the vault with Florian Schneider.

Hanna Bächer

Would you like to rerelease that, or ever release it?

Michael Rother

I’m not so sure if that’s really worthy of a release, but for historical reasons, of course, it would be interesting to… Actually, maybe, I think most of you are musicians. At least that’s what I was told.

Hanna Bächer

That’s true.

Michael Rother

Okay. And so, some of you, or most of you may know that Kraftwerk deny, or they do not look upon the first three albums as the real Kraftwerk concept, which is really sad. After Florian Schneider left a few years ago, they considered the beginning of the real Kraftwerk era, Autobahn, which was, I think, released in ’74. And so the first three albums are kept under the carpet. I’m not sure, because there’s always demand by the audience to have those albums released, and there have been talks, and sometimes there have been promises, but I think it’s just their decision, of course, which has to be accepted. It’s an artistic decision, which is unfortunate because especially, I think, the third album has some really beautiful music.

Hanna Bächer

If you had to pin down the artistic differences between you and Klaus Dinger, who is on the drums and Ralf and Florian, how would you describe that?

Michael Rother

You mean between Neu! and Kraftwerk?

Hanna Bächer

Well, between the four of you when you still played together, what did you want that was different than those two?

Michael Rother

I didn’t get the question, really.

Hanna Bächer

I’m sorry, two Germans on the couch.

Michael Rother

The thing is, I jammed with Ralf Hütter but I never played as Kraftwerk with Ralf Hütter.

Hanna Bächer

Okay.

Michael Rother

That’s a different situation. I only played with Florian and Klaus. I guess when we started the project Neu!, after splitting with Kraftwerk, we did take some of the experiences with us, of course. And the first track on the first Neu! album, maybe some of you know it, “Hallogallo,” which is one of the most popular Neu! tracks, I guess, that features a very soft approach to this fast-forward-reaching music, which was our idea at that time; a music that sort of runs forward and has no ending, is aimed at the horizon, or beyond. I guess, that is part of an analysis, a conclusion, of the experiences we had with playing with Kraftwerk.

Hanna Bächer

What we just saw was in ’71, so you were 21 years old, I suppose.

Michael Rother

Twenty, yeah.

Hanna Bächer

Where were you living at the time, and what did you do musically other than being in Kraftwerk?

Michael Rother

I was living in Düsseldorf, and I was working in a mental institute, a hospital. I was a… What is it? A conscientious objector because I refused to serve in the military at the time. I’m not sure, how is the situation? Okay. Many nationalities, different in every country. These days, in Germany, I think you just have to send in a postcard, or maybe there isn’t even any draft anymore.

Audience Member

[inaudible]

Michael Rother

So we have like, a professional Army now without any material. [laughs] I’m not complaining. But at the time, it was very difficult because it was still the time of the Cold War. I guess, not many around here have any memories of their own of that time, which was a time of paranoia, world politics, struggles between West and East, East and West. And in Germany, there was always this fear of being invaded by the Soviet Union, by the Army, whether it was realistic or not. That was the situation, and so the German government made it very hard for people not to serve in the Army, do service, and you had to have good reasons. You had to prove that your conscience forbade you to serve in the military; that you were not able to pick up a weapon. At this very serious court hearing, they tried to trick you with trick questions, like, “What would you do if a Russian soldier storms into your flat and wants to rape your grandmother?” Or something like that. Yeah, it was really terrible, and we argued along for an hour. Of course, we didn’t get anywhere, and in the end, they just said, “Okay, you didn’t convince us, but anyway, here you go. We don’t want you in the Army anyway.” [laughs] They were probably happy to get rid of me. I would’ve just caused problems in the Army, making other people catch the idea of resisting that idea. Anyway, sorry, that’s a long excursion now. And so I was working in this mental institute near Düsseldorf, which was a wonderful experience, by the way, a very valuable experience to serve people with handicaps. I even had a band in that hospital for a while consisting of some patients and also some of the active people working there. So what was the question again, half an hour ago? That was what I was doing at the time. Okay, now I got it. One day, we were in the streets of Düsseldorf. There were so many issues we were fighting about with authorities. There was still the very conservative attitude and the structures, political and social structures, and we were opposing many of these ideas. There was one guitar player who was also working in that hospital, and he had an invitation to join a band called Kraftwerk in the studio.

Hanna Bächer

Had you heard of them before that?

Michael Rother

No, I didn’t know the music. I hadn’t heard the band’s name at all, and I thought it was quite silly.

Hanna Bächer

Did you think the same thing when you first heard the music, your first meeting with them and them playing music to you, did you think it’s silly or did you like it?

Michael Rother

I didn’t get that.

Hanna Bächer

When Kraftwerk first played their music to you?

Michael Rother

No, the thing was, I went into the studio. I picked up a bass, and I jammed with Ralf Hütter. I didn’t know anything of the background, it was just that it was a very special situation. Florian Schneider and Klaus Dinger were sitting in the studio in chairs and listening on a sofa, actually, listening, enjoying it, and Ralf Hütter and I, we also had a great time. That was, for me, the first situation where I discovered that I was not completely alone with my idea of creating a music that was different, different from Anglo- American musical structures that are mostly, or were mostly, based on the blues. That was one of the main ideas I had. I wanted to steer away from that. Of course, also, I tried to forget all the heroes of the time before, and to start a new way.

Hanna Bächer

Who were the heroes of the time before for you?

Michael Rother

Where should I start? Well, okay, maybe I should start in my teenage times. When my family returned from Pakistan, where we stayed for three years, that was ’63, the big time of the British beat explosion, I think was the name that was given, with all these exciting bands, Beatles, Kinks, Stones, and many more. I was completely blown away by that music. Many of my friends at school, they all wanted to start a band, play in a band, so that was the situation. It was really a very fresh movement of music, a big change happened in the early ’60s. Those were the early heroes. Later on, of course, also bands like Cream and Jimi Hendrix, whom I still love, I can say. I mean, I don’t want to be Jimi Hendrix, I wanted to be a copy of Jimi Hendrix for a while when I was a teenager, but I luckily understood that I would never be a better Jimi Hendrix than the original. So, those were the heroes of the ’60s.

Hanna Bächer

You also had a another band when you were a teenager called Spirit of Sound, right? What happened to them then?

Michael Rother

Unfortunately, the band fell apart when I told them that I was leaving.

Hanna Bächer

To go to Kraftwerk?

Michael Rother

Yes. Actually, the band was already at a dead end. We developed, we started in the mid-’60s by being really pure copycats, and then over the years, like I grew older, and we got more ambitious. We started improvising more, adding more of our own ideas, and tried to push the boundaries, the limits. But that came to an end. Of course, back then, I didn’t know what would happen ten years later, but I was getting more dissatisfied every month, and so it was like a lucky star that I met, ran into the Kraftwerk people, and everything changed from then on.

Hanna Bächer

You also left them, together with the drummer. You had first met Klaus Dinger in Kraftwerk, you weren’t friends before that?

Michael Rother

That’s right. I didn’t know any of those people. I’d never heard of the band, and I was working in the hospital, and when I was not working in the hospital I was with my girlfriend, so there was not any connection to the musical scene in Düsseldorf at all.

Hanna Bächer

Should we listen to “Hallogallo,” maybe, that you mentioned before? Released, I think, in 1973, is that right? ’72? Thank you.

(music: Neu! – “Hallogallo” / applause)

Michael Rother

Thank you.

Hanna Bächer

You have mentioned Conny Plank before who did record the never-released Kraftwerk stuff with you in the lineup, and he also recorded the first Neu! album. So maybe to the people who don’t know who Conny Plank is, introduce him?

Michael Rother

Wow, where should I start? I mean, we would all have gotten nowhere, I guess, without Conny Plank. He was so important. He was an innovative sound engineer who was willing to take risks with all these crazy musicians with no money, big ideas and no money in the pocket. The truth is, really, we owe Conny Plank so much it’s hard to express. I’m quite 100% sure that, especially the first Neu! album would never have gone that far without Conny’s contributions. I guess it’s quite difficult today to imagine with how little gear Conny Plank was able to create those soundscapes. Today, with all the electronic devices that at a finger’s touch add crazy effects, and which are used, of course, like Kaoss pads, maybe some of you know the Kaoss pads, which are great, but back then, if I remember correctly, and I’m quite sure that there wasn’t anything else but a tape machine that he used for delays. Just a stereo delay, one delay, and then a reverb chamber next door, and maybe a limiter or two for the drums, and everything else was just the result of clever manipulation, of thinking the right things, of memorizing the good elements, which were scattered all over the [recording]. Well, it was only eight-track actually, the first [recordings], but still, eight tracks. Because we recorded those songs without having a clear idea when we started, it was just like action painting. That’s an image I sometimes bring up because Klaus Dinger and I, we lay down a basic track. We went into the studio, Klaus played drums, I played guitar or bass… And each of us, we didn’t actually talk about music, but we just sat there, and then we inspired each other by adding overdubs. And Conny Plank added great inspiration by his thoughts, his recommendations. In “Hallogallo,” for instance, maybe you will have recognized that some of the guitars are played backwards, and so I was in the recording room doing an overdub guitar, and Conny Plank decided to turn the tape around, so everything was running backwards, and whether he knew it, I don’t know, or not… I love everything music that runs backwards or is slowed down, and even better, slowed down and running backwards. [laughs]

Hanna Bächer

I’m sure there are some people in the room that would play your songs with their stuff that has this element all the way through it.

Michael Rother

Yeah, it’s just the excitement of music running backwards, the… Of course, your ideas are also turned around, and something completely different happens. By the way, Jimi Hendrix did wonderful backwards guitars. Anyway, so when Conny Plank turned around the tape, that really pushed me and inspired me to record new melodies on top. Yes, Conny Plank worked for Kraftwerk, for Neu!, with Cluster, Harmonia, and later on with Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft, DAF, as far as I know. He was involved, from my point of view, in nearly all of the exciting new experimental rock music that came out in the early ’70s. Unfortunately, Conny passed away in 1987, but he really left a big, big mark in music, and… So, thanks to Conny.

Hanna Bächer

How much time did you actually have to record this first album?

Michael Rother

Not much time. Actually, we had four days to record, do the recordings, and then one week for the mixing, which we did in another studio. I already explained that we did not, or maybe I did not explain in detail… If you try to imagine the situation in the early ’70s, no multitrack of course, no computer at home enabling you to do sketches of the music. It was all inside our minds, and all I had was a tape cassette, mono or stereo, I don’t know, which I could use to just memorize maybe a melody, like the melody of “Weissensee” on the first Neu! album. Everything else was just a vision of music, and it happened on the spot while we were in the studio. And so, four days, you can imagine, with overdubs… It’s like running forward. It’s also a working method, like the track “Hallogallo.” Not much time to waste. And that, although, of course, we were limited by the lack of money. I would have loved to have four weeks back then, but that was just unrealistic. On the positive side, of course I had this pressure – maybe Klaus felt it too, I’m not so sure – but I definitely felt the pressure of the time ticking away, you know, the days running out. But on the other side, the positive side, this limitation forces you to sharpen your ideas and to come to a conclusion very quickly. Later on, we may touch that later on, when I started my own studio with equipment, and since then, the available time to record, to create your ideas and to record, is factually limitless, and hard disks and whatever are so cheap you can just make notes of every single idea. The problem or the danger is, of course, because you’re not forced to come to the conclusion and to make decisions, actually, you can get lost quite easily. It happens to me. It happens to many musicians I know. But back then, the limitations were there, and we knew, “Okay, now we have to get this song together and finish and then time is over.”

Hanna Bächer

I talked to some members of Can, and they said that overdubbing killed Can. So as soon as they weren’t forced to just go in the studio together and play one song at once to record it to 2-track, it was over, because the magic was gone, because you could redo everything, and they had their own studio, so limitless time. Did you and Klaus then practice outside of the studio? Did you play a lot together when you were not recording with Conny Plank for four nights?

Michael Rother

I think we didn’t even once make any music together outside of the studio. We tried to play live in ’72, and then I remember we played together in a small space that he had in his flat. But before we went into the studio, there was absolutely no way of playing, of creating the ideas. It was really happening on the spot.

Hanna Bächer

Was all that in Hamburg, or was it in Düsseldorf?

Michael Rother

The first Neu! album, actually the first two Neu! albums were recorded in rental studios in Hamburg, which was, of course, the reason for the clock ticking away. And the third Neu! album in 1974, Conny Plank started his own recording studio near Cologne, and then we had much more time, and much more tracks, which also created problems. Actually, the second Neu! album, which we recorded in ’72, late ’72, and early ’73, we recorded that on 16-track, and that caused these problems, which I already mentioned. Doing all these overdubs, the time just flies away. I don’t know how many of you know the story of the second Neu! album, which has two very different sides. The first side was what we were actually aiming at, but we spent so much time recording those tracks, that at the end of the week, we didn’t have music for the second side, and so that was the time when we had to make drastic measures.

Hanna Bächer

I might play “Super 78” to illustrate that.

(music: Neu! – “Super 78” / applause)

This track is one minute, 36 seconds long. Was that the exact time you had to fill?

Michael Rother

No, we did several experiments on that second side. The first decision was to use the two tracks that had been released a few months earlier on the only single Neu! recorded. Actually, Giorgio Moroder, who was in the first lecture, and Conny Plank suggested that we should record that single in Munich in Giorgio Moroder’s studio.

Hanna Bächer

The one that we just played?

Michael Rother

No, the original.

Hanna Bächer

The disco version.

Michael Rother

The original version.

Hanna Bächer

The original version.

Michael Rother

“Super” and “Neuschnee,” the two tracks. They were recorded in Giorgio’s [studio].

Hanna Bächer

“Super 16,” though. It’s the same track that we just listened to. Well, it’s the brother track of what we just listened to.

(music: Neu! – “Super 16” / applause)

Klaus, the lion.

Michael Rother

How did you like it?

Hanna Bächer

I would love to hear the Giorgio Moroder version of that.

Michael Rother

Giorgio Moroder only gave us the studio. We rented the studio. He was there, we met, but Conny Plank did the recordings. It was a very strange situation. I remember, it’s a very tall building in Munich. It was very famous at the time, Arabellahaus, and his studio was two floors, two stories below the surface of the earth. It was very strange to go down into that space with all these pipes and a long cellar running down the length of the house, and actually, we had to stop three times. We needed three takes for three-and-a-half minutes of “Super” because Klaus didn’t get enough fresh air, so he just nearly suffocated, and after a minute of beating the drums the way he did, in a very spectacular way, he just fell off the drum stool.

Hanna Bächer

There’s something really dangerous about this track because James Holden, who was here on Monday, said he once had a car crash because he listened to this track while driving, right?

Michael Rother

I have to refuse responsibility for that, [laughter] although I feel pity.

Hanna Bächer

In this first half of the ‘70s, you were working with Klaus Dinger as Neu!, but you also met two other really nice fellows who happened to have sat on this couch. Well, on another couch but on one of our couches before, and that’s Cluster, or as they say (German pronunciation] “Kluhster.” How did you first meet?

Michael Rother

It’s… No, I’m not going to do a Monty Python sketch now. [laughs]

Hanna Bächer

Oh, yes please, absolutely!

[laughter]

Michael Rother

There’s one about Miss Elk and the theory about the brontosaurus. Does anybody know that one? Don’t tempt me. [laughs] Anyway, may I interrupt you and mention that that’s what John Cleese as Miss Elk says at the BBC interview, very funny. Please check Monty Python’s Miss Elk theory about the brontosaurus because they are thin at one end, very thick in the middle, and then very thin at the far end. [laughs] Okay, sorry.

Hanna Bächer

That relates you meeting Cluster? How?

Michael Rother

No. No, no. I wanted to say, get back to that track “Super 16,” which Tarantino, maybe some of you may have even recognized that tune because Tarantino used it in Kill Bill Part 1. Tarantino is a big fan of Eastern kung fu films, obviously, and there was this Chinese film director in the ‘70s who used our music without contacting us, without clearing any rights.

Audience Member

[inaudible / names film]

Michael Rother

Wow, right. Up and down, all the music, Kraftwerk, Neu!, and maybe also Tangerine Dream. I’m not so sure. Tarantino, being of a fan of… What’s the name of the film director?

Audience Member

[inaudible] I can’t recall right now.

Michael Rother

Okay, but anyway, so that’s why Tarantino asked for, got permission to use that track, which is quite funny. When the evil guy shows up, that’s the flying guillotine, and this track is used in the scene where… What’s her name, the lady boss of the gangsters?

Hanna Bächer

Kill Bill fans in here?

Michael Rother

Anyway, before the killing starts, and she just appears on the balcony, and then… [imitates Neu! track] Okay, sorry. When did I meet…?

Hanna Bächer

Back to reality. You were in Kill Bill land for a bit. Back to West Germany, early ’70s.

Michael Rother

That’s right. After releasing the second Neu! album, Klaus and I, because I think I touched [on] that, we could work in the studio using the multitrack technique, of course. I could record several guitars, etc. and pianos and stuff, and Klaus could sing and do other instruments, and that didn’t work live, obviously. With one man at the drums and one guitar player. The sound was not satisfying. We were not the… What are they? The White Stripes? So we had this invitation to do a tour to Great Britain by United Artists, the label that released our albums in the UK, and we had this problem that we didn’t know any musicians who seemed suited. I mean, maybe now, looking back, it makes absolute sense because we tried to be different, so that’s the reason why we didn’t find any other people; we wanted to be different from everybody else. But then I heard this track on the Cluster album, the second, I think it was, called “Im Süden,” and I realized that there was something, there was a connection to my idea of melody and harmony. Do you have it on the [computer]?

Hanna Bächer

I might. I might have it.

Michael Rother

That’s quite fascinating. Conny Plank was, of course, involved, and so I decided to pay a visit to those two musicians, and I took my guitar along and visited them in the place in the country. Actually, the place where I still live these days, in the middle of nowhere in Germany. Yeah, that’s it.

Hanna Bächer

How does this place look like exactly? What is it?

Michael Rother

I’m not sure about the English expression. It’s a collection of houses. It’s not connected to any city. It’s outside. It’s right next to the river Weser.

Hanna Bächer

Now there’s stores, or is it literally just a few houses where people live in?

Michael Rother

No stores, no, no. You have to ride on a bike for 15 minutes or drive with a car to the next store, and it is very quiet, quite the opposite of Tokyo, Shibuya at least, and very green. So the view from my window is amazing. It never fails to have this magic on me. I just see the river, and of course, in different seasons, you have different lights all the time. Nature has different colors, and after the river, there’s only fields, and some kilometers away you have soft hills. That’s a very soothing atmosphere, very… It’s good for your soul, very relaxing.

Hanna Bächer

So you moved there and started doing music with them?

Michael Rother

Okay, well, actually, it was the other way around. Because I was so fascinated by the music, in the beginning, I jammed with Hans-Joachim Roedelius [of Cluster] only. He played electric piano, and his way of playing the piano with repetition, repetition, repetition… Going on like a loop, actually, but of course with some very clever… He wasn’t clever, it was just the result of the way he played with delay, etcetera; some movement in this pattern. But that was a perfect backdrop or combination with my guitar, and I immediately fell in love with that music, and it was so important that I decided to quit Neu!, quit Düsseldorf, and took my guitar and moved to that place, and we started the band Harmonia.

Hanna Bächer

Shall we still listen to a bit of “Im Süden”?

Michael Rother

Please.

Hanna Bächer

So that’s without you, that’s just Moebius and Roedelius.

(music: Cluster – “Im Süden”)

This goes on for another 11 minutes, but maybe we listen to something where you were… Actually involved in?

Michael Rother

How about a hand for Cluster? [laughs]

[applause]

Hanna Bächer

So you released Musik Von Harmonia with the band Harmonia, that consisted of you and Moebius and Roedelius in ’74, and this is a track called “Watussi.”

(music: Harmonia – “Watussi” / applause)

Who was in charge of that beat?

Michael Rother

Pardon?

Hanna Bächer

Who was in charge of that beat?

Michael Rother

I’m not totally sure, but it was on my drum machine. I had a very… It was the beginning of drum machines, they were actually used by, how do you call these musicians playing in hotels on their own, solo entertainer, and so they had a companion, and those machines, it was a Farfisa model. It sounded like [messily beatboxes], something like that. Very silly, of course, on its own. So you had to do something with it.

Hanna Bächer

What did you do?

Michael Rother

Erm… We chopped it up, slicing it.

Hanna Bächer

Like cutting tape.

Michael Rother

No, not on tape. We ran the sound of the drum machine through different small… We didn’t have sophisticated gear, of course, we were poor musicians, very simple gear, but… For instance, a delay, and then very important was a Schaller Tremolo. I’m not sure if anybody has heard of that. It was used in the late ‘50s and ‘60s by guitar players to do… [imitates guitar tremolo] Anyway, I’m not a technician, so I cannot really explain, but it changes the amplitude, so the sound disappears, and then it comes up again, and depending on the speed, you could change the speed of that tremolo, and if you found the sweet spot where it connected to the delay and the beat, the tempo of the beat, and of course, the wah-wah pedal, and… At other occasions, we also used fuzz boxes, so everything that chopped up the original silly sound was just welcome, and in that case it was the tremolo, I guess, with the wah-wah pedal and a delay. It’s a good example, that it is very special. Maybe I should also explain how we recorded because at the time, in ’73, when I joined the two guys and we started Harmonia, we had two Revox stereo machines, A77, I think, was the type. I think they’re still around. It’s like a cult tape machine. We played together, we recorded on one machine, and then we ran that through a small mixer and recorded and played onto that track and then recorded the result on the next. Of course, we had tape hissing with every generation lost, added, but we had to do it. There was no multitrack, of course, affordable multitrack at the time, so we did this ping-ponging style, and that’s how we recorded “Watussi” and most of that stuff on the first Harmonia album. There are some live recordings also, which were only recorded during a concert, and nothing was changed. But “Watussi” is a good example of all three of us adding their color, Moebius adding these… [makes noises] Moebius has this amazing ability of surprising people by…

Hanna Bächer

Giving a sh—, basically.

Michael Rother

No, no, he has very good taste, but he does not organize it. He just lets it happen, especially at that time, and sometimes it was terrible. All of us did terrible things from time to time, but sometimes it was slightly off, but when it was good, it was really great what Moebius especially contributed to the music and Roedelius played this piano, this organ sound, which just goes around in a loop, and… Maybe some of you know it better from musical theory, but I do not really understand where the pattern starts and where it stops, and that has been something that has always fascinated me, the idea of a loop, a repetition, something just going on and on and on.

Hanna Bächer

Do you think this has anything to do with you also growing up in Pakistan? Were you exposed to music back then that was played there that infected you with that idea of repetition?

Michael Rother

I’m pretty sure that being exposed to that magical-sounding music as a young boy, I was nine when we moved to Pakistan, and I heard these bands playing in the streets with, of course, harmonic scales, which I didn’t understand, but it was just this music that kept on going. It kept on going without starting really and definitely not with any end, so it was a music, an idea of endless music, and of course, with completely different harmonic approach. This idea is still with me, and it was, of course, part of my thinking when we did Neu! and Harmonia.

Hanna Bächer

On the other hand, you just talked about music theory. You did not have any academic or proper music school background, right?

Michael Rother

That’s right. I steered away from all theory. I’m sure my teacher at school would have accepted any bet that this guy would never become a musician. [laughs]

Hanna Bächer

You are able to read notes now, or not? Are you able to read notes?

Michael Rother

No, no. I can’t make head or tail. No really. I don’t need to read notes. For my music, it’s all in your ears and your mind and your heart, and what you don’t have there you don’t need on paper. But then, there are many ways to make music, so if somebody has the desire to learn to read notes, that’s fine, but for me, it was never a question. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to know also about theory. Actually, there’s one story, there was one musician in Düsseldorf with whom we tried to work, and he was at university learning theory, and he was so restrained, knowing all [musical theories], “You can’t do this. This is not allowed. You should not do this.” Maybe that was the wrong perception he had, but I thought, “No, I don’t need any restraints. I want to be free to make all the mistakes and all the decisions.” It’s all here [pats chest]. I don’t really need notes, and I do not miss that.

Hanna Bächer

Obviously, in this time in Germany in the early ‘70s, there were a lot of political changes, or people, not even in a political way but in a private way trying to live differently to what was the common idea of, I don’t know, having your small family and being employed in a safe job. Did such ideas of doing it different than society go into the music that you were doing?

Michael Rother

We were different, of course. You can’t separate that. We gave up this idea of doing an academic way, or a normal job. Of course, I was very fortunate, I must say, looking back because of the lucky circumstances of meeting the right people at the right time, and if I hadn’t run into the Kraftwerk studio, if I had decided to meet my girlfriend instead, I would probably never have met them, and everything would’ve been different, but Roedelius and Moebius… Roedelius is quite a bit older, he has a long history which I cannot really explain, but he had different jobs over the years, but I’m not sure whether he even had any education, but all that was left behind just to make music. And while I was still at school, I thought I’d maybe become a lawyer to help people. [laughs] That was the time of…

Hanna Bächer

Is that what a lawyer does? Are you sure?

Michael Rother

Yes, well, that was my understanding, reading Schiller’s Sturm und Drang period-books, pieces which really appealed to me at the time, and I thought, “Yeah, that would be something, help the people.” Then later on, I was fascinated by psychology, and I even started studying psychology, but it didn’t have a chance against music. Music was just too strong, the appeal, and because it was also made easy for me by the combination with Kraftwerk and then releasing the first Neu! album, I quit university, and… Yeah, for me, it was the right decision, definitely, being lucky.

Hanna Bächer

That’s while we’ll listen to another Harmonia recording that got recorded a few years later and features a quite rather famous guy.

(music: Harmonia & Eno – “Lüneburg Heath” / applause)

Michael Rother

Before you give it away, does anybody know the voice?

Audience Member

Brian Eno.

Michael Rother

Yeah, very, very clear and a very special voice.

Hanna Bächer

Yeah, that’s true. I quite like the bass sound too.

Michael Rother

Mm-hm.

Hanna Bächer

Did that get mixed right on-spot in Forst?

Michael Rother

Yeah, yeah, sure, we record that on my four-track. At that time, ’76, we’re talking about ’76 when Brian Eno accepted our invitation to come to Forst, which we had given him two years earlier when he came to our concert in Hamburg. It took him two years, but then strangely enough, at the time, Harmonia had already disbanded, so we in ’76, all of us quit Harmonia and recorded solo albums. But when Brian called and said, “Now, I would like to come and visit you,” and we…

Hanna Bächer

You pretended nothing happened.

Michael Rother

[laughs] I’m not sure if we pretended nothing happened, but of course we accepted that, and it was a very wonderful time. He stayed for maybe 11 or 12 days, I’m not so sure. He brought some blank tapes with him, and we had the machines, and a lot of time, we just went into the studio, jammed, played, collected sketches, moved on, drank tea, took walks, and played ping pong. He wasn’t that great. [laughs] Okay, sorry. And talking a lot. There was absolutely no pressure when we were together because there was no idea of releasing an album. It was just the idea of exchanging ideas, of spending a creative time together, and all of that was recorded on four channels, and sometimes only two of us were in the studio and Moebius was cooking or whatever, he’s a good cook. Sometimes all four of us in different combinations. I remember Brian brought his small… What was it? An EMS synthesizer. Does anybody know that one with a patch? Okay, and so he sent my guitar through that, which was a great, inspiring sound. Yes, that was four tracks. Four guys, four tracks. Each one had a track, and then off you go.

Hanna Bächer

What happened after the recording to the tapes?

Michael Rother

Um, yeah, that’s the funny part. He was on his way to record an album with David Bowie, I think it was Low in Montreux. And after that, it wasn’t totally fixed, but the idea was to continue the collaboration, and he would return, and because those blank tapes were now filled with music, he took the tapes along, and that was the end of what I saw of the tapes. Time went on. I had released Flammende Herzen, my first solo album, and was totally shocked by the enormous success, because I was used to people ignoring the music. Harmonia was a total failure, commercial disaster.

Hanna Bächer

For how many people did you play?

Michael Rother

Sometimes, there was this one occasion, which just tells you, there weren’t any promoters, or hardly any promoters, who wanted to give us a fixed sum, and so we had this venue in Northern Germany, and it was a discotheque, and the guy said, “Okay, you can play and take a percentage of the doors,” and then three people showed up. [laughs]

Hanna Bächer

How many percent did you get?

Michael Rother

I mean, now we can laugh, I can laugh, but at the time, it wasn’t funny at all because we had to repair the car. That was so much pressure. Harmonia was really a commercial disaster. Artistically, it was vital for my education, for my idea of developing the music, and I could not have recorded things that I did on Neu! ’75 or my solo albums without that collaboration, I’m quite sure about that. But this lack of success and lack of money in the end, made the quarrels which we had… We had artistic struggles, of course, because we were all three very different in personality and what we stood for, but for a while we just got together which led to great music. If you can’t pay the repairs for the car, etcetera, so after three years in summer of ’76, we decided to record solo albums and leave the project.

Hanna Bächer

This was also more or less the same time that Neu! disbanded as well after Neu! ’75, right?

Michael Rother

Yeah, I tried to make a distinction. Neu! never disbanded, really. Neu! was not a band like Harmonia. Neu! was whenever Klaus Dinger and I worked together. It’s an important distinction, really, to make, and so people tell me, “Oh, so you disbanded?” I always have to contradict and say, “No, we just stopped working together for a while.” And when I left Düsseldorf to start Harmonia, it was not that, “Okay, now I will never see Klaus again.” It was just, “I have to concentrate on this fascinating project,” and then one- and-a-half years later, we recorded Neu! ’75, which I wouldn’t want to miss in my biography.

Hanna Bächer

Should we listen to “Hero”? Is that a good song to…? Well, it’s certainly one of the most known Neu! songs from Neu! ’75.

Michael Rother

OK! Give it a blast.

(music: Neu! – “Hero” / applause)

Thank you, especially for Klaus, I guess. This was, I guess, one of the best examples of his creativity, his ability to express his emotions. He was very frustrated, very angry at the time, and I never shared those emotions, but I really appreciate and absolutely love the dynamics of that song, this rushing forward and stomping through the night. I have a very clear memory of the situation when Klaus went into the recording studio to do the vocals. I was sitting with Conny Plank at the mixing desk, and Klaus belted out these words, and we both knew this was the take, the first take. Klaus tried to record a second take, actually he did, tried to improve this vocal track.

Hanna Bächer

What is he saying?

Michael Rother

Oh, what’s the story? I think has girlfriend went away with her family back to Norway. It’s, “Back to Norway,” it’s not, “Back to nowhere.” Sometimes people misunderstood that. He was angry at the record company, “Fu-- the program, Fu-- the company, Fu-- the press.” That was Klaus. Sometimes it’s one way of dealing with reality or with opposition. I never shared that approach. I have a very different attitude to deal with opposition or with unfortunate situations, but Klaus drew creativity from his anger. It’s one of my favorite Neu! tracks of all, really. I think it’s a very clear and true expression.

Hanna Bächer

The solo stuff you started working on during that time, it’s the furthest away from this kind of like proto-punk or whatever you did with Neu!. I can’t quite understand how you could have the two very, very different energies at once. I mean, your first solo record is called Flammende Herzen, which translates to “burning hearts.”

Michael Rother

Yes. In a sense that you’re in love and you have strong emotions, which I had. My girlfriend was far away at the time, and somehow that melody came, just flew out of me, came out of me. For me, it’s totally natural. I don’t limit myself. I enjoy abstract music, I enjoy very rhythmical music, and also very melodic, harmonious music. This is all within the range of my musical expression, and I enjoy running forward, like playing soccer very fast, rushing to the horizon, and then also creating very soft and gentle music. That’s not a contradiction for me at all. It’s just all there.

Hanna Bächer

Was there a sense of irony even involved in calling the record Flammende Herzen, or humor, or was it a straightforward appreciation of your feelings?

Michael Rother

I know what you’re trying to say. You cannot translate it directly. It is, in a way, self-ironical, of course. The story behind that title is, I had this… What’s the English word for Scheerenschnitt? Something you only see in a silhouette, and that was some historic…

Hanna Bächer

Cut-out.

Michael Rother

Cut-out, yes, of maybe Jugendstil, [Art Noveau], and it was in my building. It was given to me by a neighbor, and it had flammende Herzen. It’s a flower, actually, in Germany called Tränendes Herz, like “crying heart.” I’m not sure if you have that flower in Japan, well, we’re not talking about Japan. We’re talking about the whole world. And I knew, of course, this is something that will probably confuse people because it was not cool, of course. It was quite the opposite of being cool, it was… But I didn’t care. I chose the title, and I remember the guy of the record company, the label that released my first solo album, Sky Records, he gulped at first, and he said, “Oh well, titles do not matter anyway.” [laughs]

Hanna Bächer

It did sell many, many copies. Here’s a track, and it’s with Jaki Liebezeit of Can on drums.

(music: Michael Rother – “Flammende Herzen”)

[comments] Sorry, I need to fast-forward to his drums.

Michael Rother

This was without Jaki, but actually, in the background… Yeah, okay.

[music continues / applause]

Jaki Liebezeit is a wonderful drummer. I guess most of you will know him. He’s just a pure magician at the drums. He didn’t need any rehearsing. We just went into the recording studio. I played guitar, and he picked up my intentions of drama, of moving on from the parts, and he just joined in and added some really wonderful drumming to that track, especially to “Flammende Herzen.” Amazing drummer, Jaki Liebezeit, still today.

Hanna Bächer

That’s true. This was your very first solo recording, so it’s in ’77, and basically when I look at, well, the many quite successful solo recordings that you did, there’s a time before Fairlight and a time after Fairlight. And I think, funny enough, Marley Marl has mentioned the Fairlight music computer here the other day. But I suppose most people don’t know what it looks like, so I might show a little video where it gets introduced from 1980.

[video: Fairlight demo]

“For three days, this display center at Center Point was filled with silicon chips and floppy disks and liquid crystal display units. Now, for my money, the star of the show was this, the Fairlight computer musical instrument. It’s $26,000 worth of electronic wizardry that’s been developed over the last five years by Kim Ryrie and Peter Vogel. Peter, show us the amazing things it can do.”

“Well, here we’re using a computer to actually generate the sounds that we hear, so instead of having vibrating strings or air controlled sound in conventional instruments, the computer generates the sound that we want, so the important thing is the ease with which the musician can define through the computer and this is just the sort of sound it was made for. Now, to make that easy, we’ve created a light pen system through this device here that allows you to draw directly on this television screen the harmonic curves of our sound.”

“Now, this is the picture of a sound. That’s what the sound looks like through the computer so that we know what the sound the computer’s thinking about. Would you like to show us what sound that is?”

“Well, this particular spectrum sounds like this.” [musical chords]

“Right, well, how does a composer work with the CMI Fairlight translator?”

“Well, I might select to change one of these harmonics, taking the fifth harmonic here, and I’m just working on that curve on its own, drawing a new one, so now that curve swells up towards here in there, and I’ll make the tenth harmonic through a similar sort of thing. And when I hit the compute command here, the computer’s now thinking about the curves I’m drawing here and calculating the sound that it fed into spectrum analyzer, would look like that, and now that sound would be different.”

[musical chords]

“Depending on how my harmonics are growing in the direction of the sound.”

“That’s the kind of experimentation that a composer would engage in, but if he wanted a particular sound, the sound of a church bell or a trumpet or a violin, what does he do?”

“Well, in those circumstances, we can simply plug the microphone into the machine and tell it, ‘Okay, computer, here’s a sample of a sound that I want. See what you can do with it.’ For example, with the human voice, we can say: blah! There’s the picture of that blah.”

“So that’s the track of that, and you can then put that through the unit?” [computerized “blahs”]

“That’s rather cute, isn’t it?”

“What about natural sound if you want to get the sound of…”

Hanna Bächer

Okay, let’s stop that here. It goes on like this, but you can look it up yourself if you want. I quite like that he says, “This is how the computer thinks the sounds look like,” or something with the computer.

Michael Rother

I haven’t seen this before. It looks a bit like Monty Python even.

[laughter]

Hanna Bächer

It’s all Monty Python for you.

Michael Rother

OK, should I tell the story about how I discovered that world, or do you want to hear anything else?

Hanna Bächer

If you’d like to.

Michael Rother

Okay. I was at a film festival in 1982 with a short film, and I went to see a film I didn’t know anything about. It was called Liquid Sky. Does anybody know that film? Yeah, very special film. I remember sitting in the dark room and not believing what I was hearing. The film was very crazy, but the music consisted of sounds I had never heard before, and so when I returned to Germany, I tried to find out where those sounds came from, how could you create those sounds? And… I ended up in Munich. There was the German dealer of Fairlight systems, and so I drove down to Munich and bought that unit, which actually cost a lot more than $27,000, although I don’t know what the exchange rate was at the time. It cost a fortune, it was impossible. You could buy a house at the time for that money. But because before that technology was available, there was no possibility for me to write music in the sense that I could make a machine play it, play the sounds, the melodies, the beats, etcetera, and also to add natural instruments, not “blah-blah” but like, orchestral sounds. By the way, the sampling rate was 8-bit, and it sounded like a dustbin, looking back now. Of course, it is something that has a cult following. Everything sounds pure and great. 8-bit is suddenly interesting again. Maybe I should dust it and try to get it running again. I still have it in my studio, and it inspired me to, at least on two albums, to… I spent months just learning how to use that instrument. The guy already mentioned some software, which you had to buy separately. One was called Music Composition Language. I think Harold Faltermeyer might have mentioned that. You had to enter all the data and semicolon, brackets, semi-brackets, the round brackets, and everything meant something different, and for each note, for each single note, how long it should last, how loud it should be, etc. That, of course, took a lot of concentration and fun. You had to be excited about the possibilities to spend hours and days writing that mathematical stuff, and then some of the best things happened when I made some mistakes programming. When I played back, suddenly something completely different happened, and I thought, “Whoa, this is even better.” That was the result of programming on the Fairlight.

Hanna Bächer

Shall we listen to a bit. This is “Palmengarten.”

(music: Michael Rother – “Palmengarten” / applause)

Michael Rother

Thank you.

Hanna Bächer

Doesn’t sound much like semicolons.

Michael Rother

Yeah, of course. That was just the way to do it. It was still emotional, and it was a complex thing, and because of the perfection on one side, I made sure that I added enough handmade music, like played my guitar, which of course had all the errors, slight errors and inaccuracies, and the combination, I think, worked quite well. You can tell me if you like it or not, but you don’t have to. [laughs]

Hanna Bächer

I’m actually quite into it, in all honesty.

Michael Rother

Well, the funny thing is, just a few days ago, I got an email from my friend Aaron Mullen of Tall Firs in New York, and Steve Shelley had written him, “Hey, have a look at this, Iggy Pop played “Palmengarten” and two other Michael Rother tracks on his BBC playlist.” Iggy Pop, of all people. You know Iggy Pop? Yeah, OK.

[laughter]

Hanna Bächer

How did you feel when [Ciccone Youth] released this “Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening to Neu!”? I think it was ’88.

Michael Rother

Was it ’88?

Hanna Bächer

I think so.

Michael Rother

I probably didn’t hear about it until a few years later. I didn’t know the band, and I think, “Hmm, that’s strange,” but that was the time. I mean, we don’t have enough time to go into all these details, but in the ‘80s, Neu! was completely gone. Nobody was interested in Neu!, Harmonia was gone all the time, and so the echo came from abroad, from people like Stereolab, who sounded a bit like Neu! and also Can and were very successful with that sound, and also people like Sonic Youth. Of course, David Bowie later, or maybe even earlier, he mentioned that he especially liked “Hero” and “After Eight,” and I guess we didn’t mention that, that he wanted me to play on his album in Berlin, which mysteriously didn’t happen, but we don’t have the time now to go into all that anyway. Yeah?

Audience Member

[inaudible]

Hanna Bächer

It’s, all right, for you especially. [laughs] I already mentioned that Brian Eno came to visit us, and we worked together, and then I think he produced David Bowie’s albums then. Anyway, I wasn’t surprised when [the] next year, in summer, I got a telephone call by someone asking me, “David Bowie would like you to join him in the studio to record his album. Would you be interested?” Then I said, “Okay, yeah, that sounds nice. I would like to talk to David, of course, about the details.” David and I chatted for a long time. We were totally excited, talking about details, instruments and so on. Then, the next person to call me was one of his management. I think I surprised them. The English always were very professional, and I was a hippie sort of and not very professional thinking. I was just into music, and I told the guy, “Well, as long as the music is great, don’t worry about money. We will solve that later.” I think that was an answer that really frightened that manager. He would have liked me to say, “I need this amount and then I will sign it, and you will have no problems.” In a way, I understand that, but then also there was, in the background, which was revealed much later that his sales were going down. The Berlin period, which for quite a while now is in high esteem, most people think that that was his most creative period… But at the time, the fans were not happy with his development, they didn’t follow him, so the sales were dropping, dropping, dropping, and I guess the management decided that it was a very bad idea to invite another one of these crazy German experimentalists who might even have evil influence on the music. [laughs] So the next thing that happened was that I read that in David Bowie’s interviews later, 2000 or 2002 in Uncut magazine in England when he said, “Oh, I invited Michael Rother, and unfortunately, he turned me down.” I was told David had changed his mind. Someone, a guy in the middle, made the decisions for us and prevented that collaboration from happening. So, that was the David Bowie story in the short, my version.

[laughter / applause]

Hanna Bächer

Shall we give it up to questions, if there are any?

Audience Member

That was already the first question.

Hanna Bächer

That was already the first question. You broke the ice.

Michael Rother

May I just add some information, because we somehow steered away from that. Brian Eno went away with the tapes. The tapes were considered lost for quite a while. Ten years later, or 15 years later, we always remember that phase, which was very creative, and I had a small tape with rough mixes I had done before he left with the originals on my cassette. Then, Roedelius visited Brian Eno in London and with his permission looked in Brian’s archives and came up with one or two of the tapes, and so we could release Harmonia & Eno Tracks & Traces. That was the first version, and the current version, which is on Grönland Records, features three additional tracks, which I found on my cassette, which had so many sketches that were worth showing, and so I was really happy that we could do these additional tracks to that album as a document to that collaboration.

Audience Member

So initially, why didn’t it come out?

Hanna Bächer

I don’t know. Things just, everyone took a different direction. I guess David was… I don’t want to be unfair. Maybe he was happy with having picked up the inspiration from our collaboration, and he was not bent on releasing anything, so it was just put onto a shelf. I was very busy recording my solo albums, which as you already said, really were so wonderfully successful that I could buy my own studio gear in ’79, and I didn’t think about it for quite a few years. But it was always in the back of my mind, like, also one recording Harmonia did, a live recording, which rested in my archive for maybe 35 years. We agreed that… We already mentioned that we were poor, and blank tapes was so unbelievably expensive for Revox tape machines, so we had to erase all the time. Everything that was not totally convincing was erased and used again, but this one live recording from 1974 was left untouched because we all knew that was something special. It was probably the best live concert, the best concert Harmonia ever did. That came out on Grönland as well in, I think, 2007 maybe. Harmonia Live 1974, which is a great document, in my view, and it adds some more elements, some colors to the catalog of Harmonia.

Hanna Bächer

Shall we listen to a… Oh, there’s another question.

Audience Member

I think that was actually my question. You said a bit about that you were working on a play right now or musical, and I was wondering if you had something completely… Didn’t you say that? Oh, was that the last? Oh, that’s right. Okay, well, then you didn’t say anything about it.

Michael Rother

Well, I’m going to Hollywood. [laughs]

Audience Member

Oh, sorry, I was just like…

Hanna Bächer

It’s about time. You’re the right age.

Michael Rother

[laughs]

Audience Member

Then we did not talk about this. Do you have anything completely fresh or new stuff you’re working on that we could hear?

Michael Rother

We will hear, at the end, I think, after we finish talking, we will hear a remix I did recently for a British band, which I rather like and people seem to appreciate very much, which will be out in the near future. Then there’s also a documentary about my work, my person. A photographer from Germany has been following me and us to the concerts in the last months, and he has tons of footage, and we want to go through that when I get back to Germany. There’s so much work waiting. Time is always limited, although I have so much time, but being also… I started a record label, my own record label in ’93, when no company wanted to touch my music. [laughs] In the end, I was so frustrated after endless discussions with record labels, with people from record companies who, in the beginning, there was always someone who was excited, but in the end, the marketing people, there was always a negative decision. And so in ’93, that was hard work for a musician without any experience, but I just decided to release my music on my own label. Anyway, then I have to take care of so many things. It’s carrying my history around me, which has, of course, benefits, but also there’s a lot of work to do. I mean, Neu! is always in discussion. Harmonia, we’re talking about releasing a box set of Harmonia. There’s always something to decide for Neu!, which is requests for usage in films, etc. So, busy times, but I’m not complaining, really.

Audience Member

I have one more question. We were talking about how fast it was to make music back then because you were just limited with time or like just equipment. How productive are you now? How long did it take you to do this remix that you’re going to play for us?

Michael Rother

I think that happened quite fast, actually. The people who asked me to do the remix were surprised that I haven’t done remixes before. Actually, I did one for Paul Weller, but that wasn’t released because in the end, we couldn’t agree on the version somehow. But he approached me recently again and asked whether I could do some production for him, but I was busy with that other project at the time, so I had to turn him down. With that “Boxed In” remix, when they sent me that piece of music, there was a lot in the track, to be quite honest, which I didn’t like, but there was something in the feeling and the vocals which appealed to me. And I had this idea I could do something, and so I had all the liberties, and I just left out maybe 80% and just took the drums and the vocals and added my own guitars, and then I was very happy. I just recorded every guitar only once, just to give you an idea. I didn’t edit anything. I just did four or five or six guitars just one after the other, and then that was it.

Audience Member

So like a day?

Michael Rother

Well, I did work longer, to be honest. First, you get all the tracks, and then you have to copy them to your computer, and then you have to analyze them, so that does take longer than a day. But the process, like I said, the real creative process like recording my guitars, new melodies, etcetera, that was just a very spontaneous process, and I was happy about that. Whenever I have the chance, I prefer to do a recording only once. I don’t always succeed, but most of you will understand what I mean. It has a special magic, the first recording, with all the errors, etcetera, and the inaccuracies.

Hanna Bächer

Shall we maybe, before we listen to the remix, quickly listen to this clip of you playing at ATP [Festival] because I think it’s quite interesting how you sound like live at the moment. It’s a bit bad quality, so…

[video: Michael Rother live @ ATP Festival]

What you’re doing here is mostly mixing and playing sounds?

Michael Rother

Actually, I have to first tell you where that music comes from. That is a track from Harmonia Live 1974, which I, of course, changed and added new instruments. The audio is, of course, terrible. It’s just a document. Some fan did a video and put it on YouTube. The musicians are the band Kamera. Actually, you only see the drummer. He plays standing up, and on the right, it’s my friend Aaron Mullen on bass, who played on “Hallogallo” in 2010. Next year, if I manage to do the US tour, which I’m discussing with agents, he’ll be part of the team. Yeah, that was ATP 2012. Last year, I played with a different lineup at ATP. Actually, do you know ATP, have you heard of All Tomorrow’s Parties? Yeah. It was a wonderful series of concerts. Barry Hogan and his partner, Deborah Kee Higgins, invited me for the first time in 2005 to play, and Josh Klinghoffer, who’s now with the [Red Hot] Chili Peppers, joined me. My friend Ben Curtis, who unfortunately passed away last year, who became quite well-known first with Secret Machines and then with School of Seven Bells, wonderful music. Later on, I played for ATP in other countries, in Australia, America, Spain, with Harmonia even and also “Hallogallo” and with my project, Michael Rother Performs the Music of Neu! and Harmonia and selected Blah-Blah- Blahs, very short title. Anyway, unfortunately, they lost too much money, and so they had to stop ATP. It was the final edition I played on. Quite a few tears were spent there by the team. Lovely people. I really liked the whole family and the idea behind that kind of festival; not ripping off the people and the musicians and the festival-goers, living more or less together on a campsite and meeting, very casual. Yeah, I hope they manage to survive with the new activities. It would be a real shame to lose people of that type, not only the money-making people. I mean, obviously, money was always involved, but it was not at the heart of the matter, and that’s very important. That’s what we had in common. I guess I don’t mind making money, but it should never be the main reason for what you do. Otherwise, you lose the magic, the idea.

Hanna Bächer

Talking about meeting, you’ll be around until Friday morning. You’ll be in the building here tomorrow if anyone wants to approach you.

Michael Rother

Yeah, just talk to me. [sings] Just talk to me.

Hanna Bächer

If there are no more questions, I will go into that remix that is yet unreleased, so we play it right at the end of our thing just for you.

Michael Rother

Yeah.

Audience Member

When you did the remixes, when you were asked or commissioned to do the remixes after you did the reissue in 2009, when Grönland put out Tracks & Traces, you commissioned like people like Shackleton to do remixes.

Michael Rother

Oh yeah.

Audience Member

Was it your decision? Was it the labels decision? Do you like Shackleton, the other people that were involved in those remixes?

Michael Rother

The remixers were chosen by Grönland, and we were asked whether we accepted the remixes for release. That was the way it was handled. To be honest, I don’t even know those names. I’m really the worst-informed guy you can imagine, always too busy with my own stuff.

Audience Member

Just out of curiosity, what contemporary bands or music do you listen to? Because I listen to your music, so I just want to know what you listen to.

Michael Rother

Bach. Does that count? [laughs]

Audience Member

I don’t know if that fits.

Michael Rother

Django Reinhardt. No, contemporary… I do not spend too much time listening to music, other people’s music, to be quite honest. I have to concentrate, and sometimes I stumble upon things that I really like. For instance, the Fu-- Buttons, we played at the same festival in Poland in August, and I’m friends with those two guys. They are wonderful people, and they blew me away every time when I see them live. I think you have to see the Fu-- Buttons live, and it’s amazing.

Audience Member

Thank you for speaking. It means a lot.

Michael Rother

Thank you! For listening. I hope something made sense.

[applause]