The Pioneering Evolution Of Hans-Joachim Roedelius :: Interview
What was your childhood like growing up in Berlin just as the Second World War had began? When did you first begin to resonate with music and was this something that was relevant around your household during your more formative years?
Until the first bombings in Berlin, it was very peaceful and relaxed, a good life, a very independent life, very supportive to learn how to get along as a child like me. Music was not around my house in those years, but because I was hired to act as a child actor in some films by the famous former UFA-studios (the german equivalent of Hollywood), it was most interesting to meet up with famous actors such as Brigitte Horney and Willy Birgel, Zarah Leander, Marlene Dietrich and Theo Lingen.
Who were some of your earliest influences, and when did you realize you wanted to pursue a life in music? Your career is simply magnificent and remarkably prolific. How did you initially meet your bandmates in the groups Harmonia and Kluster, and what ultimately led to the decision to start these outfits?
Haps Hash and the colored Coats, Third Ear Band, Captain Beefheart, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Brian Eno and Roxy Music and others. Conrad Schnitzler and Dieter Moebius, along with myself, founded first “Kluster” and the “Zodiak-Club” in Berlin, and when Schnitzler left Kluster, Moebius and I continued as “Cluster”, with a kind of music that WE liked much better than “Klustermusik” which was dominated soundwise from Schnitzlers by about contemporary music which was harshness, not at all warmth and friendlyness.
What was that initial chemistry like between everyone, as well as the overall process and approach to writing and recording Harmonia’s legendary debut in 1974, “Musik Von Harmonia”?
Just curiosity, interest in adventuring in unknown sound-territories to become aware that we tone to learn a lot to create relevant music with a new but easily understandable tone-language. “Musik Von Harmonia” came to life somehow accidentally, by the way, whilst trying to live to see whether we would be able to do as this sort of newcomers we were at the time.
Having worked with the likes of Eno, your longtime friend and bandmate Dieter Moebius, as well as releasing an explosion of solo material with titles like: “Durch Die Wüste”, “Selbstportrait (Teil 1 Sanfte Musik)” and countless others, what did you ultimately want to achieve as well as express with these specific bodies of work? Any new projects on the horizon? Is there anything else you would like to share further with the readers?
It just happened, fortunately, not on purpose, but for joy and with great fun. There are lots of projects that I am taking care of at the very moment. Music for films such as a documentary about Andy Warhol and 'War Machine', which is a film featuring Brad Pitt that should have received many awards, including an Oscar.
“Wir Sind Machines/We are Machines” (3 X Series) :: Director’s Notes
Wir Sind Maschinen is the compelling story of how a collection of misfit German musicians, united in their desire to break free of the past, miraculously created a template for the sound of our (post)modern world. Some of the music is familiar to millions and has critical raves attached: Kraftwerk have been called “The most influential group in pop history” and Cluster 1971 named as one of the “Hundred Records that Set the World on Fire”. These bands, along with groups like Can, Faust, Neu! – have been passed down through the years as tokens of cool and major influences on subsequent generations of musicians. Art-rock superstars such as Radiohead and Bjork acknowledge their debt to these artists. WSM tells the story of music and shows how, like all the best art, that music was also a divining rod which detected the strange and thrilling outlines of The Future. The story’s told in three parts over three episodes.
Part 1 :: Rebels
In which we see that the creative energy that comes from despising the world of your parents and grandparents was seldom more concentrated than in West Germany in the late 60s. The energy of American rock and roll was one way out of cultural self-loathing, but American political power was despised just as much as the German ancestors’ recent history. “The Americans have colonized our subconscious” says Rudiger Vogler before slapping on another classic rock and roll vinyl in Wim Wender’s 1974 film ‘Kings of the Road’. In this intense, pressurized, colonized, cultural situation, the barriers between rock music and fine art were blurred. A fresh start was needed. Time for something exciting and new. In countercultural spaces like Berlin’s legendary Zodiac Free Arts Lab (founded by future members of Cluster and Tangerine Dream), musicians began to experiment with sounds fit for a new world. Stockhausen’s formal experiments with found sounds and electronics were picked up and developed and combined with the communal, liberating energy of the times to create astonishing new possibilities for pop and rock music. It starts a musical dialogue that continues for decades to the present day.
Part 2 :: Soul Machines
In which the German musicians’ influence discretely goes global. Brian Eno visits the group Cluster. They experiment. Eno took the results to David Bowie in Berlin, who used them to make his best records. Turned on by Bowie’s new sound and seeing the cult-y ‘Krautrock’ bands as non-American, alternative rock and roll, the New Wave discovers German influences. American band Devo (perhaps the biggest and strangest of the American New Wave acts), got Connie Plank (Producer of Cluster, Neu) to produce their debut album. In the early 80s, Thatcherite England, post-punk musicians took the electronics and the cold, danceable, endless groove (and sometimes also take Connie Plank…) and became international pop stars (The Eurythmics, Depeche Mode, New Order). A relationship between the new sounds and the new world starts to come in focus: the new future-facing groups are coming from suffering, post-industrial areas (Detroit, Manchester…) and are feeling an artistic affinity with music made in devastated/reconstructed, future-facing West Germany. The analogue world is starting to be replaced by the digital.
Part 3 :: Tear Down the Walls
In which new pop music and a new world order combine. In late 70s America, the rise of new, electronic, danceable music seemed like the soundtrack to the decline of American industry and identity. It threatened conservative culture so much that huge, symbolic record-burning/Disco Sucks events occurred which now look like some prefiguring of MAGA rallies. But over the next decade, in post-bankrupt New York, samples of Kraftwerk’s clean, robot-beats became part of Hip Hop’s DNA. In post-industrial Detroit, the motorik beat of the German groups was mixed with the futurism of the English electro-pop bands in clubs to give birth to techno, while in Chicago Electro sounds were funkified with the loping influence of Can’s track ‘Halleluhwah’ at the birth of House music. As the new dance genres took people up, Ambient music provided a sonic space to unwind and come down in. Again, the German groups had set a template (Harmonia’s innovations passed through Bowie’s ‘Berlin’ records and onwards. As these new musics – Hip hop, Trance, Techno, House, Ambient - began to displace rock as the pop soundtrack of the world, the astonishing event of Germany’s reunification created a new capital city which quickly became the world capital of Electronic Dance Music. American producers and DJs who created new musics shaped by the German sounds of the 70s have now come to the new Germany to soundtrack the ongoing party in the new capital reborn at the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today, the AIs begin to make their own music. Meanwhile, the surviving originators of the music play on. Notes on style WSM will feel like a road trip. Taking cues from Kings of the Road and from the motorik beats, the series will use images of POV driving as a repeated, connecting motif. A drive through music history and cultural history: 16mm newsreel roads, Super 8 home movie roads, VHS roads, iPhone roads, AI generated roads…
The entirety of the music that we hear in the series may seem to derive from a playlist on the screen of a Tesla’s entertainment system as it drives on the autobahn between Düsseldorf and Munich. WSM will have a strong production design. German design in the late 60s and early 70s was at a similar high point to its rock music. From Frei Otto’s Munich Olympic stadium to Dieter Rams Braun alarm clocks, Germany looked more-than-modern. By using carefully researched corporate archive film and video as part of its mix, WSM will pay careful attention to the way the world looks and the way that the appearance of the world has changed. Similarly, when WSM shows interview shots, the interview will have a clean, simple, consistent design look perhaps derived from industrial design. WSM will draw on unique sound and image archives from the original artists themselves to connect the personal lives of working musicians with decades-long cultural movements. WSM will have contemporary use current music by still-active German musicians from the 60s/70s/Episode 1-era as a soundtrack between the era-specific pop tracks. Hans-Joachim Roedelius describes his current work as “cross-wiring Karutrock’s brutalist modernism with …weird electronica … folk, jazz and classical voices.” We hope to be able to film and record surviving members of the original (episode 1) music generation playing new music now and use this material as a soundtrack and repeated reminder that, as the story in WSM speeds on down the technologically-evolving road, behind the story are living, aging, working human beings. Working through their lives in human ways. They’re not machines.
