Search - Michael Rother :: Chronicles 1

Not quite as great as Neu! but still very good!

Joerg Colberg | Northampton, MA USA | 06/10/2000

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Michael Rother is one of the few German musicians who had a lasting impact on rock music. It's somewhat funny that I discovered him only through listening to Sonic Youth and Stereolab and by then trying to find out more about that mystical band Neu!. Neu!'s albums are currently only available as bootlegs. So I ended up with copies of the original LPs on tape and with a reference to Michael Rother. Before being a solo artist, Michael Rother was a member of the very early Kraftwerk. He formed Neu! with Klaus Dinger around 1970. Neu! recorded three albums in the Seventies which are all amazingly good - they feature staccato-like drum beats (provided by Klaus Dinger) and very fine ambient guitar work by Michael Rother. Stereolab's LP "Transient Random..." includes a song I'd consider to be a rather shameless cover of one of Neu!'s songs. Anyway, Michael Rother was not very happy with the rock music Klaus Dinger wanted to make. He first formed a band called Harmonia which had one album out with Brian Eno. Later, he set up his solo work. This CD is a compilation of the solo work. Essentially, the music is rather similar to Neu!'s gentler moments which can be found on their 1975 release and which will hopefully be available again on an official CD sometime. The beats, part of which are provided by Can's Jaki Liebezeit, are still staccato-like but the whole affair is less tense and more relaxed. The guitar and electronica are less ambient-like than Harmonia's. Right now, Michael Rother's solo work is as close as you can get to Neu!."

Michael Rother-'Chronicles Vol. 1'(Purple Pyramid/Cleopatra)

Mike Reed | USA | 12/10/2003

(3 out of 5 stars)

"'Chronicles 1' is the first disc that I've ever heard from Michael Rother,who was one-time(make that short time)guitarist for Kraftwerk and then later was a key player in Neu! and Harmonia(see my reviews of all three of those band's CD reissues).'Chronicles Volume 1' features twelve tracks of some of Rother's prime material between 1977-93.The thirteen-minute "Tiefenscharfe" is nearly worth the price of admission alone.A couple of other standouts here were the snazzy electronic "Pulsar" and the acoustic "Flammenda Herzen" which I thought I heard some Floyd-like guitar.Not so much as krautrock here,as it's more like obscure in-depth thought-provoking guitar work.Believe that Rother STILL records and tours regularly to this day.Some of his music is a bit out-there,but very decent."

Well...it's not "Radio", for one thing...

DAC Crowell | 08/11/2003

(3 out of 5 stars)

"This is one of two compilation/overviews of Michael Rother's work. And while it deals with his tracks in their 'proper' lengths, it doesn't have the comprehensive sweep that the previous "Radio" has. That album being annoyingly out of print, however, this is what you get. Personally, I think this doesn't quite show off Rother's minimalist, streamlined, yet cheery style as well as perhaps some of the full solo albums does. Natch, it's a Cleopatra release...a label that might have some good taste every once in a while, but which chronically gets things like this wrong. Which is even more bothersome in that this compilation is intended as an 'intro' to American audiences that haven't discovered Rother's work from his imports.If you can turn up a copy of "Radio", grab that instead. While the tracks on there are nearly all edits, they're edits done by Rother and retain the overall compositional concept he had in mind for these works. And "Radio" gets deeper into each album and phase of his work than this does. Better still would be to just grab the individual solo albums in of themselves; you never go wrong with Rother's style of Krautrock, which is melodic, bright, often cheery but also sometimes quietly introspective in just the right proportion to keep things broken up for the listener. Any of them would be an improvement over this, which kind of leaves me feeling sort of shortchanged as a Rother aficionado."