Neu!

Throughout the '80s and '90s, the mysterious German band Neu! (meaning "new," as in "New! Improved!") was a strong presence in avant-garde rock circles, partly because, at the time, only bootleg versions of their albums were available. Neu! gathered praise from Brian Eno, Sonic Youth, and Radiohead, while Stereolab owed a good deal of its sound directly to an outfit that started playing nearly 30 years earlier -- and still sounds futuristic.

Rother and Dinger met during their brief stay in an early version of Kraftwerk, but they wanted to crank up their own music machine. Although both were urban technophiles, the dreamy Rother and the sullen Dinger were not a stable partnership. They were, however, among the first to grasp the implications of the Velvet Underground's stark, stiff beat applied to rock music. Dinger lubricated the VU momentum and called the Neu! beat "motorik." The long, triumphant tracks of the first album, "Hallogallo" and "Negativland," combine Dinger's head-down drive with the stretchy, curling guitar figures of Rother and engineer Conny Plank's farsighted, ever-present distortion effects. Neu! is not a joyride; it's an anxious flight into an unknown tomorrow. Neu 2 builds on the debut for the first side, then collapses into trite tape-speed manipulations, used when the band had depleted its studio-time funds.

By Neu! 75, the band had separated into its components. Rother's tunes were pacific, Dinger's more pissed-off (a valuable old wad of protopunk). Neu! 75 still feels rambunctious, though. Rother, who went on to explore the limits of peaceful machin-ery on the first two Harmonia albums and eight solo releases (well selected for Chronicles, Vol. 1), dwindled into a figure of fascination for cultists and guitarists. Dinger's group La Dusseldorf does not have anything in print. But time will never catch up with Neu!: It remains the once and future band of tomorrow. (MILO MILES)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide