A new Teutonic boom is injecting a sense of burbling excitement into fin de siecle art rock. Fueled by the work of Seventies kraut rockers Faust, Can and Neu!, as well as Kraftwerk's timeless knob twiddling, young German bands such as Kreidler and To Rococo Rot are creating playful fusions that are anachronistic and futuristic at the same time.

Kreidler -- drummer Thomas Klein, bassist Stefan Schneider, and electronic noodlers Detlef Weinrich and Andreas Reihse -- hail from Kraftwerk's Dusseldorf stomping ground. On their second album, Appearance and the Park, they update kraut rock's analog manifesto to include new technological blips and cutting-edge referents that draw upon everything from turntablism and the perky prose of Japan's Banana Yoshimoto to the horror flicks of Italian director Dario Argento. The result is a soundtrack for the urban animal's befuddled daily life, laced with contradictions and driven by a sense of impending cataclysm. On "She Woke Up and the World Had Changed," cuddly programmed keyboards are threatened by a live drummer's overpowering beats; on "Venetian Blind," mechanized rhythmic order duels with what sounds like an anarchic theremin, wailing in a weird tremolo.

To Rococo Rot -- the brothers Robert and Ronald Lippok and Kreidler's Schneider -- favor sweeping, intricately constructed panoramas. Their third album, The Amateur View, employs chilled-out ambient arrangements made out of synthesized sound beds, with melodies that flutter past like wistful, windblown confetti. "A Little Asphalt Here and There" takes listeners on an aural stroll so immediate, it's almost tactile -- past sites of hissing white noise, through valleys of murmuring synths, across bright patches of chattering drum machines. On "Greenwich," a typewriter leads a chorus of free-jazz-inflected, spaced-out keyboards.

With electronic music growing ever duller and more detached, the analog optimism of Kreidler, To Rococo Rot and their peers -- Schneider TM, Mouse on Mars and Tarwater -- feels like a warm blanket. It's the soul of the new machine, as comforting as it is gorgeously strange. (RS 819)

NEVA CHONIN

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(Posted: Jul 27, 1999)