Harmonia
Musik Von Harmonia
(Brain Records 1974)


The left side of my brain tells me the world doesn’t need another Krautrock album review. Brian Eno, no less, called Harmonia, “the world’s most important rock band” and my left-brain flinches at the thought of writing about anything that comes from an over-exposed musical genre and a band with such a high recommendation. But the right side of my brain vanquishes the reflexive estimations of its opposite side and with all its subjective audio processing declares unadulterated love for Music von Harmonia. So much for my linear reasoning, but then again, who appreciates an album logically?
Harmonia’s debut album used to be hard to get hold of. Various bad mixes have appeared as bootlegs and imports and I ended up borrowing an early version of the CD off of a friend for about a year before they remembered I had it and asked for it back. Harmonia were a super-group of sorts, made up of the members of Cluster (Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius) and the guitarist from Neu! (Michael Rother) long before the term became associated with mulleted middle-aged baby boomers and charity concerts. By the time I came across Harmonia I was pretty familiar with Neu! ‘75 and Cluster’s Zuckerzeit, the two albums directly informed by this debut, and like most of my initial Krautrock discoveries, the mechanical modernism of Musik Von Harmonia sounded like it had been beamed in from an alternate contemporary sphere and not an era sometimes associated with men with beards wearing blue eye shadow (1). The synthesis of what seemed to sound modern while also coming from the past was intoxicating to my ears (before the electronic mores and 4/4 propulsion of Krautrock became a routine and recognizable reference point and my patience with what often sounded like air blowing through a wind tunnel on many of this genre’s finest records began to wither (2). Nevertheless, in terms of sonic possibility, the glacial electronics, throbbing rhythms and processed instrumentals were a welcome alternative to the traditional rock paradigms of the time.
Musik Von Harmonia is an album made up of the blended sounds of various pulsing effects that are layered into rhythmic cycles, which either build into revolving Möbius strip patterns or drift off into atmospheric and textural soundscapes that hold the attention rather than furnishing it with an unobtrusive ambience (3). Tracks like “Watussi” or “Dino” (both openers for their respective LP sides) are probably the most orthodox songs on the album, the former dominated by the looping electronics of Roedelius and Moebious and the later helmed by the unmistakable “motorik” guitar sound of Rother. If Harmonia were appreciated with a level of beard-stroking didacticism it could be argued that these two songs represented the two halves of the band divided into that which is played on an electronic or electric instrument, if the layered electric and electronic contributions weren’t transformed and conjoined into elements of a satisfying whole.
“Sehr Kosmisch” or “Very Cosmically,” an aptly named near eleven-minute opus of droning keyboards and guitar washes provides an ideal conceptual soundtrack to the view outside of a spaceship blister window as it floats through interstellar clouds and remote solar systems, depending on your fractured imagination or drug of choice. In sharp contrast, the following more terrestrially situated track “Sonnenschein/Sunshine” stomps around for four minutes like an angry infant who can only shout with the use of percussive instruments, as the aforementioned electro layers do little to calm the metaphorical terror. Similarly, the unstable synth vibrations on “Ohrwurm” create a restless cycle of rising and falling reverb, as if a mechanical “Ear Worm” (English translation) really is joyfully burrowing into your skull. For all their playfulness, these protracted or discordant tracks are skilfully composed to prompt an emotional response based on positioning the listener in the fulcrum of an object/subject sensory dynamic, whether or not the material sounds conjure up perverse immaterial images or not (including my own ridiculous ones above.)
But Music Von Harmonia isn’t all about summoning seemingly pertinent aural induced visions, the uncomplicated plucked and played drift of “Ahoi” climaxes into a ringing network of machine noise that bleeds directly into the simple but effective drum-machine rhythm of “Veterano”. The closing track “Hausmusik" offers the elegiac gasp of piano keys drowning in a background of processed electronics, struggling for life in the last minutes of an album that gently fades out of existence. For a record that works as the missing link between both Cluster and Neu!’s early material and their most famous mid 70s output, and as the essential ingredient in a chart that would later influence and map the link between Krautrock, Brian Eno, Bowie’s Berlin period and a whole host of post-punk, synth pop and techno provocateurs, Musik Von Harmonia is complex but not elaborate, a dissonant but not disturbing and a innovative but not impenetrable pleasure.

Notes

1. I have photographic evidence of this.

2. A friend once drew my attention to the ridiculousness of these wind tunnel effects and subsequently ruined many a Can and Neu! album. Previously these blowing sounds never used to bother me.

3. As much as I love ambient music, the discreet nature of these soundtracks have made some of them easy to ignore. I distinctly remember the first time I played to Eno’s Music for Films, but I don’t particularly remember hearing anything memorable. It was if I had switched on a generator in the corner of my room and listened to it hum for 40 minutes, which I guess is the point.