Encounters: James Holden & Michael Rother

RBMA Radio’s Encounters is a series of conversations pairing artists that wouldn’t normally connect. Following on from our 2013 book For The Record, we find that when artists meet up, they often find out that they have more in common than they might think. In the first edition of Encounters, we invited krautrock pioneer Michael Rother of Neu! and Harmonia, and techno’s errant master James Holden of Border Community to explore their careers in some depth. In doing so, they found some fascinating similarities in their approach to making music.

Michael Rother

When I started, I was in a band and doing impersonations of everything that was popular at that time. American, British. We were so enthusiastic about all the music. Stones, Beatles, later Cream, Hendrix. Hendrix, I apologize! [laughs] In the beginning, people thought it was a synthesizer playing, but it was my guitar just sounding different from a normal guitar. But then later on, I started using Farfisas.

James Holden

The organs.

Michael Rother

Yes. They had a very cheap sounding thing called a Syntorchestra... Well, we had a contact at this company. Can, Kraftwerk, Neu! We all played Farfisa. He was based near Cologne and he was interested in new music and so he made nice deals with us. It sounded really terrible. Before you made something with it, like added delays or chopped up the sounds with a Schaller Tremolo, which was a small foot thing. It was used by guitar players in the ‘50s or maybe the ‘60s. You could create a beat with it, and with the addition of an echo then, suddenly, the Farfisa became interesting. No sophisticated synthesizers, just the treatments of those cheap sounding things. Actually, the drum machine you heard on Harmonia’s “Watussi” track, that was my Farfisa drum machine.

James Holden

The built-in, sort of rhythm box.

Michael Rother

I still have it in my studio. Sometimes we were unhappy because it wasn’t in sync, but then because that was the way it worked, the technology, it added something to the music because it’s not precise. It’s always surprising.

James Holden

That’s sort of what makes it sound more interesting than computer music now.

Michael Rother

Yeah. That’s what I was getting at, and I sometimes forget that. You have to be careful not to be too precise.

James Holden

Now, when you’re working on things, with all this modern technology that really wants to be in time, do you find ways to get that old mess back?

Michael Rother

Not completely, to be honest. I have the mess by doing stuff on the Kaoss pads or by playing guitar, which is different. Yeah, but we were poor back then so we couldn’t afford to buy [anything else]. Maybe that equipment wasn’t even available in the early ‘70s. I don’t know how Tangerine Dream did it. Did they sync the sequences? I have no idea. What is your set-up like?

James Holden

It’s like a programming language that’s easy enough for musicians. It’s modular, so you have boxes that are like mathematical operators, and you wire them up and numbers sort of flow through these pipes, but it lives inside Ableton, so you can just take MIDI into it and process MIDI in whatever way you can imagine and do anything in 15, 20 minutes, once you’ve got the hang of that. It’s a world away from where you were starting, with the limitations of the equipment making this looseness and complexity as a result. Where I am, the limitations of the equipment want to make everything tight and simple. I have to sort of work quite hard to introduce the same sort of complexity. Maybe it would be easier just to play through a tremolo! [laughs]

Michael Rother

Yeah. I heard that on the track you played, “Renata.” You had all these things that just pop off the main track, sort of.

James Holden

Yeah, and it’s all complicated sequences that are built in Max, which are sort of generative or sort of self-playing or self-creating. You’ve just going to hold them in place, ride them. Tell me a bit about “Hallogallo.”

Michael Rother

Reverse guitar is always, of course, more exciting than forward guitar. [laughs]

James Holden

If only there was a way to do it live, though.

Michael Rother

I know. I have a delay that turns things around, so I try to add that effect when I play live, but it’s not the same. It was so exciting when Conny Plank turned around the tape, and I was sitting there in the recording room and it just... It gave me so much joy, so much power to play along because everything was flying backwards and then I played a new forward guitar and then everything was turned around again...

James Holden

Building up layers.

Michael Rother

Yeah, several guitars. The only thing better than backwards guitar is slowed down backwards guitar. [laughs] It’s strange to hear the track as it is. I sometimes think, “We must have done that on purpose.” But everything happened by chance. It was the combination of the melodies. And Conny Plank’s magic of course.

James Holden

That process of serendipity. Two different takes, and you move them a bit and they suddenly match up perfectly… That’s the same process as I have with the computer. It’s funny recognizing that.

Michael Rother

Did you start solo from the very beginning?

James Holden

Yeah. Well, I tried to have a band at school, but no one liked any good music in my school, so we fell out very quickly. [laughs] I was trying to make weird rock music, but just using a computer and samples, like piano samples through distortion and I found like I could make walls of guitar tone that way. Then I accidentally got into dance music.

Michael Rother

How does that happen accidentally?

James Holden

It was really bizarre. My friend ran a night. I liked going to clubs, but it wasn’t really what I was interested in making. He said, “I’m doing a compilation CD, make me a track for it.” So I did it, and then someone else heard it and played it to a label and they released it. Then the second one I did was a sort of accidental hit. Just sort of by following the doors that opened, you sort of go down a path and it was only later that I realized that I had to step back a bit and go down a different path. [laughs] The first time I played “The Sky Was Pink,” the dance floor cleared in this club. I remember going back to that country like five years later and people being really angry that I wasn’t going to play it. Do you have that relationship with any songs?

Michael Rother

Sometimes people recognize the first signals of a song and they will cheer. But I remember a situation that was quite funny. I stopped playing guitar in the ‘90s and I concentrated solely on keyboards. I did a tour with Dieter Moebius in 2000, and we were playing in London. Everything went well. People were quite happy, but then, in one break, a guy standing right in front of me said, shouted very loud. “Pick up the fucking guitar!” [laughs]

Moebius is, of course, top notch with not practicing because he hates everything that has to do with being precise. In ‘98, we were invited by a friend to play in Düsseldorf. It was my first live performance in 22 years. One day, I asked Moebi, “Shall we go into the studio and check some stuff?” I noticed that he wasn’t very keen on doing that, but he agreed. Luckily, we found out that his keyboard was tuned to 432. In his own world, it was perfect, but if we would had found out on stage, it would have killed me, 440 against 432. After five minutes, though, he left the studio and said, “Oh, I’ll start cooking something for us.” But then, Roedelius is quite different. I’m not sure if you can call it practicing or rehearsing, but he used to play for hours and hours and hours all the time the same melodies, more or less, like you hear on “Watussi,” that’s his piano.

James Holden

He’s just playing that live with polyrhythmic, sort of circular...

Michael Rother

Then slightly shifting or just drifting away...

James Holden

Like in a trance.

Michael Rother

Yeah. That was what really fascinated me when I visited them. We were invited to do a Neu! tour through the UK in ‘72 and we didn’t have any other musicians who could understand what we wanted to do. I visited those two guys because there was something in one track I heard that sounded promising. I was completely fascinated by Roedelius playing these endless melodies, and I could just fly with the guitar. When did you hear all this music for the first time?

James Holden

Maybe it was at 2005 or something? I sort of heard it referenced. It’s interesting when you don’t know about some music and you hear people describing it... Sometimes descriptions can be quite off-putting in a way. I knew I didn’t like the very indulgent progressive rock thing and I always sort of blurred the two together and then a friend told me to pick up Musik Von Harmonia. It tied in with some of the things I was interested in. Recently I had the same thing with Terry Riley’s music. A couple of years ago, I discovered him and now I’m crazy for it, and listen to it excessively. Reading interviews with him, he’s talking about the same sort of techniques that I was sort of inventing on my own. To find that it already existed is not disappointing. It’s nice.

Michael Rother

Roedelius, I think, liked Terry Riley quite a lot. Actually, we all went to Berlin to see him play live. It was a bit strange. Yeah. I’m sorry if it sounds disappointing, but I wasn’t impressed. I didn’t like it live.

James Holden

Did drugs ever play a role in your work?

Michael Rother

I was always very careful with drugs. It was around me of course. Klaus Dinger wrote on his own website once that he was proud of having taken more than a thousand LSD trips. I’m not sure if the number is correct, but it did have quite an effect on his behavior, on his view of things. He had a difficult time with everyone because he was … How do you call it, alienated? Of course, smoking pot and stuff, that was no big deal. I sometimes joined in just for celebration, but never as a habit.

James Holden

Not in the studio?

Michael Rother

Not me. Klaus did, yes. He sometimes even used that as … How do you call it, a catalyst?

James Holden

Yeah. It’s a dangerous thing to get into.

Michael Rother

Oh, yes. Well, do you know the Neu! track “Super”?

James Holden

Yeah. I crashed my car listening to that once. [laughs]

Michael Rother

Oh, no!

James Holden

It must have been more than ten years ago. It was our first journey in our first car. I was driving up the motorway – and there were all these crashes and bangs in the record – and the car in front stopped very suddenly and my car didn’t stop very suddenly.

Michael Rother

I’m sorry.

James Holden

It’s like the music and the crash were part of the same thing and, now, my partner won’t let me listen to that in the car. [laughs]

Michael Rother

That is what Tarantino used for three seconds in Kill Bill. We got money from Tarantino, but he actually didn’t discover Neu! He is a fan of a Hong Kong filmmaker from the ‘70s who used all our music and didn’t clear any rights, just took it. But because Tarantino was a fan of this, he used it for this flying guillotine moment. It’s a monk throwing a hat, which chops off heads. Every time this monk appeared in the film, and so he used it for this battle scene in Kill Bill.

James Holden

This track is part of this story of you running out of money in the studio, right?

Michael Rother

Yeah, which is really true. At that time people thought, “They are idiots. They’re not being serious. This is not music. What are they doing? They’re making fun of us.” I think 95% of people hated us for that back then, and 30 years later, suddenly it turned around. Now, I have to say, we did this out of desperation. Not because we wanted to do it. When we started that album, we had things in mind like the first side, “Fur Immer,” which is nice, but quite different, although I love the slowed down stuff. Klaus, he was quite an angry guy sometimes, and he was cheeky which led to some great stuff and I was always, “Ooh. No, we can’t do this.” He kicked the turntable, that moment where the needle jumps.

James Holden

That’s the bit where I hit the back of the car.

Michael Rother

Every time when that scratching needle comes up, I just close my eyes, because if you hear it for the first time and you could hear it very loudly, it’s...

James Holden

It’s aggressive.

Michael Rother

It is.

James Holden

It’s like an art act.

Michael Rother

Yeah. That was, of course, the idea for Klaus. I like the slowed down things and “Hallo Excentrico!” is also nice.

James Holden

You talked about people hating you... The perception of your music must have gone in and out of fashion. It definitely seemed like there was a point around the time that I first discovered it where everyone was really excited about it again. It was impossible to buy a copy of Julian Cope’s Krautrocksampler anywhere.

Michael Rother

It had so many mistakes. [laughs]

James Holden

It’s such a beautifully written book.

Michael Rother

Yeah. He actually apologized for all the mistakes when we met and he said, “At that time, I didn’t have any possibility of checking the facts, so I wrote it as a fan and if people read it with that in mind, then it’s fine.”

James Holden

I think I took it as that. It’s like an exaggerated sailor’s story or something.

Michael Rother

He did change some of the perception, to a certain extent, in Germany because the German media didn’t care about what we did in the 90’s. When Cope came around, I remember people contacting me: “I want to write a book or an article for a magazine about krautrock.” Of course the reason was that Julian Cope had written this book. Suddenly some other people thought, “Maybe we should be proud of that period.”

James Holden

I remember seeing Cluster after that and the music they were playing was completely out of phase with the revival of interest. They were playing more New Age and using Nord keyboards. It was a great gig, but it was completely the opposite to what people were imagining. They wanted to hear old synthesizers and tapes and the hippie…

Michael Rother

Yeah. That was never behind what we did. Keeping an eye on what’s in demand. But you’re right, the Neu! albums disappeared from the surface of the earth in the early ‘80s. Very early, I think, I started accepting the fact that my love wasn’t necessarily shared by the audience. Sometimes you’re loved, sometimes you’re ignored. Harmonia was totally ignored.

James Holden

I remember reading something about Conny [Plank] clocking sequences from the drummer. Was that with you? I can’t remember who it was.

Michael Rother

Well, I tried that and I failed. In the late ‘80s, I had this idea that I wanted to turn it around because I was working with the Fairlight computer and all that stuff that was so perfect, but then I wanted to have [Can drummer] Jaki [Liebezeit] do the live drumming, and then have the machines follow him. I had a machine that was called Kahler Human Clock. You inserted audio segments like bass, drum or whatever. Then the idea was that it calculated MIDI signals from that audio, but I think the processing was too slow at that time. There was a delay. When we played, Jaki and I, we started playing in a fast tempo and after ten minutes we were down to half tempo. [laughs] That didn’t work, so I stopped that project. Maybe these days, it would work. Does it?

James Holden

Well, there’s nothing you can really buy... I mean, you can trigger things... I’ve spent so much thought on this – and so much time and effort. It doesn’t quite work because a drummer doesn’t always play the same rhythm. Sometimes, he’s missing out on one eighth note. You can’t take him as an absolute clock. There’s some sequence that has to fill in some gaps.

Michael Rother

That would probably be a mathematical calculation of taking several bars and calculating the middle.

James Holden

I’m nearly there. With this Max for Live thing I’ve got at the moment... I haven’t dared use it on stage yet because some of the early prototypes would just accelerate off to 500 BPMs, so I want to be sure that those bugs are gone... But I’ve got this system where it listens and reacts in the way a human would. There’s a guy at Harvard who’s doing research on it at the moment that has just published a couple of papers about human timing errors. Combining his work and the Max patches, I think I’m going to get there in the next years of touring.

Michael Rother

It could be groundbreaking. I mean, it would be important for me, because if that works, I don’t have to make drummers play to the click. They hate to play to that.

James Holden

It’s a really unmusical thing to do. Part of this guy’s research found that when two humans play together, if you make an error, I’ll mirror it straight away and it will affect everything for the whole track. It sort of sends ripples through it. With the click, those ripples can’t happen. I think we sort of have a sense of it, so it gives some power to music when it slips a bit or it’s not just cheesy rubato. [laughs]

Michael Rother

Can you talk about your live show? You play with drummers, right?

James Holden

Yeah, the one that was hardest to figure out was “Gone Feral” because I made the rhythm with a clock pulse on the one of the bar, and then triggered delays. I was turning the knob just to find the right place to put a hi-hat and the snare. It’s got this little weird swing. It slows and it speeds up in the course of each bar. Both of them are great jazz drummers and can do everything, but they said, “We can’t do this.” They couldn’t catch the extra hi-hat. One of them got it in the end, just through practice. The other was like, “Oh. I’ve got it! The Devo cover of ‘Satisfaction’ has the same beat. I’ll just do that.” [laughs] I got to mix that track with vacuum tubes on every channel and got really overexcited. It was just red lights.

Michael Rother

You should have been around ‘73 when we did Harmonia. You would have fit in perfectly.

James Holden

This wouldn’t exist if you haven’t had done that first.

Michael Rother

Well, you can’t turn the time around, but I recognize the joy and this distorting sound, it’s exciting.

James Holden

What happens every time you play music, if it works, is that you’re lost in it a bit. Like when you’re really playing, you’re no longer very conscious. That part of your brain is taking a rest. I can have almost have no awareness of what’s happened. You come off, “Oh, that song was good, but I can’t remember what we did in it.” I think it’s quite important. The magic part of music is the hypnotic part. I’m obsessed with this stuff. [laughs]

Michael Rother

I think the wish is always there that you can go on without having to pull something or push something. It just flows. It just continues.

James Holden

I have a recurring dream where I’m running down a hill too fast and the gravity is not quite right and I’m leaving the ground, but my feet always know exactly where to land. It’s just running, flying almost, but nothing can go wrong. That’s like the best possible musical experience. [laughs]

Michael Rother

It’s rare, at least for me. There’s so much concentration involved in the music, mind, control. Maybe, one of these days, I should do another project with no computers, no mind, no control, just flowing. But I think I need all that to create the sound that I wish to present. If I could do it with less, I would.