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Roedelius: almost a century of musical revolution in the shadow

2022-10-27T10:40:14.331Z


The pioneer of electronic music and 'krautrock' turns 88 leading the bill of the More Ohr Less festival in the Austrian city of Baden


He has just returned from giving a

masterclass

in the French Pyrenees and is finalizing the More Ohr Less festival with his mobile, the experimental music contest he founded in 2004 and is held in Baden bei Wien, the placid spa town 30 kilometers from Vienna that inspired Beethoven to compose the Ninth Symphony.

Rodelius released his latest album in February,

4 Hands

, which he believes to be the 120th of his career, between his own recordings and collaborations.

Hans-Joachim Roedelius has just turned 88 and is one of the founding fathers of

krautrock

, a musical trend and form of experimental rock that emerged in the late sixties in West Germany.

More information

Krautrock, the German musical miracle

Roedelius was born in Berlin just a year after Hitler greeted crowds as Chancellor of Germany.

His biography is a transparent chronology of the German 20th century.

The son of a dentist with a good portfolio of clients who worked at the UFA film studio, he was chosen to film as a child prodigy in the Goebbels factory propaganda films.

Somewhat more mature, at the age of ten, when Berlin was dying at the end of World War II, he was forcibly recruited by the Hitler Youth to repel the Soviet siege.

He deserted military service in the GDR and escaped to the FRG, but his mother begged him to return after receiving guarantees that he would not suffer reprisals, although the Stasi awaited him with open hands to take him directly to prison, accused of being a western spy.

In the FRG of the economic

boom

, he worked as a physiotherapist, masseur, butler, postman, chauffeur and detective of unfaithful marriages.

In 1968 he began to create experimental music without knowing how to play an instrument.

At his first concert at West Berlin's Zodiak Free Arts Lab, a chaotic commune-hall he opened in the Kreuzberg neighborhood with Conrad Schnitzler, he performed with an alarm clock and a homemade flute.

With Schnitzler and Dieter Moebius he formed the band Kluster and their debut album was Germany's first protest album,

Klopfzeichen .

, a sonorous plea with soliloquies against the moral ruin of the prosperous RFA, which he knew so well, and which he released thanks to a record label of the Lutheran church.

His music was pure noise, radical actionism, shows in art galleries that could last twelve hours.

“At a concert in Frankfurt,” recalls his wife, Christine Martha, a retired Austrian teacher who co-founded More Ohr Less, “I walked away from the big windows because I thought they were going to blow up.

After seeing that, I didn't want to meet him."

"You defined it as an act of sound terrorism," says Roedelius with the phone in one hand and the festival program in the other, the big hands of a pianist, a masseur, a miner.

Roedelius and Christine Martha, in the More Ohr Less festival edition of 2020.More Ohr Less

Zodiak was a founding space of

krautrock

in Berlin, where the band Tangerine Dream officiated its first recitals, and the group Kluster evolved towards instrumental music and changed its name to Cluster

,

now alone with Moebius, but countercultural music did not give of to eat.

Roedelius worked as a cook and masseur in a nudist colony in Corsica.

He was the entourage babysitter for future members of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang.

His biographer Stephen Iliffe has compared his life to Woody Allen's Zelig.

To others he's simply the godfather of

krautrock,

though Roedelius sighs despondently when he hears any label.

How can you define your latest musical works?

"That is a good question.

We have to find a label that identifies it before you go home.”

Krautvanguard

?

_

"It could be, but it sounds a bit pushy."

In the 1970s he settled in an art commune of self-taught musicians on a farm in the rural interior of Lower Saxony, in Forst.

There appeared Michael Rother, from NEU!, with whom Roedelius and Moebius created Harmonia, essential

krautrock band.

And also Brian Eno, who would record with both Cluster and Harmonia (“He rocked me and gave me rides in the Brian Eno stroller,” says Rosa Roedelius, the composer's daughter, who was born there).

The British musician visited them to soak up his sound map and took him with him to the Hansa Studios in West Berlin to polish

Low

(1976) with David Bowie.

Roedelius is recognized in the instrumental pieces of the most experimental album of Bowie's career.

Kraut

means cabbage

in German .

Krautrock

could be translated as “cabbage rock”, so better not do it.

The label was carelessly coined by the British trade press and reduced bands of pioneers as disparate as Kraftwerk, Can and Harmonia to a side dish of fermented vegetables.

Today it is a prestigious label.

Moebius explained that the movement arose as a double rejection of the dominant American culture and the popular German song, the

schlager

, which was linked to Nazi propaganda.

He used to say that Elvis Presley was a

schlager

.

Everything that was not a revolutionary sound expression was bourgeois.

Moebius was a

punk

”, jokes Roedelius about his great creative partner, “but he sure was right”.

Antoni Robert, from the Nova Era label, released the first two Roedelius recordings released in Spain,

Variety of Moods

(1990) and

Donde… Adonde

(1992).

"His music has evolved over his long career, but it's always been deceptively simple," says Robert.

He has never fallen into empty virtuosity.

At first he embraced experimentation and electronics, drifting towards

ambient

and finally opting for melody and acoustic piano, with forays into poetry.

Roedelius makes poetry and sound painting of great beauty”.

Christine Martha tells that years after leaving the Corsican nudist colony, she still met people who asked her for therapeutic massages.

"Now I just give massages with my music," Roedelius replied.

“In fact”, Martha continues, “last week in the Pyrenees a woman told him, after listening to him at the piano, that she had healing hands”.

After the meeting with the journalist, Roedelius had decided on the label for his last piano pieces.

“It will be

Berührungen

.

Touches

, in English.

[Play, in Spanish].

They say that it is a music that moves”.

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Source: elparis

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