“I was living in Düsseldorf, and I was working in a mental institute,” he told RBMA. “There was one guitar player who was also working in that hospital, and he had an invitation to join a band called Kraftwerk in the studio.” It was the early ‘70s, and Germany was experiencing a musical renaissance. Just as the anti-war and civil rights movements in the US had catalyzed rock ‘n’ roll into an explosive new form of sonic protest, so major upheavals in Germany pushed a new wave of artists to redefine rock music on their own terms. Rother envisioned a way of playing that was “different from Anglo-American musical structures that were mostly based on the blues. That was one of the main ideas I had. I wanted to steer away from that. I tried to forget all the heroes of the time before, and to start a new way.”

In this context, Rother was initially adrift, with an intuition of the direction he hoped to pursue but no real collaborators. The Kraftwerk invite, which he says he “stumbled” into, was, as he said, “the first situation where I discovered that I was not completely alone.” The chemistry was immediately palpable, and soon enough Rother found himself in a trio with the group’s co-founder Florian Schneider and a drummer named Klaus Dinger. Rother’s recollections drift into tenderness and no small amount of awe at his good fortune. “By pure chance, I met the only person, the only musician with whom I could communicate without words, just throwing these melodies and ideas back and forth.”

With Schneider on flute and Dinger pushing the rhythm forward with his signature motorik approach, the trio soon coalesced into a riveting live unit. “Klaus was a magnificent, powerful, determined drummer,” Rother once commented. “But he was not a skilled drummer like for instance, Jaki Liebezeit, who was a magician at the drums. Klaus was like me. We were both similar in that respect, a primitive player.” This rawness was an asset. “It was only very clear from the first moment when I did rehearsals with Kraftwerk that his powerful drumming style enabled magnificent rides… At least at one concert, but it may be true for more than one, he cut his hands at the edges of broken cymbals and blood was gushing all over the stage. There was blood everywhere and people’s jaws were dropping. He didn’t stop for a moment, he just kept on beating the drums with the same impetus.”

Kraftwerk had not yet matured into their electro-pop formation, and this incredible live footage of the group shows the three members right on the cusp of their respective, iconic bodies of work. Kraftwerk would soon transform from their roots as a raw, proto-punk group with an electronic bent into once-in-a-generation innovators of machine music. Rother and Dinger, on the other hand, would leave the group after only six months to record their most significant works together as Neu!.

Alongside Kraftwerk, Can, Tangerine Dream and Cluster, Neu! stands as one of the towering, essential bands to emerge from the so-called “Krautrock” era. Aided by the visionary producer Conny Plank, their self-titled debut album hones all the impulses from their time in Kraftwerk into a rigorously honed, coolly minimal psychedelia. Opening track “Hallogallo” is about as perfect an intro to any group as you could ask for. Atop Dinger’s pulsating backbeat, somehow both rocking and relaxed, Rother vamps on a single chord while overdubbed backwards guitars and the occasional melodic flourish drift by like clouds on a calm, sunny day. “Yeah, we somehow managed to get music on tape,” he mused in a recent Life of the Record interview. “We could easily have failed, really. And these days, if I listen to a track like, especially a track like “Hallogallo,” which has for me still so much of a mystery, it's like a cat. I look at it and I think, ‘Yeah, it is really good.’” That’s an understatement - “Hallogallo” is a revelation.

Rother continues: “And the first track, ‘Hallogallo,’ features a very soft approach to this fast-forward-reaching music, which was our idea at that time; a music that sort of runs forward and has no ending, is aimed at the horizon, or beyond.” This concept would continue to be reiterated across the three albums Neu! recorded, perhaps nowhere more clearly than on “Fur Immer” (trans. “Forever”), the 11 minute joyride on a single riff, and often a single note, that opens their second album, Neu! 2. Next time you’re heading for the highway, crank it up. Released in 1973, a year before Kraftwerk’s 22-min “Autobahn,” you wonder how much Rother & Dinger’s former collaborators were thinking of them as they charted their own expansive, endless masterpiece.

However, live performances proved challenging - “Just one guitar and one guy on drums, that didn’t take us very far.” - and Rother went in search of other collaborators. His colleagues in Cluster had already broken ground as reclusive, ambient pioneers, and Rother took the trip to their compound in Forst. The results were profound, and the group’s mixture of piano, tape loops, strange effects and distortions alongside Rother’s elegantly exploratory guitar work resulted in Musik von Harmonia, and Deluxe two more albums that join the ranks of the Neu! discography as essential listening. These albums are filled to the brim with haunting, evocative trips, but perhaps the pick of the litter is “Sehr Kosmisch,” (trans. “Very Cosmic”) from Musik, a track that breathes with eerie beauty and feels like being absorbed into a cool, dark fog in a mountainous forest at dusk.

Rother’s solo work after the dissolution of these two groups remains outstanding. Flammende Herzen, his solo debut, opens up new frontiers of romantic yearning and melodic richness. These qualities reach their apex on “Sonnenrad,” the jaw-droppingly beautiful opening track from his second album Sterntaler. The shimmering, clean melodic lines radiate out from the airy, core groove, somehow teasing a light country twang beneath moments of transcendent bliss. Both are in collaboration with Can’s virtuosic drummer Jaki Liebezeit and producer Conny Plank, and they are some of the crispest, most open recordings you’re ever likely to hear this side of the Blue Note catalogue.

Klaus Dinger died in 2008, with plans for a fourth Neu! album left woefully unrealized. Soon thereafter, both members of Cluster would pass as well, leaving Rother one of the last men standing from his illustrious cohort. His music, once considered obscure, has become canonical to anyone with an interest in the artier side of rock music, and he’s embraced his legacy by returning to his most foundational albums. On Sunday March 30th, he headlines the next edition of Outline, playing the music of Neu! and Harmonia with a group of longtime collaborators, bringing these timeless studio works to life.