Tracks and Traces (Reissue)

We Say...

Review by Philip Sherburne

One of the crucial nodes in Krautrock's sprawling history, Harmonia was a collaboration between Michael Rother (one-half of motorik rockers Neu! and an early member of Kraftwerk) and Cluster's Hans Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius. They were less a band, per se, than a point of intersection for various ideas about rhythm, texture and technology that were floating around the West German experimental rock scene of the '70s. That intersection turned international when, in 1976, Brian Eno — often said to have called them the world's most important rock band — plugged in with the group in their studio in rural Forst, near Düsseldorf. It was clearly a fruitful encounter: Eno would continue to collaborate with Roedelius and Moebius (along with Asmus Tietchens and Can's Holger Czukay) for 1977's Cluster & Eno and the following year's After the Heat. But the Harmonia sessions would go unreleased for another two decades.

Adding three tracks not included on the 1997 Rykodisc reissue, the remastered 2009 edition of Tracks and Traces isn't just for Krautrock completists. Downplaying Neu!'s pulse and Can's tribal funk, the group stretches out and sinks into a mossy bed of lilting synthesizers, tapeworn effects and muted electric guitars and bass, creating a cosmic footprint that can be followed across the succeeding decades in the music of Radiohead, Aphex Twin, Tortoise, Basic Channel, the Kranky label and much more.

The mood is consistent across the album — dreamy, prone to drift, a little druggy — but within those parameters, the musicians turn in a wide-ranging set. After the placid guitar-and-Moog prelude of "Welcome" and the dubby proto-post-punk of "Atmosphere" — which uncannily anticipates New Order's dirge disco, particularly their song "Truth" — the band launches into "Vamos Companeros," full of glimmering guitar harmonics and factory-inspired electronic rhythms. "By the Riverside" is a nine-minute synthesizer fantasia, and "Sometimes in Autumn" a 15-minute epic of quivering oscillators and primal drones; tucked between them is "Lundberg Dream," a slow wobble of chords that improbably opens up onto actual vocals. Some of the album's most striking cuts occur in its second half: the pastoral ambient balladry of "Almost," the countrified electronic pop of "Les Demoiselles," the plinking jellied organ harmonies of the closing "Aubade." Best of all might be "When Shade Was Born," which runs a buzzy analog synthesizer through a cool, luminous chord progression that lasts only a minute and a half, but casts its imaginary glow far longer.