When Michael Rother, who co-founded Nue! and Harmonia, played Intuition Festival at The Broad on Saturday night, I had a mini-revelation. This might have happened during a Harmonia song, but I can’t be sure since it was well past the point where everything Rother played on the stage outside of the museum converged into one giant piece of music in my head. I was dancing and, suddenly, something in the tone of the guitar made me think of New Order. It’s not as random a thought as you think.
Last year, one of the many, many things that annoyed me was when friends would forward some keyword-stuffed TikTok/Reel/Whatever about the totally obvious “secret history” of “Blue Monday.” Yeah, I know, Kraftwerk, Moroder, Cowley, Italo disco, blah blah blah. The band has probably been talking about this since the song was released. Plus, they’re all influences you can 100% hear even if you haven’t had to play the song at clubs week after week, year after year for longer than you want to admit.
But, I digress. The point is that there’s a lot of Krautrock in New Order and I’m not just talking about Kraftwerk. If you’ve read much about the band, you probably know that. They put a Can song on their Back to Mine compilation years ago and Neu! was a stated influence for Joy Division. That’s not particularly unusual for the time, either. Steven Severin has cited the same bands as influential on the sound of Siouxsie and the Banshees. This late ‘60s/early ‘70s wave of German musicians also impacted Bauhaus. In fact, I’m 99% certain that I saw David J in the crowd at The Broad right before Rother began his set. And I would not be surprised if a hefty percentage of folks out last night were Neu! and Harmonia fans who started bands sometime between the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Krautrock is a significant influence on the post-punk era, but it’s also a subtle one, at least in comparison to the audible nods to artists like David Bowie, Roxy Music and the Velvet Underground during this period. You can’t hear it the way you can hear Neu! in Stereolab and others who would come a long in the 1990s. Still, it’s there and you can feel it in the rhythm of the songs and sense it in the way synths and guitars merge.
Originally, I intended to write about last night’s show more directly, but, a straightforward recap doesn’t really make sense in this instance. (Also, I arrived kind of late and only got to see two of the performances.) For context, Intuition Festival was a two-night event at the Broad in Los Angeles that coincided with the exhibition, Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature. I went on the second night of the event, which was headlined by Rother and Money Mark.
While I did walk through the Joseph Beuys show, it didn’t connect with me on this particular night as much as the permanent collection at The Broad did. Specifically, I was drawn to the Lichtensteins and Warhols. Those pieces resonated more , maybe because Neu’s logo and the iconic cover of their debut album, designed by late co-founder Klaus Dinger, is pop art.
Michael Rother appeared at Intuition Festival to start his U.S. tour, his first trek across the States since 2010, with a set that included solo music as well as songs from his Neu! and Harmonia days. Gathered by the outdoor stage was a mix of silver-haired men in dapper hats, the Forever Art School crowd and an assortment of music nerd tribes. The eclectic, cross-generational audience made sense considering that you can hear the legacy of Krautrock on the fringes of every genre from disco to metal. There was also a smattering of younger folks in the audience, maybe still in their teens, which isn’t all that surprising considering how many newer groups you can find on Bandcamp and Spotify that play in the style of Neu! It’s a total rabbit hole.
Rother’s set was hypnotizing from the get-go, but, after about an hour, we broke our trance and headed inside to catch Money Mark. Honestly, it irked me that the two musicians had overlapping set times, but that’s the inevitability of any show with the word festival in its title. There will always be at least two bands that you want to see whose sets overlap and you will have to jump around the venue to try and catch parts of each.
Money Mark is also a low-key super influential musician. He’s best known for his long collaboration with the Beastie Boys, but he has also worked with everyone from Omar Rodriguez Lopez and Damo Suzuki (in keeping with the Krautrock theme of this post) to the Japanese pop group Atarashii Gakko. He has released a number of solo album and his first two full-lengths, Mark’s Keyboard Repair and Push the Button encapsulate the intersection of psychedelic, lounge, electronic and hip-hop music that was super cool in the 1990s. Plus, he builds instruments, like the programmable drum kit that he used on stage at The Broad. He’s a legend and it would have been ideal if he and Rother didn’t have competing set times.
Still, Money Mark played a fun set and was very personable with the audience. He started out with his more familiar work and then moved into the experimental pieces, playing until sometime after 11 p.m., when the lights came on abruptly and effectively ended the party.
I hate having to talk about music in terms of genre, which is something you have to do if you don’t want to get lost in the algorithm, and I think this event was a good example of why genres are cringey. There are so many different connections you can make between artists existing all across the globe, making so many different kinds of sounds at so many different points in time, that it doesn’t make sense to silo them with what are little more than convenient marketing terms. In music, everything is connected, just like it is in art and film and literature. Just like it is in life. Maybe that doesn’t make much sense in this weird online world, but it does when you’re in a physical space, listening to music, looking at art and coming to your own conclusions.
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Read her recently published work and check out her upcoming gigs or listen to the latest Beatique Mix. Follow on Instagram or Bluesky for more updates.
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