''Neu! 2'' is the second studio album by the

krautrock Krautrock (also called , German for ) is a broad genre of experimental rock Experimental rock, also called avant-rock, is a subgenre of rock music that pushes the boundaries of common composition and performance technique or which experiments ...

band Neu!. It was recorded in January 1973 and mixed in February 1973, both at Windrose-Dumont-Time Studios in

Hamburg, Germany (male), (female) en, Hamburger(s), Hamburgian(s) , timezone1 = Central (CET) , utc_offset1 = +1 , timezone1_DST = Central (CEST) , utc_offset1_DST = +2 , postal ...

, and released in 1973 by

Brain Records Brain was a Hamburg-based record label prominent in the 1970s releasing several important Krautrock records by bands such as Neu!, Cluster and Guru Guru. Many of its more prominent records are currently being reissued on CD by Repertoire Recor ...

. It was officially reissued by

Astralwerks Astralwerks is an American record label primarily focused on electronic music owned by Universal Music Group. Its material is distributed via Capitol Music Group in the United States. The label was founded in 1993 and, in its early years, featur ...

in the US and by Grönland in the UK and Europe on 29 May 2001. Illegal bootleg CDs (with the audio taken from vinyl) from the Germanofon label were widely available in the late 1990s. Critic

Paul Morley Paul Robert Morley is an English music journalist. He wrote for the ''New Musical Express'' from 1977 to 1983 and has since written for a wide range of publications as well as writing his own books. He was a co-founder of the record label ZTT Re ...

included it in his list of the "5 x 100 Greatest Albums of All Time" in 2003.

Overview

This album further focused the classic Neu! krautrock sound, with the 11-minute "Für Immer" in particular being the archetypal example of their style -- a forward-driving vamping, propelled by Klaus Dinger's drumming and

Michael Rother Michael Rother (born 2 September 1950) is a German experimental musician, best known for being a founding member of the influential bands Neu! and Harmonia (band), Harmonia, and an early member of the band Kraftwerk. Early life and educatio ...

's layered guitar with its fluid lines and droning harmonic structure. '' Pitchfork'' described the album as featuring a

proto-punk Proto-punk (or protopunk) is rock music played mostly by garage bands from the 1960s to mid-1970s that foreshadowed the punk rock movement. The phrase is a retrospective label; the musicians involved were generally not originally associated wit ...

sound, while ''

Fact A fact is a datum about one or more aspects of a circumstance, which, if accepted as true and proven true, allows a logical conclusion to be reached on a true–false evaluation. Standard reference works are often used to check facts. Scient ...

'' labeled it "spartan psych-rock set to power-driven drum tracks." Side 2 of the record caused consternation at the time. Neu! had quite simply run out of money to finish recording the album, so the second side consists entirely of their previously released single "Neuschnee/Super", manipulated at various playback speeds on a record player, or mangled in a cassette recorder. Critics at the time dismissed this as a cheap gimmick and a rip-off. While it was indeed an experiment born of desperation and necessity, it was entirely in keeping with Neu's pop art aesthetics, taking a "ready-made" sound object and re-presenting it with a series of stylized manipulations, and also quite in keeping with the way Neu's music deconstructed and pared down the form of rock music. Dinger subsequently pointed to side 2 as being a prototype of the now ubiquitous multiple remixes which typically accompany any pop single release.

Legacy

Ben Sisario of ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' described the album along with the band's other early albums as "landmarks of German experimental rock," also referred to by journalists as

. "Super 16" appears in the films ''

Master of the Flying Guillotine ''Master of the Flying Guillotine'' is a 1976 Hong Kong ''wuxia'' film starring Jimmy Wang Yu, who also wrote and directed the film. It is a sequel to Wang's 1971 film ''One-Armed Boxer'', and thus the film is also known as ''One-Armed Boxer 2' ...

'' and ''

Kill Bill ''Kill Bill: Volume 1'' is a 2003 American martial arts film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. It stars Uma Thurman as the Bride, who swears revenge on a team of assassins (Lucy Liu, Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah, and Vivica A. Fox) an ...

''.

Track listing

Personnel

;Neu! *

– guitar, bass guitar, keyboards,

zither Zithers (; , from the Greek word ''cithara'') are a class of stringed instruments. Historically, the name has been applied to any instrument of the psaltery family, or to an instrument consisting of many strings stretched across a thin, flat bo ...

, percussion, electronics, cassette recorder * Klaus Dinger – koto ("Japanese banjo"), 11-string guitar, drums, percussion, Farfisa electronic piano, vocals, electronics, record player ;Additional personnel * Konrad "Conny" Plank – producer, engineer * Hans Lampe – engineer

References

{{Authority control 1973 albums Albums produced by Conny Plank Neu! albums