Because I ignored my mother’s warning and stared directly into Julian Cope’s eyes in the mid-90′s, a proclivity for progressive German rock was visited upon me that I have since been unable to shake. I hadn’t been old enough to experience as it happened, but it was part of the standard gauge after Afrika Bambaataa emerged from the Zulu Nation with a copy of “Trans Europe Express” under his gilted robes. Now my first edition copy of Cope’s “Krautorcksampler” is never far off and it’s the first section I head to when I visit my fave record store. And it’s because I walked into Low Yo Yo Stuff one day in Atlanta and they didn’t have a tune I’d heard on the Rob da Bank show (it had been out of print for eons…), that I wound up seeking out and falling in love with Harmonia.
Something like “Watussi,” the first track on Musik Von Harmonia, Roedelius, Moebius, and Rother define what Cope referred to in various ways as that great post-war electronic teutonic vibe. I…um…acquired good versions of both “Musik” and the follow-up “Harmonia Deluxe” recently, and while the second album bridges a bit more to what would eventually fall out of Sheffield a little more than a decade later, both are worth the hunt if you are at all touched by the kosmiche.
