Neu!

Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother left Kraftwerk to form Neu!, and on this first album Dinger established the motorik beat — a steady 4/4 eighth-note hi-hat pattern that became, via routes both direct and circuitous, the metronomic pulse of techno. Reynolds traces the chain explicitly: Kraftwerk used motorik on “Autobahn”; Joy Division and The Fall injected it into post-punk; Stereolab kept it alive in the ’90s; and then minimal techno, which is essentially motorik played by drum machines, made the ancestry undeniable. “The pulse never changed — only the gear.”

Reynolds complicates the standard story by going back further than May’s famous description of Detroit techno as “like George Clinton and Kraftwerk caught in an elevator.” Kraftwerk were themselves influenced by Detroit — by the MC5 and the Stooges, whose noise was partly inspired by the pounding clangour of the Motor City’s auto factories. The Detroit–Düsseldorf relationship was always bidirectional: Detroit clangor → Stooges → Krautrock → Belleville Three → Detroit techno → back to European clubs. The loop has been running for sixty years, and this 1972 album is one of the hinge points.