West Germany 1971, functional cities fade into grey, a culture of ghosts, citizens trying to forget spectral appearances of history and the unconscious.

The killings are on their way. Listening to these re-issues one starts to form an understanding about the idea behind Neu!: the New not as a clarion call of modernity-for-modernity's sake, but a compulsive New to make sure that what lies behind never catches up with you, a perpetual state of obliteration, forgetting, seeing anew, becoming child.

When the first Neu! album (1972) gets under way it sets this goal immediately with 'Hallo Gallo', a track which might as well have been called Theme from Neu! Klaus Dinger lays down the mechanical rhythm that for years to come would be associated with motorik, the friendlier term for krautrock. It is of course an impressively simple rhythm that speaks of trance, getting lost in motion. 'Hallo Gallo' is a study in effective simplicity: over the beat four guitar parts are dubbed, some accentuate the rhythm, others wave in and out in breezy arcs. It could go on for hours without boring you. Neu! are ready to take the autobahn out of the city into wide open spaces where nature murmurs through the open car window. Much of 'Neu!' isn't exactly the motorik one would expect. Instead much of the album represents something of a pastoral dream world: 'Im Glück' is an amazing sound world, quiet, lovely but somehow pregnant with tension, a remembering of summer loves lost (as a matter of fact one of the members was in an unhappy relationship with a Norwegian girl, you can hear the lovers rowing on a lake throughout the second half of the album, moments of longing frozen in sound).