Harmonia was founded in 1973 by Rother, already known as half of NEU! and former member of Kraftwerk, as well as the two Cluster musicians Roedelius and Moebius. And the result was an equally groundbreaking and exciting band. The Harmonia -members of Velvet Underground, Mozart, Coltrane, Brel, arabischer und hinduistischer Musik and many more. Since the 1970s, they have provided creative templates for many international musician colleagues, such as Brian Eno, who once called them the most important rock band in the world, David Bowie, The Edge, Aphex Twinand just recently Secret Machines, which is a cover version of "(Deluxe) Again and Again" recorded and released in their live sets.

The trio released two albums in the short period of its existence from 1973 to 1976: in 1974 the somewhat brittle but extremely productive initial album "Music by Harmonia" and the more accessible "electropop" -Successor "Deluxe". Over 20 years later (1996) "Tracks & Traces", the document of a 1976 collaboration with one of the greatest supporters of her artistic work, Brian Eno At a time of increasing global interest in Krautrock and on Harmonia, appears with "Harmonia live 1974" a previously unreleased recording that shows the three musicians at their best. Their performance was recorded on March 23, 1974 in the Penny Station Club (a former train station near Detmold) 'in front of about 50 people', as Rother remembers, and in which he had already performed in 1971, back then with Kraftwerk, had played.

"Harmonia live 1974" is a live recording, but it doesn't deliver the raw, authentic gig atmosphere you might expect: no cheering, no applause, not even heckling. Just the sound of a band locked into a groove, with their backs to the audience, as you can see on the album cover, fully focused on the live work in an effort to captivate the audience and drive the music forward. Rother suspects that the lack of any applause and crowd noise was not due to the indifference of the audience, but to the fact that they were either stoned or unable to tell when one song ended and another began due to the long fade-outs - to the point of inaudibility.

Amazingly Harmonia-Music is still as experimental as it would have sounded in the former train station 33 years ago. It shows young people today how to immerse themselves in pieces of music that last longer than a pop song. You can hear the exciting, mechanical industrial chugging of “Schaumburg" (after all, the club WAS a former train station!); the pulsating seventeen-minute opus "Veteranissimo"; "Arabesque", which at 5 minutes 20 seconds could almost pass as a pop song; the dark and dub-like proto-trip-hop of "Holta Polta" and the ambient template "About Ottenstein".

These five sound experiments are full of complications, intersections and hidden depths. Roedelius means: Science and art are in truth siblings in the way they encounter reality, how they explore existence and try to draw conclusions from it that are valid for their respective disciplines.